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What you should know about this indicator

  • Figures for the United States exclude the fossil-fuel support measures recorded in the OECD's Inventory of Support Measures for Fossil Fuels. In December 2025, the United States asked the OECD to remove its data from that inventory, and the OECD removed it for every year, not only recent ones. Only a small residual reported by other sources remains, so figures for the United States are not comparable with other countries, and are much lower than in earlier versions of this data.
  • The figure for Northern America excludes the same OECD support measures for the United States, so it is not comparable with other regions or with earlier versions of this data.

How is this data described by its producer?

Fossil-fuel subsidies (consumption and production) as a proportion of total GDP (%)

Further information available at: https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/files/Metadata-12-0c-01.pdf

Explicit fossil fuel subsidies as a share of GDP
Fossil-fuel subsidies (consumption and production) as a proportion of total GDP (%).
Source
United Nations Environment Programme – with minor processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
July 31, 2026
Next expected update
July 2027
Date range
2010–2024
Unit
%

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

United Nations Environment Programme – Data from multiple sources

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) dataset is the primary collection of data tracking progress towards the SDG indicators, compiled from officially-recognized international sources.

Retrieved on
July 31, 2026
Retrieved from
https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/dataportal
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
United Nations Environment Programme via UN SDG Indicators Database (https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/dataportal), UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (accessed 2026). More information available at: https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/files/Metadata-12-0c-01.pdf.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) dataset is the primary collection of data tracking progress towards the SDG indicators, compiled from officially-recognized international sources.

Retrieved on
July 31, 2026
Retrieved from
https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/dataportal
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
United Nations Environment Programme via UN SDG Indicators Database (https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/dataportal), UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (accessed 2026). More information available at: https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/files/Metadata-12-0c-01.pdf.

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

Values we consider erroneous are not shown: Latvia in 2022, which the source reports as 50 to 100 times its own values for 2021 and 2023; Venezuela from 2010 to 2014, where missing data is reported as zero; Poland's whole series, which the source publishes as a fraction rather than a percentage, making it around 100 times too small; and Denmark in 2025 and 2026, where the source repeats its 2024 value in years for which no subsidy total is published.

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Explicit fossil fuel subsidies as a share of GDP”. Our World in Data (2026). Data adapted from United Nations Environment Programme. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260827-095702/grapher/fossil-fuel-subsidies-gdp.html [online resource] (archived on August 27, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

United Nations Environment Programme – with minor processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

United Nations Environment Programme – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Explicit fossil fuel subsidies as a share of GDP” [dataset]. United Nations Environment Programme, “Data from multiple sources” [original data]. Retrieved August 27, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260827-095702/grapher/fossil-fuel-subsidies-gdp.html (archived on August 27, 2026).

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