UK heating oil price history

Twenty-seven annual averages from the DESNZ monthly kerosene table. The series is one of the longest continuous domestic fuel records in the UK and it makes one thing obvious: kerosene is a crude oil derivative wearing a domestic label, and it moves when crude moves.

Annual average, 2000 to 2026

The last seven winters

What the four shocks actually did

2008 took the annual mean from 35.03p to 51.05p, then handed most of it back the following year at 36.14p. That is the pattern to hold in mind: a spike in this series is usually not a new level.

2022 was the exception. The annual mean reached 80.50p and the unwind took three years, through 65.40p in 2023 and 58.25p in 2024 to 52.14p in 2025.

2026 is the sharpest single month move in the record. February printed 53.46p and March printed 104.05p, a rise of 50.59p or 94.6% in one observation. On a 1,200 litre order that month cost GBP 607.08 more than the month before it.

By July the price had come back to 69.98p, an unwind of 32.7% from the April peak. August then rebounded 20.03p to 90.01p. That is where the current reading sits, and it is why nobody should be describing this autumn as settled.

What counts as normal

Across the ten years to 2025, the mean of the monthly series sits in the high forties to low fifties. Anything under 45.00p is historically cheap for the modern era and anything over 70.00p has, so far, always come back down. That is a description of a record, not a forecast, and the record has been wrong about the future before.

This page shows nominal pence. Where a figure on this site is described as inflation adjusted it says so and names the deflator. None on this page are.