What does the US government think happens next — and have they been right?
Governments, airlines and central banks all plan around official oil price forecasts, and the most watched of them is the EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook. It is published every month and projects Brent roughly 18 months out. The question worth asking before you trust the current outlook is how the previous ones held up.
This chart plots each monthly STEO forecast against the Brent price that actually followed. Where a forecast line runs flat while the actual line climbs, the outlook missed a turn. The January 2026 vintage is the clear example: it projected prices drifting down into the low sixties, months before the spring spike it did not see coming.
What does the US government think happens next — and have they been right?
Daily EIA Brent spot prices vs monthly Short-Term Energy Outlook forecasts.
How this is built
The actual series is daily EIA Brent spot price (RBRTE). The forecast lines are successive monthly STEO vintages for the same Brent series (BREPUUS). Each vintage is stored as its own snapshot when it is published, so the chart compares what the EIA said at the time against what happened, rather than against a later revision.
Because the forecast content is live and vintage-dependent, this page does not ship a fixed data table. The chart pulls the current actuals and the most recent forecast vintages through the site’s caching proxy each time it loads.
Sources
EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook (forecast) and EIA Open Data Brent spot series (actuals). Both public domain.