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How we count

Every figure on this site can be reproduced from a public source. This page says how, and is as plain about the limitations as about the findings.

Prices last checked 4 October 2026

The source

The Motor Fuel Price (Open Data) Regulations 2025 came into force on 2 February 2026. Every filling station in the United Kingdom must report the price of each fuel grade, within 30 minutes of a change taking effect at the pump. The data is published through the government's Fuel Finder scheme by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, free to reuse under the Open Government Licence.

How often it is read

We read the feed every 30 minutes, and have done since 10 September 2026, keeping every price change reported, so the history grows rather than being replaced. The site's pages are rebuilt from that store every morning. The figures on the site today cover 8,129 open forecourts, 221 of which reported a price on the most recent day.

"Prices last checked" on a page is the date of the most recent price report in the data it was built from. Because stations report a price when it changes, a forecourt that last reported a few days ago has simply not changed its price since; its figure is still its current price.

Grades

Prices are pence per litre. Grades are named as the regulations name them: E10 is standard unleaded, E5 is super unleaded, B7 is diesel. Averages, league tables and maps use E10 unless they say otherwise. Figures per tank assume 55 litres.

What we exclude

• Out-of-date prices. A forecourt that has not reported for more than 14 days is left out of every average, gap, chart, map and ranking, because a price that old is not a current market price. It is still listed, marked as out of date, and counted on the stale price index (605 forecourts at the last count).
• Forecourts flagged as permanently closed.
• Implausible prices, outside 50p to 400p a litre. These are recorded separately rather than discarded silently.
• Mistyped outliers, from gaps only. When we state the gap between the cheapest and dearest forecourt in a town, prices more than 25% away from the national median for that grade are left out of the gap, so one mistyped figure cannot define a town's headline. The forecourt's own page still shows exactly what it reported.

Towns

A town is the town named in the source, checked against the forecourts' own postcodes: any forecourt whose postcode area does not match the town's main postcode area is dropped from that town (211 at the last count), because the source's town field is sometimes wrong. A town needs at least 4 forecourts reporting a current price to get its own page.

Regions and nations

Every forecourt is placed in its official ONS region from its postcode, using the ONS Postcode Directory via postcodes.io. That gives 12 regions: the nine English regions plus Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The source leaves the nation blank for over a thousand forecourts, so we fill it from the postcode too. A forecourt whose postcode has been retired takes the region most common in its postcode area.

Brands

• League table. A brand needs at least five forecourts to appear, rather than being given an average drawn from one site. Brand names are matched as the source spells them (it is inconsistent), and shown as the brand writes them. Sites run by a distributor under a major's branding are counted separately from that major, because who sets the price depends on who runs the site.
• Big brands. Brands with 140 or more forecourts nationally.
• Brand by region. A brand appears in a region's table when it has at least 5 forecourts there reporting a current price. On a brand's own page, a region is shown when the brand has at least three.

Comparing brands fairly: the same-town head to head

A national brand average mixes price with geography: a brand whose forecourts sit in dearer places looks dearer even if it charges the local going rate, and motorway service areas, which charge more, are not spread evenly between brands. So our comparison of two brands uses only the towns where both have a forecourt reporting a current price. In each of those towns we take each brand's average price, and report how many towns each was cheaper in and the median difference. A pair needs at least 15 towns in common to be shown; a town where the two are within 0.05p counts as neither. The results are on the big brands compared.

Maps

Town maps show every forecourt reporting a current price, coloured by where its unleaded price sits among that town's forecourts: the cheapest third, the middle third and the dearest third. Map data is from OpenStreetMap contributors. Newsrooms may embed any town's map, or download it as an image, free, with the source credited.

Known limitations of the source

• Some forecourts report far less often than the rules require. That is why the out-of-date rule above exists. Remote and island forecourts are the most affected.
• Brand names are spelt inconsistently in the source, and some forecourts carry no brand at all.
• Our history is young. The scheme began in February 2026; we have been reading it since 10 September 2026, and the earliest prices we hold are the last reports stations had made before then. Measures that need a long history, such as how quickly retailers pass on a fall in wholesale prices, will follow as it accumulates.

Reuse

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Source: Fuel Finder, DESNZ. Postcode regions: ONS Postcode Directory (OGL). Our own analysis may be quoted freely with a link. Download the forecourt data.