What diesel costs,
week by week
Every slider on this site opens on a real diesel price, not on a number somebody typed once. This page shows that price for each country, what the site does to it before the sums start, and every week it has kept since it began.
1What a litre costs today
Three numbers per country, and they are not the same number. The first is the one on the sign at the filling station. A company gets the VAT back, which leaves the second. Some countries then pay professional hauliers part of the excise back as well, which leaves the third — and the third is the one the calculators run on.
With and without VAT, country by country → How much of that VAT a haulier actually deducts in each of the ten, why it is all of it for a truck but not for a car, and how to reclaim the VAT on a tank filled abroad.
| Country | At the pump | Without VAT | Refund | The sums use | Figure for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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2What a litre is made of
Belgium does not let a filling station charge what it likes: the government sets a maximum price, and that price is built in four blocks. Only the first of them moves with the oil price — the fuel tax and the cost of getting a litre to the pump are fixed amounts, the same on a cheap day and an expensive one, and the VAT is a percentage of all three.
3The weeks this site has kept
Every time the site fetches a new bulletin it writes that week away, so this archive grows by one row per country per week and nothing is ever overwritten. It starts on 23 September 2026, the day the site stopped using a typed-in price, so at first there is not much of a line to look at.
| Week of | At the pump | Without VAT | Refund | The sums use | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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4The money some countries give back
A professional refund is the part of the fuel excise a country pays back to hauliers after the fact. It is not a discount at the pump and it does not show up on the receipt, which is exactly why a fuel-price site will not tell you about it — and why it changes the answer so much. Belgium and France have one; nobody else on this list does.
| Country | Per litre | What it is | In force since |
|---|---|---|---|
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5How this stays current without anyone touching it
- The European Commission publishes the average price of a litre of diesel in every member state, every Thursday. It is called the Weekly Oil Bulletin and it is the official figure.
- This site keeps its own copy. Opening a page never waits for anything: you get the price as it stood on the last visit, straight away.
- Once your page is on the screen, and not before, the site quietly goes and fetches a fresher one — so the visit you are making now pays for the next one, not for itself. An hourly check does the same when nobody is visiting, so the first visitor of the day already has this week's figure.
- Whatever comes back is written into the archive above and used as the starting position of every diesel slider on the site.
- If the figure has moved while you were reading, the slider follows it — unless you have taken hold of it yourself. Your own scenario is never moved under your hand.
- If the source cannot be reached at all, nothing breaks and nothing is invented: the last price it did reach stays on screen, with its date next to it so you can see for yourself how old it is.
6Where every figure comes from
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