Petrol Data

Use our Petrol Pricing Information

The following tools and commentary are freely available for you to use for writing articles or embedding on your own website (newspaper or otherwise). All we ask is that you give whatgas.com the appropriate acknowledgment as described in our copyright page. All data and images can be reprinted for use in any publication.

The sections below should give you all the information that you need, but please feel free to contact us with any queries you may have, we are happy to help!

• Petrol Trends over Time - Graphs of fuel prices going back to 2007, use to calculate and quote long term trends
• Specific Regions - We offer a custom service where we can provide fuel pricing details of any specific region in the UK.
• Petrol Prices by Retailer - Detailed breakdown of average price by retailers, supermarkets are still the cheapest
• Oil Prices - The current high fuel prices may being driven by Oil, see how good the correlation is
• Fuel Duty and Taxes - See the current and historical breakdowns of fuel duty and tax and how it affects the price of petrol
• Commentary - See our opinions on petrol prices
• Petrol Price Map - Our free map to use on any online newspaper
   

Petrol Price Graphs (back to top)

Live updated graphs showing the average price of UK fuel. We include Unleaded, Diesel and LPG at present. All prices are updated daily and once embedded into your website using this code and will not require any further maintainence We can provide excel data for weekly petrol prices going back to 2008 if required.

Unleaded Prices

Diesel Prices

LPG Prices

Petrol Price in Specific Regions (back to top)

This service may be of particular value to a local newspaper or someone looking for areas where prices are extremely high or low. We can help you find specific examples if required. Below is a table of average petrol prices for the UK in the last 24hrs (other time periods are available on request )

Average, maximum and minimum prices for a particular postcode region can be downloaded in XML format from please contact us if you require assistance with dealing with this data.

We can provide example Petrol Prices around the country . Please contact us if you need specific information on a certain location. In general the Shetland Isles, Dumfries, London and most of the south coast, are a good bet for finding the most expensive stations, whilst Edinburgh, Bradford and Derby are often among the cheapest places to buy fuel (correct Jan 2011)

This maps takes a while to load as the data is generated live based on the last 7 days of petrol prices, but is worth the wait.

If you want to look at the whole of the UK rather than just england then please take a look at this example map (created 21 Jan 2011). Note that the linked map unfortunately does not contain live prices, but an updated version is available on request

Retailer Prices (back to top)

We can provide information on the breakdown of costs between different brand names

Our analysis shows that the Supermarkets are still the cheapest places to buy petrol, with Asda consistently the cheapest, closely followed by Morrisons (correct jan 2011). These prices are averaged over the last 2 weeks (other time periods are available on request )

The supermarkets are really doing a good job of selling cheap petrol, with the likes of Asda and Morrisons selling fuel significantly cheaper than the oil companies. There are a number of possible reasons for differences in fuel prices between retailers, the fuel quality could be lower, the retailers overheads could be lower, they may have negotiated better prices with the oil companies due to their larger purchasing power, or perhaps the supermarkets in particular are cross subsidising from their food sales in order to bring people to their shops.

Petrol and Oil Prices (back to top)

By tracking the price of both petrol and oil you can see that there is a clear correlation between the two. With Oil looming towards the $100 mark again in Jan 2011 petrol prices have moved upwards as well (helped by fuel duty rises and VAT rises). Unfortunately it looks like we only have expensive fuel to look forward to in the future. If oil prices break their all time high of $147 and if the government presses ahead with its fuel duty rises then we can expect to see prices of £1.54 (£6 a gallon) or even £1.76 (£a massive £8 a gallon).

However if oil does drop below the $70 mark then we can expect to see Unleaded fuel drop back below £1/litre again. If it doesn't.... well someone will be making a huge profit...

Click on the following graphs to enlarge

Fuel Duty and VAT (back to top)

In the UK there is a fuel duty that is applied to all Hydrocarbon fuels, including unleaded petrol, diesel, LPG, bio diesel, bio ethanol and other fuels that are used in cars.

The rate of the fuel duty is usually set during the budget, and consist of an additional tax that is applied to the petrol before it is sold. This fuel duty is applied before VAT, so whenever the fuel duty rate is raised, additional VAT is placed on top of it.

In the March 2011 budget the government announced that it was reducing the fuel duty by 1p per litre, instead of increasing it by an estimated 4p (inflation +1p). To fund this reduction they have increased the tax of oil companies from 20% to 32% in order to create a 'fair fuel stabiliser'. Time will tell what this mean exactly, but with the oil companies paying more tax, will the price of petrol just go even higher???

For comparison of Jan 2011 the price of fuel, the fuel duty and the VAT level are shown in the table below:

This leads to the following pie-chart for unleaded petrol, all prices are approximate and relevant to prices in Jan 2011.

Note that in January 2011 there will be an additional 0.76p/litre duty added to all 3 of the fuels above, on top of a VAT increase to 20% (from 17.5%). If the non taxed part of fuel prices stays the same this will mean a total increase of around 3.3p/litre for unleaded and diesel, and 2.2p for LPG

For comparison back in September 2009 the price of fuel, the fuel duty and the VAT level are shown below:

This table shows that although VAT and fuel duty have gone up the percentage of the cost of petrol which is tax has reduced from around 66% to around 62%. However in absolute terms fuel duty and VAT have of course gone up, and the government will also be benefiting from higher revenues in terms of tax on the oil companies.

For the avoidance of any doubt, if there were no fuel duty on unleaded or diesel then the price at our pumps would be around 69p as of Jan 2011, and if there were no VAT to pay this would be reduced to 48p/litre.

The full report on the government budget relating to Fuel Duty can be found here: http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/budget2010/march/bn58.pdf

Commentary(back to top)

Petrol and oil is going to run out at some point, we might as well get used to high prices, and trying to switch to alternative vehicles. This is already happening the UK with more and more people switching to Diesel cars, and the overall fuel efficiency of cars is increasing (some cars that can acheive over 80MPG are now available whereas 10 years ago anything better than 50MPG was virtually unheard of). In the USA, where fuel is much cheaper, it is not uncommon to find cars that have a fuel efficiency of 20MPG or less!

Petrol cost has a big knock on effect on overall pricing, from food to holidays, so it is a very important issue. In particular the price of diesel affects the cost of the majority of our goods in the UK as we tend to transport most things by lorry. Until there is a better train service for goods then increasing diesel prices are going to push up inflation and therefore affect everyone living in the UK.

Lot's of people in towns make pointless short journey's by car and should drive less, but in rural locations you can't do anything without one, from visiting a doctor to finding a job It's outrageous that prices are often higher in the countryside than in cities, and we even started a petition for fairer fuel duty back November 2008

Motorway prices are also extremely high which means that some people may make detours to fill up, thus putting more CO2 into the atmosphere - Forcing people to detour to find more economic fuel doesn't benefit the driver, the environment, or traffic levels.

Tax is a big part of the UK fuel costs, other countries have very different systems. Some even provide subsidies. We must make sure that fuel tax doesn't make us uncompetitive globally. To us it seems completely inefficient to have two tax systems on cars, the fuel duty and also the car tax disc. Both are billed as being environmentally friendly by penalising cars that are inefficient, however why have the administration costs for two systems? Scrapping the car tax system and instead increasing fuel duty by a small amount would result in the same tax take for the government, but would reduce the amount that is wasted on overheads and also really target inefficient cars and drivers. Payment of fuel duty is also much harder to avoid than paying for your tax disc, so it would reduce the amount of tax fraud and mean that UK's honest citizens are not subsidising the small percentage of car tax dodgers that are out there.

In future perhaps we will see more usage based taxes taking advantage of new technologies, such as number plate recognition for congestion charging or using GPS/tracking systems. Some insurance companies are already using GPS tracking to adjust premiums depending on how and where you drive. This has the potential to allow for fairer taxes, penalising those that make short journeys on congested routes, or whilst allowing those who live in the countryside, or in areas with poor public transport, lower fuel tax to get to work.

We don't condone action such as fuel blockades, but we can understand why some people feel driven to do so as their livelihoods can depend on fuel prices, in particular freight transport businesses are very sensitive to diesel prices which often outstrip unleaded by a clear margin. We would not be at all suprised if we see more industrial action against fuel prices and fuel duty if Diesel prices reach new highs. A potential flashpoint will be April 2011 when fuel duty is due to rise again (by up to 4p).

Petrol Price Map (back to top)

Our most popular tool is the petrol price map, use this to look at recent petrol prices in any area of the UK. If you would like to put this map on your own website then use this code . Note that you can make this map automatically centre on anywhere in the UK (or allow it to detect where your users live), so it is useful for both national and local petrol prices