Editorial policy
How PumpIndex gets its figures right
Where every number comes from, what we check before we publish it, who is responsible for it, how we make money, and what happens when something is wrong.
Sources
Every forecourt price on this site is the price the retailer itself reported to the UK Government's Fuel Finder service. Retailers must keep it up to date under the Motor Fuel Price (Open Data) Regulations 2025. National weekly averages, fuel duty and VAT come from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero's weekly road fuel prices, which is an official statistic. Locations come from ONS and Ordnance Survey open data. We do not take prices from users, from apps that collect prices from the public, or from retailers' own websites. We do not guess a price where none has been reported. The full list is on data sources.
Checking
Prices are loaded automatically several times a day, and every load runs the same checks. A price must be realistic for its fuel type. Its time must be after the feed began and not in the future. The forecourt must be somewhere in the United Kingdom. Anything that fails is kept on file as invalid and left out of every average, table and chart. Nothing is quietly changed. A price that has not changed for 30 days is crossed out and left out of the averages, because it may simply not have been updated. We never say a forecourt is breaking the rules. An old price is far more often a quiet week than a breach. The details are on how it works.
Averages and rankings
Our averages count every forecourt with a recent price the same. That is why they come out a few pence above the official figure, which gives more weight to busy supermarket forecourts. Every page that shows an average says which kind it is. League tables have minimum sizes (5 forecourts for a town, 10 for a brand) so that one odd price cannot top a table. Every table is rebuilt from scratch on every load. Nobody edits them by hand, and nobody can pay to move up, down or out of a table.
Writing
The guides, the weekly reports and this page are written by the editor, Matthew Hodson, and each one shows the date it was last revised. The weekly report is put together from the week's data by our own software and then read by the editor before it goes out. We do not use AI to write articles or to make up figures. Where a page relies on someone else's findings, such as the Competition and Markets Authority's work on retail margins, it says so and links to them.
Corrections
If something is wrong, we want to know. The contact form goes straight to the editor and is read the same working day. A wrong price is normally the retailer's own report, so we check the feed. If the feed has moved on, the site will already have caught up. If the feed itself is wrong, we say so on the page and point the retailer to Fuel Finder. A wrong address, name, brand, opening time or facility is fixed in our own data, and it stays fixed through future loads. Corrections to a guide or report are made in the text and the revised date is updated. Big corrections are noted at the bottom of the page.
Funding and independence
PumpIndex is published by Search Ventures Ltd, a UK company. It is paid for by clearly marked advertising and by selling the price history to fleets, researchers and the press. No retailer, brand, trade body or government department pays for anything on the site or sees it before it goes out. Customers who buy the data see the same figures as everyone else. If a business relationship ever affects a page, the page will say so. Full company details are on the about page.
Privacy and data reuse
We keep as little about visitors as we can. The privacy policy sets it out. You can quote our tables and reports for free with a link to the page. The government data behind them is open to anyone under the Open Government Licence.