US gas station universe, mapped
There are 145,158 gas stations in the US. We map each one and the owner who actually buys.
For fuel-card, POS, processor, and distributor teams selling into fuel retail. The brand on the canopy is rarely the buyer. The owner sitting in the back office is.
The market, in three numbers
A long tail of single-store operators.
are single-store operators
Six in ten US gas stations are owned by an operator who runs exactly one location. Not a chain. Not Big Oil. One owner, one site, often a name on the lease.
share held by the top ten chains
7-Eleven, Circle K, Shell, ExxonMobil, BP, Marathon, Chevron, Sunoco, Valero, and Casey's combined own under a third of the sites. The rest is fragmented.
sites at the largest operator
7-Eleven, after absorbing Speedway and Stripes, runs around 13,000 US sites. A rounding error against 145,158, and a single account-management team.
Sources: NACS State of the Industry 2024 ownership breakdown; Orbital site-by-site map, April 2026.
Methodology
Why our gas-station count moves and the published estimates do not.
The headline figures you usually see, 145,158 sites or 152,995 c-stores, come from once-a-year industry reports. They are accurate the day they ship and stale by month two. We work site by site, in the open, and refresh.
How the 145,158 figure is built
- Start with every active US fuel-retail site. Cross-referenced against the NACS State of the Industry universe, the EIA's retail price survey panel, and the US Census County Business Patterns NAICS 447 (gasoline stations) series.
- Resolve each site to a real operating business. The brand on the canopy is the supply contract. The operating business is the LLC or sole proprietor who holds the lease, the fuel licence, and the c-store inventory.
- Find the owner. Around 60 percent of US gas stations are independent single-store operators. Most of those owners never built a LinkedIn profile. We find them by name, with a verified email and a direct dial, the same way we do for every other long-tail vertical.
- Drop the dead pins. Closures, relicensed sites, rebrands, sites that switched off fuel and now sell only inside. The annual reports keep them on for a year. We do not.
- Refresh on a rolling schedule. Site-level signals run continuously against the universe of US small businesses, so what you query in June is not what shipped in January.
If you want the source breakdown for a specific state or chain, ask. We do not hide the working.
By state
Where the gas stations actually are.
The five largest states carry 35 percent of the universe. Per capita, the picture flips: thinly populated states with long road networks have far more stations per resident than the coasts.
| # | State | Gas stations | Per 100k residents |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Texas | 16,200 | 52 |
| 2 | California | 11,800 | 30 |
| 3 | Florida | 9,700 | 42 |
| 4 | New York | 7,900 | 40 |
| 5 | Ohio | 6,200 | 52 |
| 6 | Pennsylvania | 5,800 | 45 |
| 7 | Georgia | 5,500 | 49 |
| 8 | North Carolina | 5,300 | 49 |
| 9 | Illinois | 5,100 | 41 |
| 10 | Michigan | 4,800 | 48 |
| 11 | Virginia | 4,200 | 48 |
| 12 | Tennessee | 4,000 | 56 |
| 13 | Indiana | 3,900 | 57 |
| 14 | New Jersey | 3,400 | 37 |
| 15 | Missouri | 3,300 | 53 |
Counts rounded to the nearest hundred for display. The dataset itself is exact, down to the street address. Source: Orbital site-by-site map, April 2026; per-capita math against US Census 2024 population estimates.
The top ten chains
The largest brands, and how much of the market they actually hold.
Pole signs are loud. The math is quiet. The ten brands below together account for around 31 percent of US gas stations. The remaining 69 percent is independents, jobbers, and regional banners.
| # | Chain | US sites | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 7-Eleven | ~13,000 | Includes the Speedway and Stripes banners it absorbed in 2021. Corporate-owned and franchised, with the c-store leading the model. |
| 2 | Circle K | ~7,000 | Alimentation Couche-Tard's US arm. Concentrated in the Southeast, Texas, and Arizona. |
| 3 | Shell | ~13,000 | Branded sites under licence, almost entirely operated by independent jobbers and dealers. Shell does not own the store. |
| 4 | ExxonMobil | ~11,500 | Exxon and Mobil banners. ExxonMobil divested company-operated retail in 2008. These are independent operators on a supply contract. |
| 5 | BP | ~7,200 | Includes Amoco and the ampm c-store format on the West Coast. Mostly dealer-operated, with a small company-operated footprint. |
| 6 | Marathon | ~7,000 | Marathon Petroleum supplies the brand. Retail spun out to ARKO and others. The site owner is rarely Marathon. |
| 7 | Chevron | ~7,800 | Chevron and Texaco. Predominantly franchised. Strong on the West Coast and the Gulf. |
| 8 | Sunoco | ~5,200 | Now a fuel distributor more than a retailer. The brand stays on the canopy; the store belongs to an independent. |
| 9 | Valero | ~5,800 | Concentrated in Texas, California, and the South. A mix of company-operated and dealer sites. |
| 10 | Casey's General Stores | ~2,700 | Midwest c-store-led model. Almost entirely company-operated, with in-store pizza and a strong rural footprint. |
Counts marked "~" are approximate, drawn from each operator's most recent annual report and cross-referenced with our site map. The order above is by US footprint, not global. Shell, Exxon, BP, and Chevron sites are brand licences, not corporate stores: the buyer for your software or program is the independent operator, not the major.
Our take
The big-oil ownership story is mostly a logo on a canopy.
We believe
If you sell into gas stations and you only target the chains, you are walking past 100,000 buyers.
The standard vendor motion in this market is to chase the brand. Sign up Shell, sign up 7-Eleven, win the annual contract. We have watched a fuel-card team work that motion for two years, then look at the math: Shell licences around 13,000 US canopies, 7-Eleven runs another 13,000, and even rolled together with the rest of the top ten, that is roughly 31 percent of US gas stations. The other 69 percent, somewhere over 100,000 sites, sits with independents and small multi-site operators who never came up in their CRM.
One of those operators called us last quarter. He runs four sites in central Florida under a BP licence. He had not been contacted by his POS vendor, his fuel-card provider, or his payment processor in nineteen months. Every meeting his team booked, he had to find himself. That is the market most vendors are missing, not because the operators are hiding, but because the data tools are searching for "Shell" instead of for the LLC that pays the lease.
Who buys this data
B2B vendors selling into 145,158 sites.
This page is for the teams selling into gas stations, not the operators themselves. The buyer for this dataset usually falls into one of these categories.
Fleet and fuel-card programs
Acceptance-network teams sourcing the next 5,000 independent sites for their card. The brand on the canopy already accepts you; the next conversation is with the owner of the unbranded site down the road.
POS and fuel-pump software
Verifone, Gilbarco, NCR, Petrosoft, and the next wave of cloud POS vendors selling the upgrade off a 12-year-old controller. The buyer is the independent operator, not the brand.
Payment processors and EMV
Outdoor EMV upgrades and processor switching deals. After the 2020 outdoor liability shift, every site has done it once. The next refresh is in the buyer's pocket now.
C-store distributors and foodservice
McLane, Core-Mark, Eby-Brown route reps. Foodservice programs selling pizza, fried chicken, and roller-grill into stores that have the cooler space but no menu.
ATM, lottery, and tobacco programs
Independent ATM operators placing units. State lottery field teams. Tobacco programs negotiating shelf space and promotional spend with the owner who actually holds the contract.
EV charging and clean-fuel buildouts
Charging-network rollout teams targeting sites with the canopy footprint for a fast-charger pad. The conversation is with the landowner, who almost always is the gas-station operator.
Adjacent universes built the same way: the convenience store dataset, the auto dealer dataset, and the broader by-industry email lists.
Plain-spoken
When the gas-station dataset is the wrong fit.
Do not buy this if any of the following are true.
You only sell into the majors. If your motion is one annual contract with 7-Eleven and one with Couche-Tard, you do not need 145,158 records. You need two phone numbers. Save your budget.
You need real-time fuel pricing. EIA, OPIS, and GasBuddy do that. We map the sites and the operators, not the rack-to-retail spread by zip code at 9am.
Your product is for consumers. Drivers comparing fuel prices, route planners for road trippers, EV-charging maps for end users: the data here is operator-side, not consumer-side. Different shape, different licence.
You are looking for environmental compliance data. UST tank records, leak reports, Phase I site assessments: those live with the state DEQs and the EPA. We do not stand them up here.
The honest version
Why most gas-station vendor data is wrong.
If you Google "how many gas stations in the US," the top result is usually a NACS press release citing 152,995 convenience stores selling motor fuel. That is the right number, for c-stores that sell fuel. It is not the right number for gas-station sites. The tighter, defensible US gas-station count is 145,158, because a fraction of c-stores no longer sell fuel and a small number of fueling sites do not have a store attached. Most published estimates do not draw that line. We do, because the buyers for those two datasets are different teams.
The next problem is the brand. Enterprise data tools index by company, so "Shell" looks like one customer with 13,000 locations. It is not. Shell licences the canopy. The site is owned by Joe's Petroleum Group in Tulsa, or by a four-store family operator in Tampa, or by a 200-site jobber based in St. Louis. Each is a different buyer, with a different decision-maker, on a different contract. The big database returns one row. The reality is several thousand.
This is exactly the gap Orbital was built for. We map the universe of US small and mid-market businesses, find the owner of each one, and validate the contact before it reaches you. Nothing about that is gas-station-specific, which is why we can also map dentists, HVAC contractors, med spas, restaurants, and auto dealers the same way. What is specific to gas stations is the layer on top: brand affiliation, c-store format, fuel grades, and whether the operator runs one site or twenty.
One more piece of context worth pricing in. NACS, EIA, and IBISWorld all publish annual or quarterly reports on this market. They are excellent, and we cite them. They are also annual or quarterly. NACS ships the State of the Industry once a year. EIA ships retail price data weekly but tracks supply, not retail sites. Statista aggregates and lags. For a vendor doing outbound this quarter, the question is which sites are open this Monday and which owner is on the phone. That is the gap a site-by-site, owner-by-owner map closes.
Questions
Before you ask sales about gas-station data.
How many gas stations are there in the US?
There are 145,158 active gas stations in the United States, based on Orbital's April 2026 site-by-site map. The larger figure you often see quoted, around 152,995, is the NACS count of convenience stores selling motor fuel, which includes c-stores plus a small number of fueling sites without a store attached.
Who owns the most gas stations in the US?
7-Eleven, including the Speedway and Stripes banners it absorbed, operates the largest US footprint at roughly 13,000 sites. Circle K follows with about 7,000 US stores. Even combined, the top ten chains account for under a third of the universe. The market is structurally a long tail of independents and small multi-site operators.
Are most gas stations owned by the big oil companies?
No. The Shell, Exxon, BP, and Chevron pole signs are brand licences. The site is almost always owned by an independent jobber, a franchisee, or a small regional operator who buys fuel under a supply contract and runs the store. Roughly 60 percent of US gas stations are owned by a single-store operator. That is the decision-maker most vendors are actually trying to reach.
What is the difference between a gas station and a convenience store?
Most US gas stations have a convenience store attached. NACS counts convenience stores that sell motor fuel, around 152,995, while the gas-station-only count is tighter at 145,158 because some c-stores do not sell fuel and a small number of fueling sites do not have a store. For vendors selling pump hardware or fuel cards, the gas-station count is what matters. For vendors selling foodservice or backbar, the c-store count is closer.
Which state has the most gas stations?
Texas has the most, with around 16,200 active sites, driven by population, geography, and the energy economy. California follows at roughly 11,800, then Florida at 9,700, New York at 7,900, and Ohio at 6,200. Per capita, sparsely populated states like Mississippi and West Virginia have more stations per resident than the coastal markets.
How accurate is the US gas station count?
It depends on what you count. The widely cited NACS figure is a once-a-year industry report on c-stores that sell fuel. Government data from the EIA tracks refining and supply rather than retail sites. Most published estimates lag by twelve to eighteen months. Orbital builds the count from site-level signals refreshed against the universe of US small businesses, so it captures recent closures and new builds the annual report misses.
Who actually buys gas station data?
Vendors selling into fuel retail. Fleet and fuel card programs sourcing acceptance networks. POS and fuel-pump software vendors. Payment processors and EMV upgrade specialists. Convenience-store distributors and foodservice suppliers. ATM operators, EV-charging buildout teams, and lottery and tobacco programs. The common thread is that they need the owner, not the brand on the canopy.
Can I get a sample of the gas station owner data?
Yes. Tell us the states or chain affiliations you want and we send a sample of around 100 verified owner records so you can check them against your own pipeline before anything changes hands. There is no charge for the sample.
See the gas-station owner dataset before you pay for it.
Tell us the states or chain affiliations you want. We send a free sample of around 100 verified owner records you can check against your own pipeline, no commitment, no email-list back-and-forth.
Get the sample