Motorway fuel prices
Live petrol and diesel at every UK motorway service station, cheapest first — and how much of that price you would keep by leaving at the junction instead.
Service stations average 19.8p a litre above the national median — £10.89 on a 55-litre tank. Find a forecourt off the motorway first →
Service operators, cheapest first
Average E10 across the motorway sites each operator runs. Operators with fewer than three sites in the data are left out.
Applegreen3 motorway sites · cheapest £1.67£1.69Shell17 motorway sites · cheapest £1.68£1.86Esso19 motorway sites · cheapest £1.67£1.90BP84 motorway sites · cheapest £1.72£1.9323.6p separates the cheapest operator from the dearest — against 19.8p between the motorway as a whole and everywhere else. Choosing which services to stop at saves a little; not stopping at services saves a lot.
Find services on your road
163 forecourts · 13 roads96 of the 163 service areas name their road in the feed, so those can be filtered by road number. The rest are searchable by name, town or operator. Prices update through the day.
What to do instead
The premium is 19.8p a litre, or £10.89 on a tank. A two-mile detour each way burns about half a litre in a 40 mpg car — call it £0.85 — so leaving the motorway pays for itself several times over unless the nearest forecourt is a long way off route. The break-even is a single division, and the guide works it through.
Planning helps more than reacting. If you know roughly where you will need fuel, check the postcode of the junction before you set off: the search map shows every forecourt near any postcode with today’s price, so the stop is chosen rather than forced. Supermarket forecourts near motorway junctions are often the cheapest fuel for miles — compare the chains to see which are worth looking for.
Common questions
Why is fuel more expensive at motorway services?
Motorway forecourts average £1.90 against £1.70 elsewhere — 19.8p a litre more, or £10.89 on a 55-litre tank. Three things drive it: service areas pay very high ground rents, they are required to open around the clock and to provide free parking and toilets whether or not you buy anything, and there is no competitor inside the service area. Nothing obliges an operator to price in line with the surrounding roads.
How much can I save by leaving the motorway?
About £10.89 on a full tank at today's prices. A junction detour of two miles each way costs roughly half a litre of fuel in a 40 mpg car — under a pound — so the detour pays for itself many times over unless the exit is genuinely far off route. The arithmetic is worked through in our guide on driving further for cheaper fuel.
Which motorway service operator is cheapest?
Across the sites we track, Applegreen averages £1.69 and Welcome Break £1.93 — 23.6p between them. That is a smaller gap than the one between any of them and the forecourts off the motorway, so choosing between service operators saves far less than leaving the motorway at all.
Are motorway services required to publish their prices?
Yes. Since the Fuel Finder scheme opened on 2 February 2026 every UK forecourt, motorway services included, must report a price change within thirty minutes of it taking effect. That is where these figures come from. What the scheme does not do is cap what they charge — it only makes the number visible before you commit to the slip road.
Do the big signs on the motorway show the price?
Some approach signs display fuel prices, and where they do they are worth reading — but they are not universal and are not always current. Checking before you set off is more reliable, which is what this page and the search map are for.