Prices checked at 4:18pm BST on 1 October 2026.
When diesel gets more expensive, the advice is usually to shop around. It is sensible advice. It is also much easier to follow in some places than others.
I built Fuel Finder to make local prices easier to compare. With diesel now reaching £2 a litre, I wanted to look beyond the national average and ask a practical question: if a forecourt is charging £2 or more, how far away is an option below it?
Across 7,338 qualifying diesel forecourts, the answer was encouraging for many locations. But 245 forecourts charging at least £2 had no qualifying sub-£2 alternative within five miles. At 95 of them, there was none within ten miles.
Those are straight-line distances. The journey by road can be longer, particularly where coastlines, islands or limited crossings separate two stations.
A cheaper option is nearby for most £2 forecourts
The RAC Foundation reported on 30 September that its average diesel price had passed £2. Fuel Finder's own analysis of the threshold showed why a national average does not describe every pump.
For this study, I excluded motorway locations and Costco, where membership affects access. Of the remaining qualifying forecourts, 2,439 were charging at least 200p per litre.
At 2,194 of those sites, or 90.0%, there was another qualifying forecourt reporting less than £2 within five miles. Comparing prices can therefore reveal a nearby option below the headline threshold in most of the locations examined.
The size of the difference is another matter.
| Option within five miles | Forecourts | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Another station below £2 | 2,194 | 90.0% |
| Another station at least 5p cheaper | 1,423 | 58.3% |
| Another station at least 10p cheaper | 406 | 16.6% |
| No qualifying station below £2 | 245 | 10.0% |
The first three rows overlap. They measure different things: whether a driver can get below £2, and whether the price difference is large enough to make a noticeable difference to a fill.
Getting below £2 can save very little
A price of 199.9p looks different from 200p on a forecourt board. On a 50-litre purchase, the difference is just 5p in total.
A station that is 5p per litre cheaper saves £2.50 on the same purchase. A 10p difference saves £5. Those are the amounts before paying for any extra driving.
For someone passing the cheaper station anyway, even a small difference can be worth taking. A separate trip needs a different calculation. The amount being bought, the vehicle's fuel consumption and the extra road miles all affect what is left of the saving.
That is why the 90% figure should not be read as 90% of these locations having a substantial saving nearby. The proportion with a difference of at least 5p was 58.3%.
Some places have several stations, all above £2
The most revealing result was among the 245 forecourts without a qualifying sub-£2 option within five miles.
150 had at least one other qualifying forecourt inside that radius, but every nearby option was also charging at least £2. The other 95 had no other qualifying diesel forecourt within five miles.
So the result is not explained entirely by isolated sites with no neighbours. Some locations have several places to buy diesel, yet none of the available reports offers a way below the threshold.
This does not mean those stations all charge the same price, or that there is no saving between them. A move from 209p to 202p still saves £3.50 on 50 litres. It means getting below £2 is not an option shown by the qualifying nearby data.
The local differences are substantial
In the IV postcode area, which includes Inverness and a wide surrounding area, 24 of 40 qualifying £2-plus forecourts had no sub-£2 alternative within five miles. In KW, covering Wick, Thurso and Orkney, the figure was 13 of 15.
In the BR postcode area around Bromley, all 20 qualifying £2-plus forecourts had a sub-£2 option within five miles.
These comparisons use the same question and radius. They show how different the available choices can be even when the starting pump price is at least £2 in both places. Postcode areas cover different amounts of land, and the figures describe forecourt locations rather than households or individual motorists.
Islands also need particular care. Two dots can look close on a map while a ferry or a much longer journey separates them. The straight-line calculation is useful for identifying nearby reported options; it does not establish that they are practical to reach.
What price information can and cannot do
The government introduced the Fuel Finder scheme to make it easier to compare nearby prices and find better deals. Having that information is useful, particularly when prices are changing quickly.
But an app cannot create a cheaper forecourt where the available reports show none. For someone with several lower-priced options on a normal journey, shopping around can help. For someone whose nearby stations are all expensive, the same advice may offer much less relief.
If you are comparing prices, look at the actual difference per litre and the amount you plan to buy. Check the reporting time, opening hours and pump price before filling. Consider the extra journey rather than choosing a station simply because its price starts with a 1.
You can compare nearby reported prices on Fuel Finder. The useful question is how much a particular stop would save you after the extra travelling, if any.
How I measured it
This is a fixed snapshot of prices available to Fuel Finder at 4:18pm BST on 1 October 2026. It uses 7,338 active, open forecourts with valid locations and a valid standard-diesel source price timestamp no more than 14 days old. Prices outside 50p to 300p per litre, test records, retired sites, motorway classifications and Costco are excluded. Standard diesel uses the latest accepted B7 or B10 report, with B7 preferred when their timestamps match.
For each forecourt charging at least 200p, I compared its price and location with every other qualifying forecourt. Distances are calculated along the Earth's surface and expressed in straight-line miles. The analysis does not estimate road routes, travel time, ferry access, whether a station is open at the time of a particular journey or the cost of a detour.
Older and missing prices can hide an option that exists in practice. As a check, I repeated the calculation allowing valid source price timestamps up to 30 days old. That left 234 £2-plus forecourts without a qualifying sub-£2 option within five miles, compared with 245 under the main 14-day rule. The broader sample contained 7,783 forecourts.
All counts refer to forecourts in the available data. They are not counts of affected drivers, purchases or litres sold. Nearby price differences do not establish retailer profits, price coordination or why any individual station charges what it does. A station excluded for an old report has not necessarily failed to report a price change; its price may simply have remained unchanged.
The current figures will move as new reports arrive. This study measures the choices visible at its stated timestamp, rather than promising that a particular price will still be available when someone reaches the pump.