Is now a good time to fill up?
Email alerts are on the way. Until they land, here is the question they are meant to answer, worked out from where today’s UK price sits against the past year.
Today sits in the dearer end of the past twelve months. Prices at this level have historically come back down, though nobody can say when — putting in half a tank rather than a full one costs nothing and keeps your options open.
Where beats when
Across the past twelve months the whole national range was 39.6p a litre. On any single day the gap between the cheapest and dearest forecourt within a normal driving radius is often wider than that. Which is the useful conclusion: a driver who always picks a cheap local forecourt beats one who tries to time the market, without having to think about it again. Find the cheap ones near you.
Prices have moved +4.0p in the past week. A week-on-week change smaller than the typical weekly swing is noise, not a trend — the price history shows what a normal week looks like, and the timing guide covers which of the usual rules of thumb survive the data.
What the alerts will do
The data is already running. What is being built is the part that emails you.
Until then the search page does the same job manually: put in a postcode and it shows every forecourt near you with today’s price, sorted by cheapest or by nearest.
Check prices near youCommon questions
Is now a good time to fill up?
Petrol is at £1.70, which sits 97% of the way up the range it has traded in over the past year (£1.31 to £1.71). That is towards the dear end. Timing matters less than most people think, though: over a year, choosing cheaper forecourts saves considerably more than choosing cheaper weeks.
Do fuel prices follow a weekly pattern?
Not a reliable one. The often-repeated advice to fill up on a particular weekday comes from an era of weekly wholesale pricing and does not survive contact with the current data — retailers now change prices whenever their costs change, and must report each change within thirty minutes. What does hold is that prices rise faster than they fall: when the oil price jumps, the pump follows within days; when it drops, the pump takes weeks.
How much can I actually save by timing a fill-up?
Over the past year the gap between the cheapest and dearest weeks for UK petrol was 39.6p a litre — £21.80 on a 55-litre tank, and only if you managed to buy every tank at the low. The spread between forecourts on any given day is routinely wider than that, which is the saving actually available to you.
When will price alerts launch?
They are in development. The price data behind them already runs — every forecourt in the country, refreshed through the day — so what remains is the alerting itself rather than the source. Until then, the search page shows live prices at every forecourt near any postcode.