The Pool
Iraq's oil revenue, month by month — the single source every later diversion draws on.
Everything documented on this site begins here: the revenue Iraq earns from oil is the single pool from which every later diversion draws.
Iraq is an oil state in the strict sense of the term: crude and refined exports have supplied more than nine tenths of federal revenue in every year of the period this file covers. The money arrives in dollars, from a small number of buyers, into a small number of accounts. Its size sets the ceiling on everything that follows — the balances held in New York, the volume the currency window can sell, the budget the parties divide.
This chapter measures the pool. It does not allege that the pool is stolen. It establishes the denominator against which every figure elsewhere on this site should be read, and it states plainly which months are taken from official announcements and which are reconstructed from official export volumes.
in oil revenue, January 2004 to mid-2026
barrels exported across the same period
average oil revenue per day across the era
What is official and what is derived
The monthly series carries 271 months, of which 271 record a positive figure. Each month is labelled with its basis and drawn accordingly: official months solid, derived months lighter and dashed.
- Tier A129 months carry revenue directly from Ministry of Oil and SOMO monthly announcements.
- Tier B142 months are derived from official export volumes priced at Brent minus the published Basrah differential.
President Barham Salih told parliament in 2021 that of the near-$1,000 billion Iraq had earned from oil since 2003, an estimated $150 billion had been smuggled abroad.
CNN; OCCRP — attributed estimate, never combined with this file's own totals
Iraq's oil income moves with the oil price — and everything downstream moves with it.
Monthly oil revenue (left, US$ billions) and average realised export price (right, US$ per barrel) · official months solid, derived months lighter
Drag the handles below the plot to set a custom range.
Iraq's oil income moves with the oil price — and everything downstream moves with it.
Monthly oil revenue (left, US$ billions) and average realised export price (right, US$ per barrel) · official months solid, derived months lighter
Export volumes roughly doubled while the revenue line swung with price
Average exports, million barrels per day, by month · solid where official, dashed where derived
The period calculator
Choose a single day, a date range, or the entire era. Every output states the share of days in the selection whose revenue is official rather than derived.
- Oil revenue in the period
- $1,467,913,361,434
- Barrels exported
- 20,986,847,283
- Average revenue per day
- $181,965,212
- Average price achieved, per barrel
- $69.94
- Average exports, barrels per day
- 2,601,568
- Days in the selection
- 8,067
Basis mix: 3,931 of 8,067 days official, 4,136 derived.
Loading the daily series… · 8,237 · 2004-01-01 → 2026-07-20
Where the pool goes
The dollars counted on this page are not paid into a Baghdad account. They are paid into accounts held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and the architecture of those accounts — who controls them, what is deducted before the balance is reported — is the subject of Chapter 01.
From New York the dollars are sold to the Central Bank of Iraq and resold, each working day, through the currency window measured in Chapter 03. That is the point at which a public revenue becomes a private allocation, and it is the point this file documents most closely.
Sources for this chapter
- JODI Oil (jodidata.org) — export volumes as submitted by the Government of Iraq.
- Ministry of Oil monthly export and revenue announcements, collected per month via iraq-businessnews.com.
- EIA Brent spot price via FRED, used with the published Basrah differential for derived months.
The full source register, with a link for every month, is printed in the Methodology chapter. Methodology & Data