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Shell, Esso, BP or a supermarket: which is cheaper where you live?

Compared town by town, where the brands sit on the same roads. Esso was cheaper than Shell in 186 of the 248 towns that have both, by a typical 1.9p a litre.

The big brands side by side

Brands with 140 or more forecourts. National averages include motorway service areas, which charge more and are not spread evenly: BP and Shell run far more of them than the supermarkets do. That is why the town-by-town comparison below is the fairer one.

Head to head, in the same towns

For each pair, only towns where both brands have a forecourt reporting a current price. The typical gap is the median difference between the two brands' average price in those towns.

Which brand is cheapest in each region

Average unleaded E10 for each big brand in each region. The cheapest of them in each row is marked. A blank means the brand has fewer than 5 forecourts reporting there.

Every pairing

Pairs with fewer than 15 towns in common are left out. Towns where the two brands' averages are within 0.05p count as neither. Every figure is from the prices forecourts are legally required to report to the government Fuel Finder scheme, as at 2026-11-10; forecourts that have not reported for over 14 days are excluded. How this site works.