How often do UK fuel prices actually change?

How often prices move

Every UK forecourt reports its prices to the government's Fuel Finder scheme, and each price carries the moment the retailer submitted it. Because retailers report a price change and are not required to reconfirm a price that hasn't moved, those timestamps let you measure something nobody usually publishes: how often the pump price at a British forecourt actually moves.

Across 634,902 recorded price changes, the typical gap between one change and the next at the same forecourt is 3.1 days. The average is longer, 6.1 days, pulled up by a tail of quiet rural sites that hold a price for weeks.

Time since the last price change

Across 8,079 open forecourts, measured against the most recent submission in the feed on 5 October 2026.

5,818 forecourts (72%) moved a price in the last week. At the other end, 560 (7%) have held every grade steady for more than a fortnight, and 66 (0.8%) for more than a month.

Which brands move fastest

Brands with at least 20 open forecourts, ranked by the share that changed a price in the last week. The spread is wide, and it tracks how each estate buys fuel rather than how big it is: networks on frequent deliveries and centralised pricing reprice often, while brands whose sites are largely dealer-run hold a price until the next load arrives.

Why it's worth knowing

It tells you how much a price you saw yesterday is worth today. At a supermarket forecourt that reprices every couple of days, a two-day-old figure is a rough guide. At a rural independent that has held the same price for three weeks, it is as good as live.

It also sets the ceiling on what any fuel price comparison site can do. Every one of them, this one included, is built on the same government feed, so nobody can be more current than the retailers choose to be.

Method

Two measurements. The headline gap comes from 634,902 consecutive price changes in our own price history, one series per forecourt per fuel grade, reporting the median because a handful of very long gaps drag the average upward. The table of time-since-last-change uses the most recent submission timestamp across all grades at each forecourt, taken from the Fuel Finder feed rather than from when we collected it, so the figures don't shift with our own schedule.

Permanently and temporarily closed sites are excluded throughout. Buckets are whole days counted back from the newest submission in the feed rather than from the clock, so a delayed data refresh shifts every row together instead of quietly emptying the top bucket. A brand needs 20 open forecourts to appear in the league table, because below that a single quiet site moves the percentage more than the brand's actual behaviour does. These are observations of the public feed: we can see what a retailer published and when, not the price on the pump.