Fuel prices
Petrol is up 42p a litre since February
Filling a family car with unleaded now costs about £96, £23 more than at the start of February, and prices are 15p above their spring peak. Search your postcode below for the cheapest petrol near you.
Cost of filling a 55-litre tank
£96
Up £23 from £73 on 1 February
Price of a litre
174.7p
from 132.2p on 1 February
Motorway services
+22p
a litre more than a typical forecourt
Find cheaper petrol near you
Enter a postcode to see the cheapest forecourts within five miles
A record rise in March, and a second climb since July
Average UK price of a litre of E10 unleaded, pence. The shaded band covers the middle 80 per cent of forecourts
Monthly averages
| Month | Average, p a litre |
|---|
The average litre rose by about 20p in March, which the RAC called the biggest monthly increase on record, as war in the Middle East pushed up the price of oil. Prices peaked at 159.6p in late May and eased to 150.4p in early July. They have risen by 24.3p since then, and the average has not fallen on any day since 18 August. Petrol is now 15p above the May peak, though still about 17p below the record set in the summer of 2022.
Tesco and Asda are cheapest, Shell is dearest
Average price by brand against the UK average of 174.7p, pence a litre. Great Britain, excluding motorway sites; brands with at least 80 forecourts
Brand averages
| Brand | Forecourts | Average, p | vs UK |
|---|
The gaps between brands are small. Shell is about 4p a litre dearer than Tesco and Asda, or about £2 a tank.
Motorways cost most. The typical motorway forecourt charges 196.9p, 22p more than the typical forecourt elsewhere, which adds about £12 to a tank.
Petrol is 7p cheaper in Northern Ireland
Every forecourt, coloured by its price against the UK average. Tap a dot for details
Petrol in Northern Ireland averages 167.6p, 7p less than in Great Britain. In Great Britain, the Wakefield postcode area is cheapest at 171.1p and Reading the dearest at 177.3p.
Cheapest and dearest postcode areas
| Postcode area | Forecourts | Average, p |
|---|
How we did this
- Prices come from Fuel Finder, the government scheme that requires forecourts to report price changes within 30 minutes. This page uses standard unleaded (E10) only.
- Each forecourt's latest price is carried forward day by day until it reports again, for up to 30 days, so averages are taken across forecourts rather than across price updates. Changing that window moves the 1 October average between 174.2p and 174.8p.
- Most forecourts joined the scheme in late January, so the 1 February figure covers fewer of them. On the 4,688 forecourts with a price on both dates, the rise is 43p.
- We removed 165 of 347,612 price records: reports dated before 2026, second reports at the same timestamp, and prices that could not be real, such as prices entered in pounds rather than pence and 999.9p placeholders. We checked every forecourt's map position against its postcode and corrected 167.
- As a check, our averages for 1 and 31 March (132.9p and 153.7p) compare with the RAC's 132.8p and 152.8p.
- A "motorway" site is one flagged as such by its operator. Some flagged sites are on A-roads, and the median is less affected by them than the average. Brand and area comparisons exclude motorway sites.
- A forecourt only has to report when its price changes, so some prices are out of date. The cheapest-near-you result uses only prices reported in the last 7 days, and older prices are marked. It also leaves out Costco, which sells only to members; Costco still appears in the list.
- Postcode searches use postcodes.io. Distances are straight-line. A tank is 55 litres, the RAC's standard for a family car.
Sources: Fuel Finder, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (Open Government Licence v3.0); RAC; postcodes.io