When a website shows you a fuel price, that number came from somewhere. It might be a legally mandated report filed by the station five minutes ago, a weekly national average compiled by the European Commission, or a driver who typed in what they paid. Those three things are not remotely equivalent, and almost nobody tells you which one you are looking at. This is a reference to who actually knows the price of fuel, country by country, and what to do where nobody does.
Three kinds of price, and why the difference matters
Every fuel price you will ever see on a map or in an app comes from one of three places, and they fail in completely different ways.
A state-mandated feed. A handful of countries legally require filling stations to report their prices to a government body, which then publishes the data. This is the gold standard: it is close to real time, it covers essentially every station, and the station has a legal obligation to be accurate. Germany is the strictest example in the world.
A national statistical average. Governments and the European Commission publish average prices per country, usually weekly. These are excellent for understanding trends and taxation, and useless for deciding which station to drive to: an average tells you nothing about the forecourt two streets away.
A driver report. Somebody filled up, looked at the pump, and wrote the number down. This is the only source that exists in most of the world. It is real, it is specific to that station, and it is exactly as fresh as the moment it was posted, which is why the timestamp matters more than the number.
A map that mixes these three without labelling them is not being helpful. A price that is thirty seconds old and a price that is a weekly national average should never look the same on screen.
Germany: the strictest fuel price law in the world
Germany operates the Markttransparenzstelle für Kraftstoffe (MTS-K), or Market Transparency Unit for Fuels. It is not a private service or a voluntary scheme: it is an organisational unit of the Bundeskartellamt, the Federal Cartel Office, and it exists to force price transparency onto the retail fuel market.
The mechanics are unusually aggressive. A station operator must transmit every change of their fuel prices in real time, and the practical rule is a five-minute window to report a price change electronically. Change the number on the pole, and the state expects to know within five minutes.
The system began a pilot phase on 12 September 2013 and moved to regular operation on 1 December 2013. By the start of that pilot, more than 13,000 of Germany's roughly 14,500 filling stations were already connected.
Two limits are worth knowing. First, the obligation covers petrol (E5 and E10) and diesel only. LPG, CNG and electricity are not part of the reporting requirement, so a German app showing you an autogas price is not getting it from MTS-K. Second, MTS-K does not run a consumer app itself. Since 2014 the data has been published as open data under Creative Commons licensing, which is why so many German price apps, ADAC, and satellite navigation manufacturers all show the same numbers: they are all drinking from the same state-run tap.
What this means in practice: in Germany, a petrol or diesel price older than a few minutes has no excuse. If a service shows you a stale German price, that is a defect in the service, not a limitation of the available data.
France: open data, six fuel types, one ministry
France publishes fuel prices through prix-carburants.gouv.fr, operated by the Ministère de l'Économie, des Finances et de la Souveraineté industrielle. Unlike Germany's cartel-office model, this sits with the economics ministry.
The French system is notable for the breadth of what it lists. Six fuel types are searchable, using the European fuel labelling standard that appears on pump nozzles and inside fuel flaps:
- Gazole (B7): standard diesel with up to 7% biodiesel
- SP95 (E5) and SP98 (E5): 95 and 98 octane petrol with up to 5% ethanol
- SP95-E10 (E10): 95 octane with up to 10% ethanol
- GPLc: liquefied petroleum gas for vehicles
- E85: superethanol
The data is published as open public data under the Etalab 2.0 licence, France's standard open government licence. That combination (a ministry-run dataset, LPG and E85 included, and an open licence) makes France one of the better-covered countries in Europe for anything other than plain petrol and diesel.
The same feed carries an availability flag beside each price, which is the part most price comparisons drop. Refuelia reads it every thirty minutes across all six fuels and keeps the count of how many forecourts are selling each one and how many report it temporarily out; the current figures, with the timestamp of the snapshot they came from, are on the fuel availability page.
The EU-wide layer: the Weekly Oil Bulletin
Above the national systems sits a pan-European dataset that is frequently misunderstood. The Weekly Oil Bulletin is published by the European Commission's Directorate-General for Energy, explicitly "to improve the transparency of oil prices and to strengthen the internal market."
Its rhythm is fixed and worth remembering: national data is submitted to the Commission on Wednesdays, and the bulletin goes out to subscribers every Thursday. It covers petroleum product prices across all EU member states, and (this is the genuinely useful part) it publishes prices both with and without taxes, alongside VAT and excise duty information per country. Price development series run from 2005 onwards.
What it is brilliant for: understanding why fuel costs more in one country than another. Strip the tax out and the underlying product prices across the EU are far closer together than pump prices suggest. Most cross-border price differences are fiscal, not commercial.
What it is useless for: choosing a station. It is a weekly national figure. By the time you read Thursday's bulletin, the number describes last week's average across an entire country. Any service quoting the Weekly Oil Bulletin as a live station price is misrepresenting it.
Where there is no official feed at all, which is most of the world
Here is the part that price comparison sites tend to skip. Mandatory real-time price reporting is rare. Germany's five-minute rule is exceptional, not typical. Several European countries publish open datasets of varying freshness; many publish nothing station-level at all; and outside Europe and North America, official station-level price data is largely absent.
This creates a hard boundary that no amount of engineering removes. In a country with no official feed, there are exactly two ways a service can show you a station price:
- A driver reported it. Real, specific, and only as current as the report.
- Somebody estimated it. A regional average, an extrapolation from last month, a guess dressed up as data.
The second option is where trust dies. An estimated price looks exactly like a real one on screen, right up until you arrive and it is wrong. Refuelia does not do this: where nobody has reported a price, we show no price. An empty field is honest. An invented number is not.
How to read any fuel price critically
Whatever service you use, four questions separate a price you can act on from a number on a screen.
How old is it? This is the single most important question and the one most often hidden. A price with no timestamp is not a price, it is a rumour. In a state-feed country, anything over an hour old is suspect. In a driver-reported country, a day-old price is still useful context and a week-old one probably is not.
Where did it come from? Official feed, operator, or driver? Each is legitimate; each carries different confidence. A service that will not tell you is hiding something.
Which fuel exactly? "Petrol" is not a grade. E5 and E10 are different fuels at different prices, and not every car tolerates E10. In France you will see SP95, SP95-E10 and SP98 side by side with meaningfully different numbers. Comparing the wrong pair produces a nonsense saving.
In what currency and unit? Litres in most of Europe, gallons in the US and parts of the UK's older habits, and 60-plus currencies across the countries drivers actually cross. A price without a currency is a decoration.
Why Refuelia works the way it does
Everything above explains a design decision that surprises some visitors: Refuelia often shows a station with no price at all.
Station locations, opening hours and attributes come from OpenStreetMap, the open map database. Live conditions (is there fuel, is there a queue, did the charger actually work, what did you pay) come from drivers, each report carrying the minute it was made. Where an official government feed exists and is open, it is a labelled layer, clearly marked as official rather than blended invisibly into driver data.
There is no fourth source. There is no database anyone can buy that says which stations have fuel right now. That is why the map is sometimes empty in a new area, and why a single ten-second report from one driver genuinely changes what every driver behind them sees.
The alternative (filling the gaps with plausible-looking estimates) would make the map look complete and make it worthless. We would rather tell you we do not know.
Related reference: The label on the nozzle: how to read European fuel markings
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