How PumpIndex works

Where the prices come from

Since 2 February 2026, every forecourt in the UK has had to report its prices, opening hours, facilities and closures to Fuel Finder. Fuel Finder is a Government service run for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. The rules are the Motor Fuel Price (Open Data) Regulations 2025, and the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) makes sure retailers follow them. A price change must be reported within 30 minutes. The CMA says about 97% of forecourts are signed up, and between them they sell 99% of the fuel. The data is free for anyone to use, which is what makes this site possible.

We load the data from the daily open-data file published by FuelCosts.co.uk and, when it is set up, from the Fuel Finder API itself. Either way, the numbers are what the retailer reported. We do not ask users for prices, and we never change a price.

What we add

• History. Fuel Finder only shows the current price. We save every change, 1,099,536 so far. That gives every forecourt a chart going back to February 2026, and every town, county, brand and region a daily average going back just as far.
• Checks. Retailers type prices in by hand, so mistakes happen. We reject anything under 95p or over 250p a litre (275p for premium fuels), forecourts placed in the sea or in the wrong country, obvious test entries and duplicate entries. Rejected prices are kept on file but never shown or counted.
• Brand names. The brand field is free text, so "Bp", "BP PLC" and "Bp Harvest Energy" all turn up. We match more than a thousand spellings to about forty real brands so the brand pages make sense.
• Places. We put each forecourt in a town, council area, county and region using its postcode. We use the same list of towns as our sister sites OpenCrime and GPScore, so a town means the same thing on all three.
• Comparisons. Every price is shown next to the UK average, the town average and the forecourts within 5 miles, in pence per litre and in pounds per tank.

What "changed 3 days ago" means

Fuel Finder records the time of the last price change. It does not record the last time the retailer checked in. So a forecourt that has kept the same price for two weeks looks the same as one that has stopped reporting. That is why we say "changed" and not "updated", and why we never say a forecourt is breaking the rules. If a price has not changed for more than 30 days, we cross it out and leave it out of the averages. The CMA itself says an old date does not by itself mean a retailer has done anything wrong.

How the averages work

An area's average is the plain average of the current price at every forecourt in it that has reported a change in the last 30 days. Every forecourt counts the same, however much fuel it sells. That is why our figure comes out a little higher than the official DESNZ weekly figure, which gives more weight to busy supermarket forecourts. For the daily history we take each forecourt's price at the end of the day and carry it forward for up to 30 days if nothing changes. A town needs 5 forecourts to be ranked and an area needs 3, so one forecourt cannot make a whole town look cheap.

What the colours mean

Green means 3p or more under the average. Red means 3p or more over it. Amber means within 3p. On town pages the average is the UK average. On a brand's town page it is the town average.

What we do not do

No forecourt pays to appear, to be ranked, or to be hidden. We show no prices from any source other than the retailer's own report. We do not sell your email address. The alerts are the only emails we send.

Spotted a wrong price? Tell us and we will check it against the feed. If the retailer reported it wrongly, the best fix is to report it to Fuel Finder.