I'm a car expert: here's why petrol prices in Google Maps is a big deal

You can now see the cheapest petrol and diesel near you on Google Maps. So if you’re on a long journey, or simply want to see the state of play in your local area, it’s now trivially easy to find out where filling up will be cheapest. 

This has been made possible by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ, often pronounced ‘Deznez’) and the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) obliging petrol stations to provide live fuel information to the Fuel Finder tool. This creates a live data feed for anybody to use, and Google has decided to add it to its Maps service.

This transparency really matters. Since late February, the price of standard unleaded petrol has gone up 31% and diesel has risen by 41%. This means the average petrol car now costs £22 more to fill, while the average diesel car costs £30 more.

Diesel prices are particularly volatile right now and currently sitting at their highest since 2022, with many forecourts having to replace the ‘1’ at the start of their prices with a ‘2’ – a symbolic change that has shocked many a motorist.

Finding cheap fuel

Fuel Finder's integration into Google Maps is actually pretty good.

Run a search for ‘petrol pumps’ in Google Maps and all the corresponding map pins will show the lowest fuel price at each petrol station. Even in areas with a huge number of forecourts, such as where I live in North London, it’s easy to see what the cheapest place to go is.

Tap on a specific location and you’ll see the prices for all the fuels the forecourt has reported on. 

The government has always said that buyers who compare petrol prices could save up to £40 a year on fuel, which is probably about right for average-mileage drivers.

Having prices on Google Maps also highlights where you can make big savings. For example, you can now easily the price difference between service stations and local petrol stations.

In the example pictured, you can see the difference between two petrol stations near the A14 on the outskirts of Cambridge, the Shell is a dedicated service station, while the Tesco is, as you’d expect, a supermarket. However, both are very close to A14 exits and therefore easy to get to.

Filling up a 50-litre tank with petrol would cost £7.50 less at the Tesco versus the Shell. Locals probably know this, but this data gives you local knowledge at the tap of a button, no matter where you are in the UK.

Make a few good decisions like that over the course of a year and you’ll save much more than £40. 

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Data quality

Fuel Finder legislation states that petrol stations have to update their fuel prices within half an hour of a change.

However, with small independent operations, this might mean an already over-busy petrol station employee has to update Fuel Finder manually within the half-hour window. As such, the data may not always be accurate or up to date for reasons that are quite reasonable.

There has never been a motivation for petrol retailers to publicise their prices beyond lit-up totems, so none of the major petrol retailers list fuel prices on their websites. It took the huge fuel price increases of 2022 to create the legislation that forced their hands, which means we consumers are working with an undeniably useful, but not completely infallible system.

Take the cheapest petrol station in all of North and Northeast London. I visited on Wednesday night with the latest data telling me that standard unleaded was 163p and that diesel was 186p, making it the 65th cheapest petrol station in the whole country. When I arrived, unleaded was 167p and diesel was 192p, up 4p and 6p respectively. The reason? That big-brand petrol station hasn’t updated its prices on the Fuel Finder platform since 17 September 2026.

For me, the most puzzling thing is that even with accurate Fuel Finder prices, this petrol station would still be notably cheaper than any other petrol station for miles around. In other words, they have nothing to hide but seem to have neglected to keep on top of this task or are having an unresolved technical issue.

The fuel prices in the real world (above) versus the 'latest' Fuel Finder data in Google Maps

The good news is that, seemingly, this is the exception to the rule.

I’ve analysed the latest raw Fuel Finder data (which is what forms the basis of the Google Maps tool), and of the 8,133 fuel stations with Fuel Finder data, 4,964 (61%) have updated their fuel prices since the start of October.

A further 1,596 updated in the last few days of September, and another 1,101 did so between 21-27 September, 2026. In total, 459 fuel stations haven’t updated their prices since before September 20th, which is about the time diesel was in the middle of its latest big price bump. In some cases this is due to a petrol station being temporarily or permanently closed, and in those cases Google Maps doesn’t display data anyway. 

Currently, Google Maps doesn’t display how up to date the fuel prices are, although based on my research it does appear to remove pricing information that is clearly out of date or falls outside of an expected price range.

Enforcing the rules

The CMA has the ability to fine retailers who don’t keep their fuel prices up to date on Fuel Finder and, as of August, it says it’s written 1,166 letters to retailers to get them properly registered, and issued 53 compliance notices to retailers.

Thus far, no retailers have been referred by the data company VE3 (which is employed to manage the data for Fuel Finder) for suspected non-compliance. Financial penalties for non-compliance can be up to 5% of worldwide daily turnover for a company for ongoing breaches, or 1% of global turnover for other breaches. 

In practice, it’s hard to imagine it being possible to accurately verify the accuracy of all petrol stations all the time, which is why today’s Google Maps news is so welcome.

Millions of eyeballs on petrol prices will cause the market to self correct: reviewers on Google can be brutally honest and if a petrol station is consistently reporting incorrect fuel prices that appear on Google Maps, negative reviews will follow. This will help motorists decide whether to trust the price they see. 

All this brings petrol and diesel into line with EV charging, which already has excellent and pretty accurate public data on various apps including Google Maps, Zapmap and Octopus Electroverse. It puts more decision-making power into our hands, and that’s always a good thing.

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