How Our Data Works
Where our fuel prices come from, how often we refresh them, and what the timestamps around the site actually mean.
Where the data comes from
Prices and station details are sourced from the UK Government's Fuel Finder scheme, under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Fuel retailers submit their own prices directly to that feed — we don't set or verify prices ourselves, we only fetch and display what retailers have reported.
Our import schedule
We run three separate imports, each on its own schedule:
Prices last imported: 17 Sep 2026, 20:46 UK time (8 minutes ago)
Station details last imported: 17 Sep 2026, 20:03 UK time (51 minutes ago)
Why you'll see different times in different places
The footer's "last import" time, and the "updated … ago" label under an individual price, are answering two different questions — so they won't always match. There are three distinct timestamps at play:
The last time our servers successfully pulled data from the Fuel Finder feed. This just tells you how fresh our own database is — it runs every 15 minutes for prices regardless of whether any individual price actually changed.
The time the station itself reported that price to the Fuel Finder feed. This is set by the retailer's own till or pricing system, so it can be earlier than our import time — a price may have been live at the pump for a while before our next 15-minute pull picked it up.
Not every retailer includes a submission timestamp. When one is missing, the displayed time falls back to when we first recorded that price — so there's still a timestamp shown, but since we can't confirm how fresh the retailer's price actually is, the freshness dot shows as Unknown rather than guessing.
In short: the footer tells you how current our whole database is, while a price's own timestamp tells you how current that specific price is. A station that hasn't changed its price in weeks will still show an old timestamp even though we've imported dozens of times since — that's expected, not stale data.
Freshness badges
Search results, station pages and nearby-station listings all carry a small coloured dot next to each price, based on when the station submitted that price — not on our import time:
Opening hours & bank holidays
Opening hours, including each station's bank holiday hours, come from the Fuel Finder feed. To know whether today counts as a bank holiday, we separately check the UK government's bank holidays list, refreshed every 24 hours, and match it to the right nation (England & Wales, Scotland, or Northern Ireland) using the station's postcode. If gov.uk is unreachable when we try to refresh, we keep using the last calendar we successfully fetched rather than showing no bank holidays at all. That's what lets a station's live status badge switch to its bank holiday hours automatically.