Which governments actually force fuel stations to report their prices?
Most "live" fuel-price maps are built on resold, unofficial data with no real timestamp. We went looking for the opposite: countries where a law forces every station to report a price change, with a real deadline and a real penalty. Here's what we found, and how we use it.
How we grade every source
Every price on the map carries a grade, so you always know how much to trust it — not just that a number exists.
A
Official, statutory. A law requires stations to report price changes to the government, with a real deadline.
B
Official, periodic. A government feed exists, but it's daily, weekly, or a regulated ceiling price rather than real-time per-station reporting.
C
Third-party aggregator. Resold or scraped data with no reporting duty behind it and no price timestamp.
D
Community-reported. Crowd-sourced prices, typically where no official source exists at all.
L
Location only. We know the station exists; nobody publishes its price.
The gold tier: real statutory reporting, real deadlines
Only a handful of European countries combine a hard legal duty on every station with government-published open data. These are grade A almost everywhere:
🇫🇷 France — prices must be declared and displayed "immediately"; an open government feed refreshes roughly every 10 minutes, free to reuse commercially, no key required.
🇩🇪 Germany — the strictest deadline in Europe: every station must report a price change within 5 minutes to the Bundeskartellamt's Markttransparenzstelle. Over 14,000 stations, effectively a full census. Public access runs through a licensed reseller (Tankerkönig), free with a registered key.
🇬🇧 United Kingdom — statutory since February 2026: every station, 30-minute reporting window, with turnover-based fines and criminal penalties for non-compliance.
🇪🇸 Spain — stations must submit prices weekly and on every change, before the new price even takes effect. An open, unauthenticated API covers roughly 11,500 stations.
🇩🇰 Denmark — a new duty since January 2026: real-time publication for every sales location above a volume threshold.
🇬🇷 Greece — immediate declaration on any change, open data under a reusable licence.
🇮🇹 Italy — the duty is real-time, but the published dataset is a single daily snapshot each morning — strong law, weaker freshness in practice.
The silver tier: a duty exists, but the data doesn't reach the public cleanly
Austria has a 30-minute statutory duty, but the only public access point is a restricted comparison tool, not an open feed. Portugal's data licence forbids commercial reuse. Cyprus requires an access request. Several more countries have reporting duties whose data simply isn't published anywhere usable.
Where there's nothing to rely on from government
Including our own home market. Sweden and Norway don't just lack a reporting duty — their competition authorities have actively discouraged or restricted chains from publishing list prices at all, out of concern it enables price signalling between competitors. The practical result: no official feed exists for Swedish fuel prices, and none is coming. What we show for Sweden is entirely community-reported (grade D), which is exactly why the grade badge matters — a Swedish price and a German price on the same map carry very different guarantees, and we never pretend otherwise.
The same "nothing official" situation applies to Finland, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Ireland, Malta, and several others.
A third group: regulated ceilings, not station prices
Luxembourg, Slovenia, Croatia, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, and most of the Western Balkans work differently again: the government sets or calculates a maximum price, and stations simply may not exceed it. That's a useful sanity bound — "no station here can legally charge more than X" — but it isn't a station-level price, so we grade it accordingly.
Why this is the whole point
A fuel-price app lives or dies on whether its data is actually true. Most competitors blend every source into one undifferentiated price with no way to tell a 5-minute-old statutory figure from a six-month-old crowd report. We'd rather show you less, honestly labelled, than more, quietly guessed.