CMA June 2026 Report on Why UK Petrol Prices Stay High

If filling up your car has felt especially painful this spring, the Competition and Markets Authority says there is a big reason: the price retailers pay for fuel rose sharply after conflict in the Middle East pushed wholesale costs higher. In its June 2026 road fuel monitoring update, the watchdog says that explains most of the rise drivers saw in March and into April. That is the first point to hold on to. The CMA is not saying forecourts simply invented higher prices. But it is also not giving the market a clean bill of health. Even while wholesale costs explain the main jump, the regulator says weak competition is still leaving many drivers paying more than they should.

To make sense of this, it helps to separate two prices. The wholesale price is what petrol stations pay to buy fuel. The pump price is what you pay. The gap between the two is called the retail margin, and that margin helps cover costs and profit. The CMA says it found no evidence that retailers changed their pricing strategies in order to take advantage of the crisis. That matters, because it answers the most obvious public suspicion. Even so, the watchdog found that a small number of retailers did increase margins, so it looked more closely at what was happening across the market.

Its answer is more complicated than a simple blame story. The report says some retailers were reacting to fast-moving conditions: wholesale prices were volatile, supplies were tighter, demand had increased, and firms were trying to manage stock bought at different costs. In some cases, retailers also followed price rises made by nearby competitors. **What this means:** a forecourt can raise prices without there being a deliberate attempt to exploit a crisis. But if lots of businesses mostly watch each other instead of trying to undercut each other, drivers still lose out. You do not need a formal agreement for competition to feel weak in practice.

That is why the CMA remains uneasy. It says average fuel margins at supermarkets and at other retailers stayed historically high through this period. In April, average margins edged up to 11.3 pence per litre, even though stock levels and wholesale costs had started to settle to some extent. For us as readers, this is the key distinction. A crisis can push prices up quickly, but once supply conditions improve, you would expect some of that pressure to ease. If pump prices stay stubbornly high after the worst disruption has calmed, the question shifts from events overseas to whether competition at home is doing enough to bring prices down.

The CMA thinks part of the answer may be the same problem it flagged in its 2023 market study: too much passive pricing. That phrase sounds technical, but the idea is simple. Instead of cutting prices to win your custom, many retailers appear to look sideways at local rivals and move roughly in step with them. When that happens, competition is weaker than it should be. Sarah Cardell, the CMA's chief executive, says the watchdog knows pump prices are putting real pressure on drivers' budgets and expects any falls in wholesale costs to be passed on quickly and fully. In other words, retailers are being told that stabilising supply should eventually mean cheaper prices for motorists too.

There is one part of the report aimed directly at you. The CMA says drivers may be able to save up to £9 per tank by shopping around, and it wants more people to use Fuel Finder-backed comparison tools and navigation apps. The more motorists use those services, the regulator argues, the better they work because price differences become easier to spot. The report also repeats something many drivers will recognise from experience. Supermarkets were, on average, still the cheapest places to buy fuel, while motorway service stations were the most expensive and charged a sizeable premium. So the message is practical as well as regulatory: where you fill up can make a real difference.

The story, then, is not that retailers exploited a crisis, and it is not that everything is fine. It sits in the uncomfortable middle. The June 2026 report says wholesale prices did most of the work in pushing bills up, yet weak competition still appears to be keeping margins unusually high. The CMA says it will publish another update in August, covering market developments up to the end of June, and it will also speak directly with retailers as part of a deeper review of pricing strategies across the market. Three years after its original market study, the regulator is signalling that its concerns have not gone away. Results from that wider assessment are expected in the autumn, when there should be a clearer picture of whether better supply conditions and the Fuel Finder scheme are actually leading to lower prices. If you are teaching or learning from this story, there is a useful lesson here. Big international events can raise costs very quickly, but what happens next depends on how competitive the market really is. That is why regulators matter, and why the apparently dry question of who sets prices and how is really a question about everyday fairness.