Until 2025, finding out what petrol cost at a specific UK forecourt required you to drive past it. There was no national dataset. The price boards updated when the retailer felt like it, and the only way a consumer could compare was to commit to a station before they knew the number. Then the Motor Fuel Price (Open Data) Regulations landed, and everything changed.
What the regulations require
In short: every UK retailer selling motor fuel to the general public must publish, to a central government scheme, the price they’re currently charging for every fuel grade they stock. Each forecourt publishes independently. Any change must be reflected in the scheme within thirty minutes of the new price going live at the pump. The data is open-licence and machine-readable.
The threshold is volume-based. Retailers selling less than one million litres a year across their whole estate are exempt — in practice that’s a handful of independents at the very smallest end. Everyone else, from Costco to the single-site village garage, is in scope. Roughly 8,000 UK forecourts are covered.
What each forecourt publishes
The schema is deliberately minimal. For each site:
- Forecourt name, address, postcode
- Latitude and longitude to four decimal places
- Brand (Tesco, Shell, BP, Esso, etc.) where applicable
- Current price in pence per litre for each fuel offered
- The timestamp of the most recent update
Notably absent: opening hours, pump count, shop offering, loyalty scheme status, 24-hour availability. The scheme is price transparency, not facility directory. Some of that data exists elsewhere (what3words, Google Business) — FuelHawk reconciles it at the station level where it can.
Who runs it
The scheme is operated by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) on behalf of the Department for Business and Trade. The CMA recommended the regulations in its 2023 market study, which found that UK forecourts had been quietly widening margins in the post-pandemic period — the gap between what retailers paid at the wholesale rack and what they charged at the pump had grown by around 6p per litre on average. The price-transparency requirement was the primary remedy.
The dataset is exposed as a public JSON feed at www.fuel-finder.service.gov.uk. Any organisation can consume it without registration or attribution requirements. The licence is Open Government v3.0, which is about as permissive as government data licences get.
What the regulations don’t do
The scheme doesn’t cap prices, doesn’t enforce consistency between sites of the same brand, and doesn’t require retailers to offer a minimum number of grades. Shell can charge 170p at one site and 162p a mile down the road; Tesco can sell E10 but not E5; a forecourt can decline to stock HVO. Transparency is the point — retailers remain free to price as they see fit, but they can’t keep the number private.
The enforcement mechanism is civil penalty rather than criminal. Failure to publish, or publishing stale data, can attract fines proportionate to turnover. Early data suggests compliance is running above 98% by forecourt count.
How FuelHawk uses it
We poll the scheme every five minutes, diff against the snapshot we already have, and write the changes into a time-series table. That’s the whole data pipeline — the reason the rest of the site (live rankings, 90-day trends, forecourt history, margin scores against wholesale) can exist at all is because the underlying data is now public, clean and frequent enough to make real use of.
You can read the regulations yourself on legislation.gov.uk — SI 2024/1394, Motor Fuel (Price Open Data) Regulations 2024, in force from 31 December 2025. They run to about four pages of actual substance, which is unusually terse for a statutory instrument.
See today’s national average, derived from the scheme →
Find the cheapest forecourt near you →