What's new
What each release of this site contained, newest first. Currently version 1.4.0, 28 August 2026.
Looking for changes to the government's data file rather than to this site? That is the schema changelog, and it is a different log.
1.4.0 — Data quality
What this archive knows about its own mistakes, published rather than kept — including the ones we made ourselves.
- The collection log now lists every price we hold that cannot be true: what the forecourt submitted, what we recorded it as, and which of the two is our fault.
- All 32 of them are ours. Retailers send prices in pounds, pence or tenths of a penny, and where one submits 10.41 our own conversion turns it into 1041p with nothing checking the result. Not one retailer sent a figure that was absurd as it arrived.
- Nothing is quietly corrected. A price we think impossible is kept exactly as it was published, beside our reading of it, because a repaired price would be a price we invented.
- The compliance page gains a second question: not how promptly a brand publishes, but how much. Asda publishes an average of two grades a forecourt; Shell publishes almost four.
- It carries no column for the unit a retailer chose, and that absence is a finding — 140,050 of the 140,097 prices in our own readings arrive in pence, so there is nothing there to tell one brand from another.
- Forecourts publishing super unleaded below their own regular unleaded are listed as what they are: two published prices that cannot both be right, and we do not claim to know which is wrong.
1.3.0 — Grade directories
The fuels and facilities too rare to belong on every page get a page each: who publishes a price for them, and what operators say their forecourts have.
- HVO and B10: the whole list, on one screen each, because 55 and 59 forecourts publish a price for them against nearly 8,000 for petrol.
- Super unleaded: who publishes no price for it — about one petrol forecourt in five, 193 postcode districts with none at all, and one chain that publishes none anywhere.
- 24-hour fuel, LPG and AdBlue: what operators declared about their own forecourts, in their words. Nobody has been to check a pump.
- 24-hour fuel comes with a warning: operators answer that question twice in the file and disagree with themselves at 191 forecourts, so both of their answers are shown.
- AdBlue is two questions, not one: a pump you can pull up to is 1,080 forecourts; a bottle in the shop is 7,362, and the larger number never stands where the smaller belongs.
1.2.0 — Local competition
Two questions about the map rather than the file: how far the next forecourt is, and how much prices vary between forecourts close enough to choose between.
- How far the next forecourt is, for every forecourt in the file — 195 of them have nothing within five miles, and the furthest is 32 miles from its nearest competitor.
- What that distance costs: forecourts with a neighbour inside a mile and forecourts up to five miles out carry the same median petrol price, and past ten miles it is five pence higher.
- The gap between the cheapest and dearest forecourt in a postcode district — typically four pence, occasionally enormous, and the widest are listed rather than smoothed away.
- Every district page now shows its own gap — including when every forecourt in it charges the same to the penny, and when there is only one forecourt and nothing to compare.
1.1.0 — First analyses
The archive starts answering questions rather than only listing prices — four pages that count something nobody else is counting, and this page.
- Price endings: nine in ten forecourt prices end in .9, and the page counts what the rest end in — including one large chain that prices to a different convention from everybody else.
- Super unleaded: what the premium actually costs, per forecourt, with the range it runs across and the forecourts whose own prices contradict it.
- Premium diesel: the same for the two diesel grades, and an explanation of why its history starts later than the petrol one.
- Biggest movers: which forecourts changed price most over a day and over a week, up and down, ranked across every forecourt we can measure.
- The home page’s movement figures now lead to the forecourts behind them.
- This page, so each release says what it contained.
1.0.0 — Launch
The archive went public: every forecourt in the government’s fuel price file, every reading we have taken, on pages anybody can link to.
- A page for each of the 8,000-odd forecourts, with its current prices and every change we have recorded.
- Prices by postcode district, by town, by area and by brand, with a map for each district.
- A search that takes a postcode or a town and a “use my location” that reaches the nearest district we hold.
- Reporting promptness by brand, measured against the scheme’s 30-minute rule using the retailers’ own timestamps.
- A duty and VAT breakdown, a methodology page, a press kit, and a daily CSV of the current reading.
- A public log of changes to the government file’s own format, which nobody else keeps.
Earlier than 1.0.0 there is nothing to report: the site did not exist.