Resolvo Fuel Price Methodology

A transparent guide to how we track, process, and publish live petrol and diesel prices for thousands of UK forecourts.

Our Primary Data Source

The foundation of our fuel pricing engine is the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) Open Data Scheme. Following government intervention to increase transparency in the road fuel market, major UK fuel retailers are now required to share their daily pump prices.

We process this data feed directly. It includes live price reports from major supermarkets (Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury's, Morrisons) and leading independent groups (Applegreen, Motor Fuel Group, Ascona, Rontec, and more).

How Often Are Prices Updated?

Under the CMA scheme, participating retailers must update their pricing data daily. However, Resolvo's systems ingest and process these feeds continuously throughout the day.

  • When a retailer updates their open data feed, our database syncs the changes.
  • Our UK Fuel Price Index calculates national and regional averages based on the absolute latest available data at the time of your visit.
  • We display the "last updated" timestamp on individual station pages so you know exactly how fresh the data is.

Data Processing and Quality Control

Before a price reaches our live map or local city pages, it goes through our processing pipeline:

  1. Ingestion: We pull XML and JSON endpoints from all registered CMA scheme participants.
  2. Normalization: Prices are standardized into pence-per-litre (p/litre) and matched to our unified fuel categories (E10 Petrol, E5 Super Unleaded, B7 Diesel, Super Diesel).
  3. Geocoding: Retailer locations are matched to precise coordinates so they appear accurately on our map boundaries and radius searches.
  4. Anomaly Detection: We filter out obvious data-entry errors (e.g., a station reporting 14p instead of 140p) to prevent skewing local and national averages.

What the Data Doesn't Cover

While the CMA scheme covers the vast majority of UK supermarkets and large motorway service operators, not every single independent station is currently mandated to report. If your local independent garage is missing from the map, it is likely because they are not yet participating in the open data initiative.

Additionally, the prices shown are the standard pump prices. They do not account for:

  • Temporary loyalty card discounts (e.g., Nectar, Clubcard, or Morrisons More)
  • In-store voucher promotions (e.g., "Save 5p a litre when you spend £40 in store")
  • Fleet or fuel card pricing

Press and Citations

Journalists, researchers, and media outlets are welcome to use our localized fuel data, historical trends, and national averages. We only ask that you provide a standard web citation to Resolvo.uk or link back to the specific city page or Price Index you are referencing.