>>Techno+(OP)
> From 2 February 2026, you must submit fuel price updates within 30 minutes of any change.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/report-your-fuel-prices-and-fore...

So looks as though the requirement to report was only just introduced, hence the considerable missing data.

Edit: BBC reporting here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp80dpzdg37o

>>Nextgr+29
Some vague info here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/fuel-finder-enfor...

>>Techno+(OP)
We've had fuelwatch here in W.Australia for 30(?) ish years now (used to be a telnet file IIRC)

https://www.fuelwatch.wa.gov.au/

Nice to see the UK come onboard.

>>Techno+(OP)
More information on the API schema from here:

https://www.developer.fuel-finder.service.gov.uk/apis-ifr/in...

It doesn't mention any filters beyond batch number and effective start date. They're definitely storing the lat-lon information though, so it would be nice to do area-based queries, especially if you're building an app with a map view.

>>london+Hc
According to this webpage you can do it by phone: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/report-your-fuel-prices-and-fore...

I wouldn't look forward to having to do that every time I changed prices!

I wonder how many small independent stations are there these days? Almost every one I see is either in a supermarket, a big chain like Esso, or a smaller chain like Harvest.

>>Techno+(OP)
This is a great innovation and I'm sure in time it'll become a useful source of information. There are some edge cases of course.

If you live on the Irish border, you'll have a choice between getting your petrol on the UK side, or the Irish side. For about 20 years, petrol was cheaper on the Irish side, causing a bunch of petrol stations to spring up just over the border, attracting drivers from the other side with cheap prices and good exchange rates.

In the last 10 years or so, the position has reversed. Petrol is now roughly cheaper on the UK side of the border, or at least not worth making a special trip for.

There's even a petrol station in Belleek mentioned here[1] that straddles the border and apparently has or had pumps on both sides.

[1]: https://www.impartialreporter.com/news/25653110.border-filli...

>>Techno+(OP)
Created a quick map dashboard that shows the prices on a map with pins:

Preview:

https://bf31ed2a-ec85-460a-a503-fa9bf86bf63b.paged.net/

Source:

https://github.com/markwylde/uk-fuel-price-map

You have to download the CSV manually from the gov.uk link.

>>Techno+(OP)
See also: UK-fuel-price-map: A web UI for the UK fuel price data - >>46857520

(no comments there yet though!)

>>london+Hc
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/report-your-fuel-prices-and-fore... does have a Web interface for updating prices.

>>tietje+fl1
It's 22 times a day, according to the Federal Cartel Office.

https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/DE/Aufgaben/Markttransparenz...

>>consta+ly1
The source for the "private APIs" is the government run MTS-K.

https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/EN/Tasks/markettransparencyu...

>>Techno+(OP)
Good to see. For what it's worth, data were previously available from the Competition and Markets authority, used by https://localfuelprices.co.uk/

>>notaha+gh1
> A 7p per litre difference does sound like the difference between local station and motorway prices though, and they probably will have factored in that opportunity cost of time...

Only 7p?

Motorway services have shocking price markups, way more than 7p. Most people don't realise this or are just too lazy to find something that isn't quite as convenient.

According to the live feed at https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/fuel-watch/ I see:

    Unleaded is 131.80p (UK wide) and 156.80p (Motorway Service Area).

That's nearly a 20% markup.

Last time I drove into a motorway services and saw prices ~20p/litre higher I just drove through the petrol station and found a local garage to fill up at.

>>citrin+Wc
Agreed. Most of the time the cost of driving out of your way exceeds the saving you would make. However, there's a fuel station near me that is 19.8% cheaper than one only 1.6 miles away from it, and that's a thing that is worth knowing.

https://xkcd.com/951/

>>Techno+(OP)
This is great news. There's been a pilot study in which each retailer (voluntarily) hosted a JSON file containing their current prices (https://www.gov.uk/guidance/access-fuel-price-data). I noticed recently that a few of them had been removed/stopped working.

Neither the pilot nor the current API appears to include all fuel stations, but at least they provide (hopefully) more reliable updates from the ones that do.

I'd been playing with the pilot study data and set up FuelBelly to aggregate and compare https://fuelbelly.com/explore?lat=51.50740713124398&lng=-0.1.... (doesn't include the API updates, yet...)

A quick play with the API, the information responses (opening times, addresses etc.) doesn't appear to be working, I just get a 500 (HTML not JSON) response. But the price calls are working, and I'm glad this is being pushed forward post-pilot.

>>Techno+(OP)
This sort of thing works well for individuals. Eg.

https://www.fuelcheck.nsw.gov.au/app/FuelPrice/ByLocation?la...

Then you need the integration into home assistant for your local options.

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/nsw_fuel_station/

And an app for ease of use when you're out of your local area.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=au.gov.nsw.one...

https://apps.apple.com/au/app/nsw-fuelcheck/id1266569551

How does it affect things across the economy for fuel purchase? Haven't seen a study. It would incentive-ise price cutting to increase sales, especially by the independent operators, by essentially advertising the lower pricing for free, is my guess.

>>alexfo+HI1
Having seen what happens with bad gas from shoddy stations, i too will bypass many in favor of the big names. I know someone who got water instead of gas when a tiny mom-and-pop gas station let thier tank run so low it started pumping decades of groundwater from the bottom of a rarely-serviced tank.

Just google "gas station pumped water" to see all the local news articles about this sort of thing.

https://www.koco.com/article/drivers-oklahoma-furious-after-...

https://www.motorbiscuit.com/gas-station-pumps-ga-water/

https://www.wkyc.com/article/news/local/lake-county/mentor-w...

https://www.motorbiscuit.com/nevada-gas-station-pumps-golden...

>>sandwo+Np2
None of these are local news articles, in fact they are all from a different continent.

A local article that I did find was from a BP petrol station in Liverpool, so I'm not sure this can be isolated to 'mom-and-pop' outfits (something we don't really have over here anyway).

https://www.petrolprices.com/news/garage-sells-petrol-dilute...

>>maffyo+99
That's an extreme case though, and not what this sort of thing is aimed at.

Here in Perth, Western Australia, it's common for pump prices to vary significantly even within a small radius. But they're all on https://www.fuelwatch.wa.gov.au/ so you can see what the price is ahead of time.

If it's 14c cheaper per litre (coming up for 10%) to go 500m one direction vs 500m another direction, which one are you going to choose?

>>Nursie+qY2
> I think it's exactly that, the UK has never had this so people there either choose by brand or just convenience.

We've had it for years (as noted in other comments there's a few different people like the RAC, AA and Petrolprices.com all maintaining their own lists - a quick check of my email has messages from the latter going back to 2011). The new part is that this is from the government and the data is freely accessible (Petrolprices in particular covered their pages in ads, so I'd be surprised if there wasn't a way to exchange money for the data).

The context to this is that, especially since the pandemic, there's been a complaint with the Competition and Markets Authority that the petrol stations were quick to raise prices, slow to lower them, and weren't competing with each other[1]:

> The CMA found that retail prices tended to "rise like a rocket, but fall like a feather" in response to increases or decreases in the cost of crude oil.

Independent petrol stations have virtually disappeared and you don't have to look too hard to see that in an area they tend to all raise or lower their prices in virtual lockstep. Gathering this data would make the case significantly easier if the next step were that some of the petrol station operators had to be broken up to encourage more competition.

1: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp80dpzdg37o#comments

Edit: Petrolprices was founded in 2005 (!) [2]

2: https://www.myautomateapp.co.uk/

>>Glawen+0e3
I don't see how that makes it uniquely viable in France. Germany has something very much like this too. And we've had it for nearly 13 years.

> Since 31 August 2013 companies which operate public petrol stations or have the power to set their prices are required to report price changes for the most commonly used types of fuel, i.e. Super E5, Super E10 and Diesel “in real time” to the Market Transparency Unit for Fuels. This then passes on the incoming price data to consumer information service providers, which in turn pass it on to the consumer.

As a consumer, there is no direct API by the MTS-K that you can use, but there are some services like Tankerkoenig which pass this data on to you. I have used their API in Home Assistant before I switched to an EV.

https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/EN/Tasks/markettransparencyu...

>>Techno+(OP)
I spent the last few hours hacking together PetrolMate using this dataset: https://petrolmate.co.uk

A couple of interesting observations while building it:

Yesterday the dataset had ~600 stations. Today it’s reporting 6,666 stations from the UK government feed, which is… a slightly ominous number, but according to the data and me asking an LLM, that’s close to full UK coverage already.

I deliberately went for a “pure speed” tech stack. Astro, no UI framework, just vanilla JS. Deployed on Cloudflare, with prices stored in D1.

I'm not using the API to load the data, I'm cleansing and then importing the CSV (which you can download for free) into the D1 database.

There’s also an /insights page with some aggregated stats that genuinely surprised me: https://petrolmate.co.uk/insights

Really nice to finally have an official, open dataset to build on. It already feels far more reliable than the old user-reported approaches, and it’ll be interesting to see how coverage and update frequency settles over the next few weeks.

Would love to hear feedback by the way. What is this missing to make it a genuinely useful tool?

>>esquiv+nB2
Not really, he was advised to take it daily by his doctor and his doctor knows his drinking habits.

UK advice is to avoid drinking more than 14 units (think a shot, a small beer or a small glass of wine = 1 unit) whilst taking paracetamol.

https://www.nhs.uk/medicines/paracetamol-for-adults/common-q...