Fuel prices by postcode area

Pick the letters at the start of your postcode.

Where fuel is cheapest in the United Kingdom today

Fuel duty and value added tax are the same everywhere in the country, so every regional difference below comes from the retail market: how many forecourts compete with each other, how much fuel each of them sells, and how far the nearest alternative is. The national median for unleaded today is 161.9p.

The cheapest postcode areas right now, counting only those with at least 20 forecourts reporting a price, are BT Northern Ireland at 154.9p, BD Bradford at 157.9p, WF Wakefield at 157.9p, BL Bolton at 158.9p and HD Huddersfield at 158.9p. The dearest are DA Dartford at 164.9p, UB Southall at 163.9p, TF Telford at 163.9p, SO Southampton at 163.9p and RG Reading at 163.9p. That is a spread of 10.0p a litre between the cheapest and dearest parts of the country.

The more useful number is the one inside each area rather than between them. In HP Hemel Hempstead, for example, the cheapest tenth of forecourts today are at or below 152.9p while the dearest tenth are at or above 165.9p, a gap of 13.0p a litre inside one postcode area. Almost everywhere, the difference between forecourts near you is larger than the difference between where you live and the cheapest region in the country, and it is the difference you can actually do something about.

The patterns that hold from week to week

Northern Ireland is consistently the cheapest part of the United Kingdom. Same duty, same value added tax, but a dense independent retail market, a smaller supermarket presence and, near the border, the option of filling up in the Republic of Ireland.
Remote and island areas are consistently the dearest. Delivery costs contribute, but the dominant factor is the absence of a competitor within a sensible drive.
Large urban areas cluster near the national median. Plenty of competition and high volumes keep margins thin, which is why cities rarely appear at either end of the list.
Commuter belts around big cities are often dearer than the city itself. High traffic, relatively few forecourts and drivers who are passing through rather than shopping around.
Motorway corridors distort the picture. A postcode area containing several motorway service areas will show a higher median than the towns inside it actually charge.

How to use this page

Postcode areas are a good way to see the shape of the country and a poor way to find a cheap tank of fuel. Pick your area to see every forecourt in it with its current price, then use the search on the home page to sort the ones actually near you by price or distance. If your area sits near the top of the dearest list, the pages for neighbouring areas are worth a look before a long journey, and the motorway services page is worth checking before any of them.

Questions people ask

What is a postcode area?

It is the one or two letters at the very start of a United Kingdom postcode: OX for Oxford, M for Manchester, BT for the whole of Northern Ireland. There are around 120 of them and they were drawn around sorting offices rather than councils, so they do not line up with county or local authority boundaries. They are used here because they are the part of an address everybody knows without looking it up, and they group forecourts into regions of a sensible size.

Why is fuel dearer in rural areas?

Delivery costs are part of it and a smaller part than most people assume. The larger reason is competition: a forecourt that is the only one for fifteen miles has no reason to price keenly, while one with three rivals within two miles has every reason. Rural forecourts also sell far less fuel, so they need a wider margin per litre to cover the same fixed costs. The two effects compound, which is why isolated areas sit consistently near the top of this list.

Why is fuel cheaper in Northern Ireland?

Fuel duty and value added tax are identical across the United Kingdom, so the difference is in the retail market rather than in tax. Northern Ireland has an unusually high number of independent forecourts competing hard against each other, a smaller supermarket presence than Great Britain, and the practical option for drivers near the border of filling up in the Republic of Ireland instead. Together those keep margins tighter than anywhere in Great Britain.

Do fuel prices vary that much across the country?

Between regions, less than people expect. Within a region, far more than people expect. The spread between the cheapest and dearest postcode areas is real, but the gap between the cheapest and dearest forecourt inside a single area is usually larger than the gap between areas. Where you fill up matters more than where you live.

Medians are calculated at build time across every forecourt in the area reporting an unleaded price, from the government Fuel Finder feed. Areas with fewer than 20 reporting forecourts are left out of the cheapest and dearest lists above so that a handful of sites cannot distort the ranking, but every area has its own page. The within-area range uses the tenth and ninetieth percentiles rather than the outright cheapest and dearest, because a small number of forecourts misreport a price on any given day and one bad figure should not set a headline number.