65% of Shell-branded forecourts charge £2 for diesel. Almost no supermarket forecourt does

By brand: 65% of Shell-branded forecourts at £2, 3 of 1,208 supermarket forecourts

Every UK forecourt must report its prices to Fuel Finder, the statutory scheme run by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. We read the feed daily. On 20 October, UK average diesel was 198.8p a litre across 5,264 forecourts reporting a diesel price, where it has sat since 17 October. On this measure it has been below 200p since 8 October, down from a peak of 200.3p on 3 to 5 October.

The average hides a split by brand. Forecourts carrying the Shell brand are the clearest case: 449 of the 689 reporting a diesel price, 65%, charged 200p or more on 20 October. Take the motorway sites out and it is 436 of 676, 64.5%, at an average of 201.7p a litre. Off the motorway, with a price confirmed in the last 14 days, BP-branded forecourts averaged 200.0p, with 255 of 661 at £2 or more (38.6%). Esso-branded forecourts averaged 199.8p, with 247 of 882 at £2 or more (28.0%). Gulf (23.7% at £2 or more) and Valero (21.6%) sit close behind; Texaco (7.2%), Jet (3.0%) and Murco (10.4%) are mostly below.

The supermarket brands sit together at the bottom. Tesco-branded forecourts averaged 195.8p (259 forecourts), Asda 196.3p (322), Sainsbury's 196.4p (313) and Morrisons 196.7p (314). Of those 1,208 forecourts, 3 charged £2 or more for diesel, all of them Asda Express sites. All other brands together averaged 196.4p, with 16% at £2 or more.

Add the motorway back in and the oil-company figures rise a little: Shell 201.9p across 689 forecourts (65.2% at £2 or more) and BP 201.6p across 729 (43.9%). BP's brand is on 68 motorway forecourts and Shell's on 13, which accounts for that difference.

Four in five of the £2 forecourts carry one of three brands

On 20 October, 1,271 forecourts, 24.1% of those reporting, charged 200p or more for diesel. In our station cache, 449 of them are Shell-branded, 320 BP and 252 Esso. That is 1,021, or four in five of every forecourt still at £2, from three brands that between them account for 44% of the forecourts reporting a diesel price. Motorway services account for 111 of the £2 forecourts, so this is not a motorway story. It is an ordinary-roads story about which signs the £2 price tends to sit under.

A week ago more of each brand's forecourts were at £2. From the 12 October station cache, on the same brand rule, 72.7% of Shell-branded forecourts were at £2 or more, 54.0% of BP and 51.9% of Esso. The older cache carried one timestamp per forecourt rather than one per grade, so treat the comparison as approximate. The direction is clear: Esso's share at £2 nearly halved in eight days, BP's fell from 54% to 39% and Shell's from 73% to 64%. The supermarket brands came down by about 1p a litre each from a lower start. Nationally, the share of forecourts at £2 or more fell from 33.6% to 24.1%.

The sign is not the whole story

A brand on the canopy is not always the company setting the price. Many Shell-, BP- and Esso-branded forecourts are owned and priced by independent dealers; the supermarkets own and price their own. Fuel Finder records what each forecourt charges, not who decided it or why, and so do we. These are the prices at forecourts carrying each brand, nothing more.

The spread within a brand is also wider than the gap between brands. Off the motorway, Shell-branded forecourts ranged from 189.9p to 216.9p on 20 October, a 27p spread worth £14.85 on a 55-litre tank. Tesco and Sainsbury's forecourts ranged from 185.9p to 199.9p. The brand average is not the price at any one forecourt, which is why the postcode lookup on our live fuel tracker is worth a minute before you drive anywhere.

Brand averages include sites in towns and on A-roads; supermarket forecourts are mostly on retail parks. We do not adjust for location. We report the prices as they are.

Where the £2 forecourts are

By nation, using the feed's own split across every forecourt in the count, Northern Ireland has the cheapest diesel at 190.8p (453 forecourts), then Wales at 198.3p (357), England at 199.5p (4,774) and Scotland at 199.8p (575). Maxol, which trades only in Northern Ireland, averaged 190.6p across 92 forecourts.

By postcode area, off the motorway and counting only areas with 25 or more forecourts reporting, the dearest averages on 20 October were Paisley (PA) and Inverness (IV) at 202.3p, Bromley (BR) 201.9p, Kingston upon Thames (KT) 201.7p, Cambridge (CB) 201.4p, and Slough (SL) and Bournemouth (BH) 201.1p. The areas where at least half of forecourts charge £2 or more: Kingston 78%, Inverness 66%, Cambridge 65%, Bromley 60%, south-west London (SW) 56%, Southall and Uxbridge (UB) 52%, Medway (ME) 51% and Bournemouth 51%.

The cheapest areas: Northern Ireland's BT postcodes at 190.8p across 418 forecourts, with one at £2 or more, then Liverpool (L) 196.2p, Bolton (BL) 196.4p, Edinburgh (EH) 196.7p, Oldham (OL) 196.8p, and Ipswich (IP), Gloucester (GL) and Kilmarnock (KA) at 196.9p.

What it costs a tank

On a 55-litre tank, the gap between the Shell-branded average and the Tesco-branded average off the motorway, 5.9p a litre, is £3.25. The gap between supermarket and non-supermarket forecourts on the feed's own flags, 3.8p a litre, is £2.09. The motorway premium, 18.0p a litre on 20 October and the widest in our series, is £9.90; we covered that gap on 16 October, when the 15 October reading was 17.4p, in our motorway diesel story.

Premium diesel is a different market: 217.9p a litre on average across 1,687 forecourts, with 94.4% at 200p or more. If you buy premium, you are almost certainly paying £2.

RAC Fuel Watch, which uses its own method, put diesel at 199.15p and unleaded at 174.18p on 19 October, close to our figures. Its forecast for both fuels is "Should fall". That is RAC's forecast; we do not make our own. For the background on why diesel has been this high, see our guide to diesel prices.

What to do

Check the forecourts near you with the postcode lookup on our live fuel tracker rather than choosing by the sign; the spread within a brand is bigger than the gap between brands. Home Alerts members see Fuel Finder prices within 10 miles of home.

Supermarket forecourts are about 4p a litre cheaper for diesel on average, about £2 a tank. Do not drive miles out of your way for it; a detour can cost more than it saves.

Wednesday's 24-hour strike by more than 160 Apache offshore workers starts at 06:00 on 21 October. The pipeline it concerns carries crude oil, not road fuel, and there is no reason to fill up early; our strike story has what each side says and what our forecourt data shows.

How we measure this

Fuel Finder is the statutory UK fuel price scheme run by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. Forecourts must report their prices to it. We read the feed daily and average the standard grade across every forecourt with a price confirmed in the last 14 days; on 20 October, 6,160 forecourts of the 8,134 in the feed were in that count, 5,264 of them with a diesel price. The figures in this story are as of 20 October at 06:41 UTC.

The brand is the brand each forecourt reports to Fuel Finder, or its trading name where it reports no brand. Asda's supermarket forecourts and 50 Asda Express forecourts report as Asda; a further 92 Asda Express forecourts carry the Esso, Texaco, BP or Shell brand and are counted under those. We show brands with at least 20 forecourts reporting a diesel price, and we leave motorway forecourts out of the brand table unless we say otherwise, because a brand with many motorway sites would otherwise look dearer for reasons that have nothing to do with its ordinary forecourts. Postcode-area averages use areas with 25 or more forecourts. Week-ago brand figures come from our 12 October station cache, which carried one timestamp per forecourt rather than one per grade, so they are approximate.

We publish aggregates only, under the scheme's terms, and never a single forecourt's price: the lowest and highest prices within a brand are statistics, not locations. Our series began on 24 September 2026, so "the widest in our series" means since then. RAC Fuel Watch is our cross-check; its averages differ slightly from ours because the methods differ.