How much drivers can save by shopping around for fuel
By Anthony Sharkey, Chief Operating Officer, New Reg Limited
Petrol prices vary by as much as 12p a litre across UK forecourts, meaning a 50-litre fill-up can cost £6 more at an expensive site than a cheaper one.
Drivers filling a standard 50-litre petrol tank could pay up to £6 more simply by choosing the wrong forecourt, according to official UK fuel price data covering 7,855 sites across the country.
The average price of E10 unleaded currently sits at 167.1p a litre, but that figure masks a wide spread. The cheapest forecourts are pricing petrol at around 160.9p a litre, while the most expensive are charging close to 172.9p a litre. That gap of roughly 12p a litre translates directly into the difference between a £80.45 fill and an £86.45 fill on the same size tank, depending entirely on where a driver pulls in.
Diesel drivers face a higher baseline cost, with the national average sitting at 188.6p a litre according to the same official data. As with petrol, regional and site-to-site variation means the actual price a driver pays can differ considerably from the national figure, reinforcing the case for checking local prices before heading to a particular station.
The savings on offer are modest in absolute terms but add up meaningfully across a year of regular driving. A driver who fills up once a week and consistently uses a cheaper forecourt rather than a dearer one could save in the region of £300 over 12 months without changing their driving habits at all. Supermarket forecourts have historically offered lower prices than motorway services or branded urban stations, and that pattern continues to hold across the data.