The findings come from a Press Association analysis of the data sitting behind Fuel Finder, and they paint a patchy picture. Alongside the roughly 570 forecourts that have never provided a petrol price at all, a further 1,751 sites last recorded a price change more than a week ago, and 96 of those hadn't updated in at least a month. Industry figures suggest more than 300 of the UK's roughly 8,300 filling stations still haven't even registered with the scheme.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who has championed the tool, said the gaps were "not right" and confirmed the CMA has issued hundreds of warning letters to non-compliant businesses. Her message was blunt: keep failing to report, and the regulator will move from letters to fines.
What Fuel Finder is — and why it exists
Fuel Finder is a Government-run scheme, delivered with technology partner VE3, that requires every forecourt in the country to report its pump prices to a central database. It grew out of a 2023 Competition and Markets Authority study, which found that competition between retailers had weakened and that drivers were paying significantly more at the supermarkets as margins widened. The fix was transparency: make everyone publish their prices, feed that data to comparison apps and websites, and let drivers vote with their wheels.
The scheme went live on 2 February 2026, and since then every open forecourt has been legally required to report any price change within 30 minutes. Ministers estimated it could save a typical car-owning household around £40 a year by sharpening competition. That only works, though, if the data is actually there — which is exactly what this investigation calls into question.
This is the feed we use: PetrolPrices.co.uk is built on the very same Government Fuel Finder data. We pull the feed every 15 minutes for over 7,900 stations. The flip side of that honesty is important: if a station never sends its price to Fuel Finder, no comparison site — including this one — can show it, because the gap is at the source, not the app. What we can do is be upfront about how fresh each price is (more on that below).
What the investigation found
The missing and stale data isn't confined to tiny independents. Of the 7,765 open forecourts that had provided standard unleaded (E10) prices by early July, 2,229 were supermarket sites — and 410 of those hadn't uploaded a price change in at least a week. Reporting body ITV News has also flagged accuracy problems in the raw scheme data, including obviously wrong entries such as a UK forecourt plotted in the south Atlantic Ocean. The RAC called the findings concerning, arguing it simply isn't plausible that so many sites genuinely left their prices unchanged for a week or more.
What happens to stations that don't comply
The CMA has real teeth here. Enforcement runs in stages — warning letters first, then formal action — but the financial penalties at the end of that road are steep. The regulator can levy a fixed fine of up to 1% of a business's worldwide turnover, a daily penalty of up to 5% of daily worldwide turnover, or a combination, with maximum exposure reported at up to 30% of annual turnover. For a large retailer, that is a serious number, which is why the warning-letter stage is expected to prompt most laggards into line.
The retailers' side: Not every gap is a business dodging the rules. The Petrol Retailers Association points out that smaller, rural forecourts often take a fuel delivery only about once a month, so their prices genuinely change less often. The CMA makes a similar point — some sites legitimately move prices less frequently as part of their pricing strategy. The problem is telling those apart from sites that are simply ignoring the law.
What it means for you
For drivers, the practical risk is subtle: a price you see for a particular station might be out of date, or that station might be missing from comparison tools entirely. That's frustrating, but it's manageable if you know what to look for. The single most useful habit is to check how recent a price is before you rely on it, rather than assuming every figure is live to the minute.
This is exactly why every station on PetrolPrices.co.uk carries a Price Freshness badge — a simple green, amber or red indicator showing whether a price was updated recently, a while ago, or is going stale. When the underlying scheme has gaps like these, that context is the difference between a saving you can trust and a wasted detour. You can see it in action across our live fuel map, and we explain the wider scheme in our guide to how Fuel Finder works.
It also matters more than usual right now. Average UK petrol is still around 19p a litre higher than before the recent conflict in the Middle East, even though oil has returned to pre-war levels — a gap we covered as prices fell back through the summer. With margins under that much scrutiny, knowing the genuinely cheapest live price near you is worth real money. You can track the national picture on our UK Fuel Price Index.
The practical move: Don't treat any single number as gospel — check the freshness of the price before you drive out of your way, and lean on stations reporting recent, live figures. If a forecourt's price looks suspiciously unchanged for days, treat it as a rough guide and confirm at the pump. Shopping around still works; it just pays to know which prices are current.