Where the prices come from
The UK Government's Fuel Finder scheme runs under the Motor Fuel Price (Open Data) Regulations 2025. Fuel retailers must register their forecourts with an aggregator appointed by the government and report every change to their pump prices; since 2 February 2026 each change has to be reported within 30 minutes. The aggregator shares the data openly and freely with apps and websites that register for it, and the Competition and Markets Authority enforces the rules (CMA guidance).
FuelWise reads the feed every 15 minutes. We do not collect prices any other way: no scraping, no prices typed in by users. Each price on the site is shown with the time the forecourt reported it.
What we leave out, and why
- Stations that have stopped reporting. A forecourt missing from the feed for more than 48 hours is treated as a dead source. Its last prices stay visible on its own page, marked, but it is left out of every average, ranking and list.
- Prices older than 30 days. Retailers only report changes, so an old price is usually a price that hasn't moved — but one untouched for over 30 days is more likely an abandoned listing. Almost all prices are newer than that.
- Probable typos. Forecourts type their own prices in. A price more than 20% below or 35% above that day's UK middle price for the grade is shown against its station with a "check this price" note, but kept out of averages and never named the cheapest.
- Forecourts closed for good, as flagged by the retailer.
Averages
An average is the plain mean of the current price at every forecourt in the area that passes the checks above, one price per forecourt per grade. We also show the median (the middle price, which half of forecourts beat). The feed doesn't say how much fuel each forecourt sells, so averages are not weighted by sales: a quiet village forecourt counts as much as a busy supermarket one.
Daily figures for charts are recorded through each day (UTC) and fixed once the day is over. Days before FuelWise began recording are reconstructed from our record of price changes, and only written where enough forecourts are covered — at least a quarter of today's count for that area — to be a fair average.
Areas
The government feed gives each forecourt an address but no region or town. We place each one using its postcode and the ONS Postcode Directory, through postcodes.io, both published under the Open Government Licence:
- Regions: England's nine regions, plus Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
- Council areas: the local authority district.
- Towns: the ONS built-up area in England and Wales; in Scotland and Northern Ireland, which have no built-up areas in the directory, the travel-to-work area. A town gets its own page once at least five of its forecourts have a current price, and only when it isn't simply its council area under another name.
Pages with fewer than five forecourts with a current price ask search engines not to index them, so thin pages don't crowd out useful ones.
Brands, supermarkets and motorways
A brand is the name the forecourt reports, tidied so that "SHELL" and "Shell" count once. Supermarket forecourts are those of Asda, Costco, Morrisons, Sainsbury's and Tesco, plus any the feed marks as supermarket sites; motorway service areas are those the feed marks as such. A forecourt run by a dealer under a brand counts as that brand.
The weekly Price Pulse
Price Pulse covers Monday to Sunday, UK time. It compares Sunday's end-of-day figures with the Sunday before, counts every price change forecourts reported in the week, and lists the biggest single cuts (leaving out drops of more than 25p in one go, which are almost always typos being corrected). It is written the next morning and never changed afterwards. Its wording follows fixed rules; no AI writes it.
The blog
Articles on the blog are researched and drafted with the help of AI (Anthropic's Claude), working from FuelWise's figures and published sources that each article lists. Every article is read and checked by a person at FuelWise before it is published, and none is published automatically.
Using our figures
You're welcome to quote FuelWise figures. Please credit "FuelWise (fuelwise.io), using UK Government Fuel Finder data" and link to the page you took them from. The underlying data contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Journalists can find more on the press page.
Corrections
If a price or a figure looks wrong, email contact@fuelwise.io with the page address. Wrong station prices usually need correcting by the retailer, through the Fuel Finder scheme; we will tell you if that's the case.