Fuel guides

How UK fuel pricing actually works, and what to do about it. Written to answer the question rather than to fill a page — with the arithmetic shown wherever a number is claimed.

Typical UK forecourt today: petrol £1.70, diesel £1.94. See prices near you.

Explainer

How UK fuel prices are setRoughly half of what you hand over at the pump is tax, and it is the same tax everywhere in the country. Understanding the other half explains everything about why prices differ. 6 min readSupermarket fuel versus branded fuelThe price gap between a supermarket forecourt and a branded one is large and consistent. The quality gap is far smaller than the price gap suggests. 5 min read

Money

Is it worth driving further for cheaper fuel?Chasing a cheaper price can cost more than it saves. The break-even point is easy to calculate, and once you know it, most detours answer themselves. 5 min readHow to cut your fuel billMost fuel-saving advice is a long list of small things. Two or three of them account for nearly all of the saving, and they are not the ones usually listed first. 6 min read

Practical

The best time to buy fuelThere is a lot of advice about when to fill up. Some of it is sound, and some has been repeated so often it is taken as fact despite being wrong by a factor of about a hundred. 5 min read

Where the money actually goes

Most advice about fuel is folklore: fill up on a Monday, keep the tank half full, use the premium stuff occasionally to clean the engine. Some of it was once true, some never was, and almost none of it survives contact with a dataset covering every forecourt in the country. These guides start from that data instead.

Three findings run through all of them. Roughly half of what you hand over at the pump is tax that does not move, which is why a large swing in the oil price makes a small one at the till — the history page shows the split. The gap between two forecourts a few miles apart is usually wider than the gap between two weeks, so where you fill matters more than when. And a cheaper price is only cheaper after the drive to reach it, which is a division anyone can do in their head once they have seen it done once.

Reading is one thing, prices are another

Every forecourt on the government feed, updated live.

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