Every price on Petrol Rates comes from official data. Here's where it comes from, how fresh it is, and how we turn it into the figures you see.
The source: the Government's Fuel Finder scheme
UK fuel retailers are required to report their pump prices to the Government's Fuel Finder scheme, which publishes them as open data. That covers the big supermarkets, the major fuel brands, and independent forecourts.
We don't scrape websites, use crowd-sourced reports, or estimate prices. If a price is on our site, it was reported by the station itself.
How fresh the prices are
- Prices are fetched from the scheme every 30 minutes.
- Station details, such as addresses, opening times and facilities, are refreshed once a day.
- Each station shows when its price was last updated or confirmed, so you can see how recent it is.
We only use prices that have been updated in the last 30 days. Anything older is treated as out of date and left out, rather than shown as if it were current.
When a price looks wrong
Very occasionally a station reports a price with a typo in it, like 12.9p instead of 129.9p. In our reports and averages, we leave out any price that's wildly out of line with the national average for that fuel, so one mistake can't skew the figures or appear as "the cheapest station in the UK".
On the map and town pages we show what the station reported. If you spot a price that's clearly wrong, let us know and we'll look into it.
How we work out the figures
- Town pages include every station within 10 miles of the town centre.
- Averages are simple averages across stations. They aren't weighted by how much fuel each station sells, because that information isn't published.
- Regions group every station by the nearest town we list. Stations in Northern Ireland are identified by their postcode.
- Changes over time are rebuilt from every individual price change reported to the scheme, which is how we can show daily trends going back to February 2026.
Other data we use
- Crude oil prices are the daily Brent crude price from the US Energy Information Administration, with pound-to-dollar rates from the Federal Reserve, both via the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
- UK fuel volumes in our articles come from HMRC's Hydrocarbon Oils Bulletin.
- Postcodes come from Ordnance Survey's Code-Point Open dataset.
- Maps use OpenStreetMap data, with map tiles from CARTO.
Using our figures
You're welcome to quote any figure from our reports or articles. A link back to the page you took it from is all we ask.