Is diesel cheaper in France? UK vs France fuel prices today

Every price on this page is a live pump price from our own feeds — the UK from the retailer files published under the Fuel Finder scheme, France from the official station data. Nothing here is an estimate.

Prices updated 18 Oct 2026, 14:08 UTC · UK data 18 Oct 2026, 12:53 UTC · France data 18 Oct 2026, 14:08 UTC

Today's pump prices, side by side

Median price per litre across every station that reported any fuel in the last 7 days: 4,823 in the UK and 7,987 in France. The cards below count only the stations that reported that fuel, so their numbers are smaller. We show both currencies because the pumps do not: British stations price in pence per litre, French ones in euros per litre.

Exchange rate: €1 = £0.8439 (European Central Bank reference rate). A litre is 0.22 imperial gallons, so a penny per litre is about 4.5p per gallon. UK figures cover 4,823 of our 8,154 British stations: the rest (41%) have not reported a price recently and are left out rather than shown as stale.

At the crossing: Kent against the Calais coast

The national medians above are the honest headline, but nobody drives the national average. What matters at 6am on the M20 is the price within reach of the port. These are the medians within 25 km of Dover and Folkestone on one side, and of Calais on the other.

Where to fill up after the ferry or the Eurotunnel

Three corridors, each with the live prices we hold right now. Every station links through to its own page, with the full fuel list and the map.

Driving on past Paris? French motorways charge tolls (péage): see tolls in France, motorway by motorway. Through Switzerland or Austria you also need a motorway vignette.

Filling up before you drive back

Today it is a wash: the two sides are within 0.2p a litre on diesel, which is less than the fuel you would burn on a detour to a cheaper pump.

Two things the headline number does not cover. A detour of ten miles to save two pence a litre does not pay on a 50-litre tank. And French motorway service areas are consistently dearer than the supermarket and town stations a few minutes off the exit — the corridor pages above rank by price, so the gap is visible rather than assumed.

For context beyond our own feeds: the European Commission's weekly bulletin put the French average at €2.328/L for diesel and €2.212/L for Euro-95 in the week of 12 Oct 2026. There is no UK line in that bulletin — it covers EU member states, and the United Kingdom left the EU.

Questions British drivers actually ask

Where these numbers come from

UK prices come from the retailer files published under the Fuel Finder scheme (Tesco, BP, Asda, Morrisons, Sainsbury's, Esso, Jet, MFG, Shell and others). We hold 8,154 British stations, of which 4,823 reported a price in the last 7 days; the remaining 41% are excluded from every figure on this page. French prices come from the official national station data, published under the Licence Ouverte 2.0: 7,987 of 10,230 stations are current. Medians, not averages, so a handful of motorway outliers cannot move the headline. Prices convert at the ECB reference rate and are indicative: the pump is the only price that counts.

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