Fuel prices by brand

What the table is really showing

Every retailer in the table pays the same fuel duty and buys from the same wholesale market. The differences below are entirely differences in what each operator chooses to charge, and they follow a pattern that repeats week after week.

Today the median unleaded price across the supermarket forecourts in this data is 158.9p, against 161.9p across the oil company brands: a gap of 3.0p a litre. On a 50-litre fill that is £1.50 every time, or roughly £30 a year for a car covering 10,000 miles at 45 miles per gallon.

At the two extremes today, the cheapest brands by median unleaded price are Go at 151.9p, Nicholl at 151.9p and Costco Wholesale at 153.9p. The dearest are Welcome Break at 186.9p, Heltor at 164.9p and Harvest Energy at 164.9p. The top of that list is usually dominated by motorway service operators, which is a story about location rather than about the brand: their customers cannot realistically go anywhere else. The motorway services page sets out the size of that premium on its own.

There is a subtler effect worth knowing about. Asda and Asda Express are run by the same operator, and today their median unleaded prices are 158.9p and 162.9p respectively, a difference of 4.0p a litre. Smaller convenience-format sites carry higher costs per litre and often sit where there is less competition, so the name over the door is not a reliable guide to the price underneath it.

Why diesel sits above petrol

Diesel carries exactly the same fuel duty as petrol, so the gap between them is entirely in the wholesale product and the retailer margin. Across the brands here the typical difference today is 22.0p a litre. Diesel is traded as a global product with heavy demand from lorries, farming, construction and, in some countries, heating, and European refining capacity for it has been tight since 2022. The competition authority has also found that retailers have run wider margins on diesel than on petrol. Neither of those is something a government sets, which is why the petrol-diesel gap moves around independently of anything announced in a Budget.

Premium fuels: what the extra buys

The super unleaded and premium diesel columns are typically 10 to 25p a litre above the standard grades. Super unleaded has a higher octane rating, which a small number of engines genuinely require and which the handbook will state plainly if yours is one of them. For everything else the extra is buying a heavier additive package rather than more energy. Premium diesel works the same way. If a car has run happily on standard fuel for years, the burden of proof is on the premium grade rather than the other way round.

How to use this page

Brand medians are a good way to know roughly what to expect and a poor way to choose a specific forecourt, because prices are set site by site. The reliable order of operations is to check the forecourts near you first, use this table to sanity-check whether the price you are being quoted is normal for that brand, and treat any site more than a few pence above its brand median as a site worth driving past. Individual brand pages list every forecourt with its current price and the cheapest sites in that estate.

Questions people ask

Medians are calculated across every forecourt of that brand reporting a price for the fuel today, from the government Fuel Finder feed. Brands with fewer than five forecourts are grouped as independents. Prices are shown as retailers report them and are not filtered or ranked in any retailer’s favour.