How Cheapest Pump works

Where do the prices come from?

From the UK government's Fuel Finder scheme. Since 2 February 2026 every forecourt has had to register and report its prices, and since 1 May 2026 it must report any change within 30 minutes. The data is open data published under the Open Government Licence.

How often are prices updated?

Forecourts report changes within 30 minutes. This site refreshes its copy of the feed through the day and each page checks for newer prices when you open it, so the "updated" time shown is the last time that forecourt changed its price.

Why is a price obviously wrong?

Prices are shown exactly as the forecourt reported them; we do not edit them. Typing errors happen. If a price looks wrong, report it to Fuel Finder using the link at the foot of every page, or tell us and we will pass it on.

What do E10, E5, B7 and HVO mean?

E10 is standard unleaded (up to 10% ethanol). E5 is super unleaded, usually 97 to 99 octane. B7 is standard diesel (up to 7% biodiesel); premium diesel is a B7 blend sold at a higher price. B10 is diesel with up to 10% biodiesel, and HVO is a renewable diesel sold at a small number of sites.

Are the prices per litre?

Yes, in pence per litre, for example 156.9p. The "50 litres" figure on a station page is simply the price multiplied by 50 to make comparison easier.

Which forecourts are missing?

Only forecourts that have registered with Fuel Finder appear. The scheme covers around 8,300 sites and coverage is still growing. Motorway and supermarket forecourts are flagged so you can spot them.

Why the Fuel Finder scheme exists at all

Until 2026 there was no legal requirement for a forecourt in the United Kingdom to tell anybody what it was charging. Comparison sites relied on drivers photographing price boards and submitting them, which meant the data was patchy, slow and often out of date by the time anyone read it.

That changed because of a competition investigation. Between 2022 and 2023 the Competition and Markets Authority examined the road fuel market and found that retailer margins had widened materially since 2019, that the supermarkets had become less aggressive on price than they had once been, and that drivers had no practical way of knowing whether the forecourt in front of them was competitive. Its central remedy was to make price transparency compulsory rather than voluntary. Fuel Finder is the result: every forecourt must register, must publish its prices, and since 1 May 2026 must report any change within 30 minutes. The data is published as open data under the Open Government Licence, which is why a site like this one can exist without a commercial arrangement with anybody.

What happens between the feed and the page

The chain is deliberately short, because every step is a chance to introduce an error.

1. A scheduled job collects the published prices from the Fuel Finder service through the day.
2. Records are parsed and normalised: postcodes tidied, brand names grouped so that variations of the same name do not appear as separate retailers, and coordinates checked against the postcode.
3. Prices are carried through unchanged. Nothing is rounded, adjusted, excluded for looking odd, or reordered to favour a retailer.
4. Every day’s prices are added to a history file, which is what makes the trend charts and the week-on-week comparisons on this site possible. Most comparison sites keep only today.
5. The site is rebuilt so that every town, brand, area and forecourt page carries the current figures.

What the timestamps mean

The time shown against a forecourt is when that forecourt last changed its price, not when we last looked. A site that has held the same price for a fortnight will show a fortnight-old timestamp and be entirely current. The figure at the foot of this page is different: it is the newest price change anywhere in the data in this build, and it is the honest measure of how fresh the whole set is.

What this site deliberately does not do

• It does not hide or correct odd prices. A forecourt occasionally reports a figure that is clearly a typing error. Editing it would mean deciding what the price really was, which is not something we can know, so it is shown as reported with a way to report the error.
• It does not rank retailers by anything except price and distance. No retailer pays for a position, and there is no arrangement with any of them.
• It does not show loyalty or members-only prices. Only the standard price has to be published, so a supermarket loyalty scheme can beat everything shown here at that site.
• It does not track you. A postcode search sends the postcode to a free lookup service and nothing else. Using your location keeps the coordinates on your own device.

Reading a forecourt page

Each forecourt page shows every fuel it reports, the price for a 50-litre fill for easier comparison, how the site compares with the median for its town and for its brand, its own price history where we hold enough of it, and the nearest alternatives with their prices. The comparison figures are the useful part: a price only means something relative to what the forecourts around it are charging on the same day.

How the search works

When you type a postcode we look up its location using the free postcodes.io service, which sends only the postcode. "Use my location" asks your browser for your position and never sends it anywhere except to work out distances on your own device. The site then downloads the price data for the stretch of the country around you and sorts it in your browser.

Fair use of the data

We follow the Fuel Finder fair-use rules: prices are presented without favouring any retailer, they are not altered, their timestamps are shown as reported, and every page links to the official report an error form. Cheapest Pump is independent and not affiliated with the UK Government or any fuel retailer.

This build: 8,075 forecourts with prices from 8,080 records, newest price change 29 Aug 2026, 15:26.