# When do fuel stations change their prices in Romania?

Window: Jul 14, 2026 – Oct 11, 2026 · 90 days · rebuilt every night

- A station in Romania changes its standard petrol price 1.68 times a week on average, and a price that has just changed then holds for 2 days before the next one.
- On an ordinary day 1.1% of the stations in Romania change their price; on the busiest day of the window, 99.2%.
- The busiest weekday is Wednesday, with 21.4% of all changes; the quietest is Monday, with 3.9%.
- An increase moves the price by 0.084 RON/L on average, a cut by 0.106 RON/L. Over the window there were 22 649 changes upward and 2 054 downward.
- Half of all the price changes of the last 90 days happened on just 12 of them.
- When PETROM moves, 100% of its own stations move on the same day — the price of a station in this network is not set at the station.
- PETROM reaches the centre of a market-wide move first in 9 of the 11 waves we measured; the rest follow at a median of 0.0 days.
- Across the window the market median went from 8.630 RON/L to 10.140 RON/L.
- Where the source carries a clock of its own, most changes land between 00:00 and 01:00 — 29% of 27 220 changes carrying a timestamp in the sample.

## standard petrol

- Changes per station: 1.68 / week
- A price holds for: 2 days
- Stations: 1 141 · 24 703 price changes

| Which weekday | increase | cut |
|---|---:|---:|
| Monday | 786 | 168 |
| Tuesday | 4 361 | 133 |
| Wednesday | 4 874 | 407 |
| Thursday | 3 367 | 28 |
| Friday | 3 494 | 1 303 |
| Saturday | 3 853 | 15 |
| Sunday | 1 914 | 0 |

- increase: 0.084 RON/L (n=22 649)
- cut: 0.106 RON/L (n=2 054)

| Network | Stations | Changes / station / week | Together | Behind the first mover |
|---|---:|---:|---:|---:|
| PETROM | 317 | 1.56 | 100% | first |
| MOL | 190 | 2.02 | 99% | first |
| OMV | 142 | 1.56 | 100% | first |
| SOCAR | 64 | 1.41 | 95% | 0.03 d |
| ROMPETROL | 155 | 1.97 | 97% | 0.50 d |
| LUKOIL | 252 | 1.63 | 100% | 0.50 d |

## standard diesel

- Changes per station: 2.27 / week
- A price holds for: 2 days
- Stations: 1 142 · 33 312 price changes

| Which weekday | increase | cut |
|---|---:|---:|
| Monday | 2 354 | 27 |
| Tuesday | 4 848 | 1 370 |
| Wednesday | 5 488 | 681 |
| Thursday | 3 186 | 475 |
| Friday | 4 505 | 1 279 |
| Saturday | 4 390 | 876 |
| Sunday | 2 716 | 1 117 |

- increase: 0.110 RON/L (n=27 487)
- cut: 0.232 RON/L (n=5 825)

| Network | Stations | Changes / station / week | Together | Behind the first mover |
|---|---:|---:|---:|---:|
| LUKOIL | 252 | 2.33 | 100% | 0.25 d |
| SOCAR | 64 | 2.26 | 95% | 0.35 d |
| ROMPETROL | 155 | 2.46 | 99% | 0.50 d |
| PETROM | 318 | 2.10 | 100% | 0.50 d |
| OMV | 142 | 2.10 | 100% | 0.50 d |
| MOL | 190 | 2.58 | 99% | 0.61 d |

## How this was measured

One price per station per day. We read the Romanian register every two hours, so a day has up to twelve readings; the daily series takes the last reading of each day. Mixing the two Romanian streams would produce a zig-zag, so only one of them is used.
A change is two consecutive days in a station’s series with different prices; it is counted on the second of the two. If more than 3 days separate the two readings, the pair is dropped — there is no way to say which day the price moved.
A market-wide move — a “wave” — is a run of days on which at least 50% of the stations with a price changed it; the threshold is not a fixed number but the market’s own median plus half the way to its 95th percentile. Within a wave each network gets the centre of gravity of its own changes; the network whose centre falls earliest moved first. Waves found in this window: 11.
The figures are rebuilt once a night from the full history, not on every visit.

## What this cannot tell you

At most one change per station per day is visible. Where we read more often we can measure what that costs: in Romania, 9.6% of the station-days that had a change had more than one, so a once-a-day measurement undercounts by roughly that much.

Source of the prices: Monitorul Prețurilor Carburanților (Consiliul Concurenței). Analysis: fuel-prices.eu.

Live fuel prices in %s: https://www.fuel-prices.eu/live/romania/

HTML: https://www.fuel-prices.eu/live/romania/price-changes/
JSON: https://www.fuel-prices.eu/live/romania/price-changes/data.json