What the CMA's 2025 Fuel Monitoring Report Actually Says | We Buy Cars Hexham
On 22 December 2025 the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) published its first full annual monitoring report on competition in the UK road fuel market. It is 35 pages of measured regulator language, but the headline findings matter to anyone who drives a car. This piece is a plain-English breakdown of what it actually says, with every number sourced by paragraph reference so you can check for yourself.
There is a companion piece to this one, a Tyne Valley view on fuel prices, which is lived experience from a Hexham buying yard with a side-note on a rural fuel duty policy cliff that might surprise you. This post is the data half: UK-wide, regulator-sourced, no local-observation stretch.
One-line summary: The CMA’s own conclusion is that competition in the UK road fuel market has not strengthened since their 2023 market study. Retail margins are still historically high. Supermarket operating profit margins on fuel have doubled since 2020.
The headline finding
In July 2023 the CMA finished a year-long market study into UK road fuel. It found that competition had weakened since 2019, that drivers were paying more for road fuel at any given wholesale price, and that the UK’s biggest supermarket fuel retailers had been taking a less aggressive approach to pricing. The regulator made two recommendations to government: a new statutory monitoring function so the CMA could keep watching the market, and an open-data Fuel Finder scheme that would force retailers to publish live prices so drivers could shop around properly.
Nearly two and a half years later, the December 2025 annual monitoring report is the first time we have seen the full picture of what has happened since. The CMA’s own words, from paragraph 15 of the report:
“This annual report finds that competition in the UK road fuel market has not strengthened since our market study.”
CMA Road Fuel Annual Monitoring Report, December 2025, paragraph 15
Retail spread vs the 2015-19 baseline
The most telling figure in the report is the retail spread, the slice of your pump price that is not crude oil, refining, fuel duty or VAT. It is the bit that reflects competition at forecourt level. When competition is tight, it compresses. When competition is slack, it widens. The CMA uses the 2015-19 period as its baseline because, in their words, “competition worked better” over those years and delivered better outcomes for consumers.
| Fuel | 2015-19 avg retail spread | Nov 2024 - Oct 2025 avg | Above baseline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Petrol | 6.5p per litre | 13.9p per litre | +7.4p (more than double) |
| Diesel | 8.6p per litre | 14.6p per litre | +6.0p (about 70% above) |
Source: CMA Road Fuel Annual Monitoring Report, December 2025, paragraphs 3.9 and 3.13. The CMA confirms these gaps remain significant even after adjusting for inflation.
The CMA is explicit that retailers argue the elevated spread is because of rising operating costs, labour, National Insurance, business rates, energy, forecourt crime, investment in EV charging. The CMA’s own analysis finds that cost increases do not fully explain the elevated margins. That is important: it is not saying costs explain nothing, but it is saying costs do not explain the whole gap.
Supermarket vs non-supermarket margins
The retail spread is the market-level picture. The CMA also collects fuel margin data directly from the twelve largest UK retailers and breaks them into two groups: supermarkets (Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons/MFG) and non-supermarket retailers (BP, Shell, Esso, Moto, Welcome Break, Rontec, EG On The Move and others). The trailing twelve-month averages to September 2025 look like this:
| Retailer group | 2022 peak | Oct 2024 - Sep 2025 avg | Direction of travel |
|---|---|---|---|
| Supermarket | 10.9p per litre | 9.7p per litre | Slightly downward |
| Non-supermarket | - | 11.1p per litre | Broadly upward |
Source: CMA Road Fuel Annual Monitoring Report, December 2025, paragraphs 3.23 and 3.40.
Two things are worth noticing. First, non-supermarket margins are now higher than supermarket margins, and they are trending in the wrong direction while supermarket margins are trending gently downwards. Second, both groups remain well above the 2017-21 financial-year averages that the CMA uses as a historic comparator.
Some of the 1.4p gap between supermarket and non-supermarket averages is genuine structural cost difference, non-supermarket forecourts are disproportionately rural, motorway and small-site operators with lower throughput and higher per-litre operating costs. But the CMA’s own analysis (paragraphs 3.35 and 3.50) finds that rising operating costs do not fully explain either group’s margin levels.
The other number that stands out in the summary is this: operating profit margins for supermarket fuel businesses have roughly doubled between 2020 and 2024. That is a profit margin figure, not a revenue figure, and it is after operating costs are accounted for. The CMA interprets this as evidence that competition at forecourt level is not putting meaningful downward pressure on margins, even as headline pump prices have come off their 2022 peak.
Rocket and feather, quantified
The trade press calls it “rocket and feather” pricing: retailers pass on wholesale rises quickly (rocket) but pass on wholesale falls slowly (feather). It is not a fringe theory, the CMA’s 2023 market study noted that retailers had been pricing “by reference to local competitors rather than responding promptly to cost movements” (market study, section 5).
The December 2025 annual report quantifies it. Between the end of the CMA’s market study period (May 2023) and October 2025, input costs on petrol moved as follows:
- Crude oil input cost: fell by around 8p per litre
- Exchange rate effect: fell by over 4p per litre
- Refining spread: fell by around 6p per litre (petrol) and 10p per litre (diesel)
- But the retail spread: fell by only about 1.9p per litre over the same period on petrol
The retail spread, the bit that competition is supposed to compress, is the most sticky piece of the pump price. Inputs fell much faster than retail spreads fell, and retail spreads remain more than double the 2015-19 average on petrol, even adjusted for inflation. That is rocket-and-feather pricing as a piece of quantitative evidence, not a trade-press hypothesis.
What this costs a UK household
The per-litre figures sound small. They are not, once you multiply them out by a tank and a year. Here is the maths, using the CMA’s own 7.4p petrol retail-spread excess above the 2015-19 baseline and a typical 50-litre family car tank:
- 7.4p/litre petrol retail-spread above the 2015-19 average
- × 50-litre family car tank = £3.70 extra per fill-up vs the competitive-era norm
- Weekly fill-up, 52 weeks: £192.40 per year
- Fortnightly fill-up, 26 weeks: £96.20 per year
Important caveat: the CMA’s position is that most of this gap is weakened competition and some of it is genuine operating cost inflation that retailers have had to absorb since 2019. So the £192.40 figure is what the average weekly filler is paying above the 2015-19 normal, not a claim that the full amount is retained as profit. The CMA’s interpretation, based on their profit margin analysis, is that the bulk of the gap is not explained by cost increases.
The CMA’s 2023 market study also estimated that a driver of a typical family car could save up to £4.50 a tank by shopping around within a five-minute drive. That saving is achievable in dense urban areas where there are multiple forecourts within five minutes. It is substantially less achievable in rural areas with one forecourt in the village and the nearest alternative 20 minutes away. The annual monitoring report does not quantify that rural-urban shopping-around gap, which is probably the biggest hole in the current public data.
Fuel Finder launched 2 February 2026
The CMA’s second July 2023 recommendation, a statutory open-data Fuel Finder scheme, went live on 2 February 2026. Under the Motor Fuel Price (Open Data) Regulations 2025, UK motor fuel traders are now required to report price changes to a central aggregator (VE3 Global Ltd) within 30 minutes of the change being made on their forecourt. The aggregated data is made available to third-party apps, satnavs and price comparison websites so drivers can see live station-by-station prices for every forecourt in the country.
The CMA’s view, stated in the annual report’s conclusion (paragraph 16), is that Fuel Finder is the lever that should finally force competition back into the retail market. In practice that will depend on whether drivers actually use the tools, whether the five-minute shopping-around model works in rural areas, and whether retailers feel enough price-comparison pressure to compress margins. The next twelve months of CMA monitoring data will be telling.
Why fuel pricing moves used car values
We buy used cars in Hexham and the Tyne Valley, so here is the honest link back to why any of this matters to a used-car buyer or seller. Running cost is one of the biggest inputs into what a used car is worth on any given day. When retail spreads are sticky and pump prices hold above their competitive baseline for years at a time, the effect shows up in used-car valuations:
- Thirsty cars, V6 and V8 petrols, non-economy diesels, older large SUVs, soften in the used market as buyers get cautious. Offers come down, time-to-sell stretches.
- Smaller, more efficient petrols and hybrids firm up at the same time. Demand shifts.
- Rural buyers, who cover more miles a year than the national average, feel all of this faster than metropolitan buyers.
If you are thinking of selling a car and weighing up whether now is the right moment, the CMA’s data on retail spread is one of the inputs worth knowing about. Get a free valuation and we will price against the Tyne Valley market, not a national average that does not know your postcode.
Sources
- CMA Road Fuel Annual Monitoring Report, December 2025, the source for all retail spread, margin, and operating profit figures in this piece. Paragraph references given inline.
- CMA Road Fuel Market Study, July 2023, the source for the £4.50-a-tank shopping-around figure and the original weakened-competition finding.
- DESNZ Weekly Road Fuel Prices, the official UK weekly series, updated every Tuesday.
- RAC Fuel Watch, daily UK averages with monthly commentary on retailer pass-through.
For the local-Hexham view on what all of this looks like from the Tyne Valley pump, including the strange case of the Kielder postcode that gets a 5p-per-litre fuel duty rebate while Hexham does not, see Fuel prices in the Tyne Valley: a view from Hexham.