Methodology

UK prices are collected continuously, around the clock, from the government’s statutory scheme. Under that scheme a retailer only re-reports a price when it actually changes — so a station showing an older timestamp usually means its price genuinely hasn’t moved, not that we have stopped checking.

Every price change is recorded permanently, so the history behind a station is real and can be looked back over. Other countries update on their own official source’s schedule, which varies from several times a day to monthly.

A station stays listed while we are still successfully hearing from it, judged against how often its own source publishes rather than one fixed rule for the whole world. We deliberately do not hide a station just because its price hasn’t changed recently — only if we have genuinely stopped receiving data for it.

Every price carries its real, absolute reported time — never a vague “recently.” Where a price has held unchanged for a while we say so plainly, because an unchanged price and a missing one are different facts and should never look the same. Where we have stopped receiving data, we say that instead, and we stop offering the page to search engines rather than let an old number keep ranking.

Reported prices outside the range any real pump price could occupy are treated as source errors and discarded outright rather than displayed. A price that is plausible in absolute terms but far out of line with what that same station has actually been charging is held out of publication for review, rather than either shown or silently deleted — a genuine outlier is itself worth investigating.

We never estimate, average, or carry forward a price we have not actually received. If a number isn’t real, the honest answer is that we don’t know it yet — not a best guess presented as fact. We never interpolate across a gap in the data; a break is shown as a break. And a commercial relationship never changes ranking order: prices are always shown cheapest first, full stop.

A town, county, postcode area or brand page only goes live once enough stations with genuine live prices support it. Below that we would rather show nothing than a thin page with barely any real content behind it.

Our own analysis — the weekly UK report, the country rankings and comparisons, and the averages we compute — is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0: use it freely, including commercially, with a credit. The source data underneath stays under each publisher’s own licence.

Cite as: Petrol Price Map (petrolpricemap.com), [page title], [date you read it]. A link to the page you used is the credit we would most like.

UK data is published under the Open Government Licence. Every station page links to the government’s own error-reporting page. Found something wrong? Tell us — we would rather fix it than leave it. Things we have already got wrong and fixed are logged publicly on corrections.