NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Motorists may fume when forking over $3 a gallon at the local service station, but as it turns out, your local filling spot makes chump change from a gallon of gasoline.

While often blamed for pushing up prices, oil traders don’t necessarily benefit from the high price of crude or gasoline; they profit from how much the price changes, CNNMoney reports. Traders can get rich -- as long as they bet correctly on whether prices will rise or fall.

For example, an investment bank that makes a bet that the price of oil will rise makes money when oil prices go from $95 to $100 a barrel -- or $100 to $95 if it bet the price will fall -- not on the difference between production cost and trading price.

Most service stations are independently owned and operated and take in between 7 and 10 cents for every gallon they sell, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

That 7 to 10 cents going to the gas station isn’t even profit. Out of that, station owners still have to pay leases, workers, and other expenses -- leaving them with a profit of just a few cents. For the service stations, most profit comes from selling coffee, cigarettes, food and other amenities.

The government takes about 40 cents right off the top, with about 18 cents going to the feds. State taxes vary widely, but the national average is about 22 cents a gallon. Most of this money is used to build and maintain roads, reports the news source.

About 24 cents a gallon goes to refiners, including independent companies like Valero, Sunoco or Frontier. About $2.07 from every gallon of gasoline goes to producers of crude like Chevron, BP, ExxonMobil and smaller outfits like Anadarko and Marathon (many of which also operate refineries), or national oil companies controlled by countries like Saudi Arabia, Mexico or Venezuela.

Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) has called the chief executives of the five biggest oil companies to testify on the industry’s record profits on April 1.