Northern Ireland is the most oil-dependent part of the United Kingdom and the only part with a genuine weekly regional price survey. The Consumer Council publishes prices for 300, 500 and 900 litre baskets every week, which is more transparency than the whole of Great Britain gets.
DESNZ Quarterly Energy Prices / QEP 4.1.1 standard grade burning oil / published 27 August 2026 / checked 23 September 2026 / lag 27 daysone to four weeks oldtier A
Typical price for a delivery of up to 1,000 litres, VAT at 5% included. Observed on the Monday nearest the 15th. This is the UK-wide official figure. Northern Ireland has its own weekly survey, linked below, and we do not restate figures from it.
Why Northern Ireland has no separate published price
Northern Ireland is the exception. The Consumer Council for Northern Ireland runs a weekly survey of home heating oil prices across three basket sizes, 300, 500 and 900 litres. It is the best consumer fuel price instrument anywhere in the UK and there is nothing equivalent in Great Britain.
We link to it and we do not copy figures out of it. On 23 September 2026 the price checker returned an HTTP 403 to our automated check, so we did not read it, and restating a number we did not retrieve would break the rule this site runs on. That withdrawal is recorded in the revision log.
Follow the Consumer Council link below for the current week's baskets. It is updated weekly and it is free.
The local geography, and what it does to a delivery
A small, dense market with a large number of independent distributors and no mains gas across most of the country. Competition density is high and order sizes are small.
Delivery
The 500 litre order is the norm here rather than the exception, because household tanks are smaller and buying patterns are tighter. That makes the small-order premium a bigger part of a Northern Ireland household bill than a Suffolk one.
Ordering here
Use the Consumer Council checker before you ring anyone. It is a public weekly survey of actual quoted prices, it is free, and it exists precisely so that a household can tell whether a quote is normal.
What an order costs at the current reading
500 litres
GBP 450.05
1,000 litres
GBP 900.10
1,200 litres
GBP 1,080.12
2,375 litres
GBP 2,137.74
The last five years
| Year | UK average | 1,200 litres at that average | Coverage |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 42.77p | GBP 513.24 | full year |
| 2022 | 80.50p | GBP 966.00 | full year |
| 2023 | 65.40p | GBP 784.80 | full year |
| 2024 | 58.25p | GBP 699.00 | full year |
| 2025 | 52.14p | GBP 625.68 | full year |
| 2026 | 79.95p | GBP 959.40 | 8 months |
The last sixty months
Sep 2021 to Aug 2026 / 60 readings
low 41.48p / high 104.05p
Kerosene scale / 60 month window / colour is price level, never anything else
Bands are quintiles of the 60 month window in pence per litre. There is no red and green pair anywhere on this site. Direction is carried by the delta glyph in the text, not by colour.
Primary sources for this page
- Consumer Council for Northern Ireland home heating oil price checkerA genuine weekly regional survey, the only one of its kind in the UK. The page returned HTTP 403 to our checker on 10 September 2026, so no basket figure from it is restated on this site. Follow the link for the current week.
- DESNZ Quarterly Energy Prices, table 4.1.1Monthly typical retail price of standard grade burning oil, the fuel sold to UK households as kerosene. Priced on the Monday nearest the 15th of the month, for deliveries of up to 1,000 litres, VAT at 5% included. This is the only official UK-wide domestic heating oil price series.
- VAT rates on domestic fuel and powerDomestic heating oil is charged at the reduced rate of 5% on qualifying quantities.
- Household Support Fund guidance for local councilsThe route through which most off-grid fuel help in England is actually distributed. Allocation rules are set by each council.