What Are Henry Hub Natural Gas Futures? NG Contract Explained

NG is the common root for NYMEX Henry Hub Natural Gas futures, but a complete contract identity also needs its delivery month and year. All calendar months trade, and each named month has its own trading and physical-delivery framework. The month is a term of the agreement, not a suffix that can be dropped when a number is copied into a note or chart.

What commodity futures are explains why a commodity name alone does not define a futures agreement. The NG root gives the product family, while the month and year distinguish the specific contract that a market-data record or position refers to.

One standard NG contract represents 10,000 MMBtu. Its quote is in U.S. dollars per MMBtu. The first number describes the quantity covered by the contract; the second describes the unit of the displayed futures price. A price per MMBtu is not the total dollar scale of a 10,000-MMBtu contract, a statement of gas held at an interconnection, or proof of an immediately executable cash-market price.

A named NG future can differ from a gas-market observation in delivery timing, location, field, source, and timestamp. Futures versus spot markets keeps those records distinct instead of treating a futures quote as an immediate natural-gas transaction.

For ordinary outright NG trading, the minimum price fluctuation is $0.001 per MMBtu. Multiplying that increment by the 10,000-MMBtu contract unit produces a $10 tick value for one standard contract.

Ordinary outright tick value = $0.001 per MMBtu × 10,000 MMBtu = $10

The separate $0.00025-per-MMBtu, or $2.50, increment applies only to simultaneous Globex inter-commodity spreads. It is not the ordinary outright NG tick and should not be substituted into a single-month NG calculation. How to read Henry Hub Natural Gas futures quotes keeps product, month, field, source, and time attached to an NG number.

NG is physically delivered at Henry Hub near Erath, Louisiana under its NYMEX rules. That identifies a delivery design for a named contract month; it does not make NG cash-settled, turn every screen price into a live natural-gas price, or promise that every account will receive gas.

Henry Hub Natural Gas futures expiration and delivery sets out the expiring contract's trading cutoff and delivery-month mechanics. Cash-settled versus physically delivered futures separates the two contract designs without turning either one into an individual account outcome.

For NG, save the exchange, product root, delivery month-year, 10,000-MMBtu unit, U.S.-dollars-per-MMBtu quote convention, ordinary outright tick, price field, timestamp, source, and physical-delivery reference. How to read futures contract specifications provides a repeatable way to verify those terms for the exact listed contract.

Futures tick value and contract multipliers explains why the price increment, contract quantity, and resulting dollar tick should remain separate fields. That also prevents the special simultaneous Globex inter-commodity-spread increment from being copied into an ordinary outright record.

This guide describes standard NYMEX Henry Hub Natural Gas futures mechanics. It does not publish a current natural-gas price, recommend a position, predict gas prices, or determine an account's handling of a contract. Current CME rules, clearing procedures, market data, and account documents govern the exact contract.