The South East holds a large absolute number of oil-heated homes despite a high mains gas coverage rate, because the region is populous. The oil houses are concentrated in the Weald, the Downs villages and the parts of Kent and Sussex that the gas grid skirted.
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. Applied to South East England. No regional retail series exists for Great Britain, so this is the UK figure and it is labelled as such rather than dressed up as a local price.
Why South East has no separate published price
The official UK series is a single national observation. It is priced on the Monday nearest the fifteenth of the month, for deliveries up to 1,000 litres, with VAT at 5% included. There is no regional breakdown behind it, and nobody else publishes one for Great Britain either.
Sites that show you a regional price for a GB region are showing you either a national figure with a regional label on it, or a set of quotes collected from sellers. This page does the first of those and says so, which is the only honest version of it.
The local geography, and what it does to a delivery
Oil heating here is scattered rather than clustered. A village of forty houses may have six on oil and the rest on gas, which changes the economics of a delivery round: the tanker is not filling a whole lane, it is calling at six addresses spread over several miles.
Delivery
Round density is the thing to watch. Depots serving the South East cover a lot of ground for relatively few domestic drops, and a scattered round is a more expensive round. In practice that shows up as a smaller discount for volume than a Northern Ireland household would expect, not as a headline surcharge.
Ordering here
Order ahead of the first cold snap rather than during it. The South East competes for tanker time with a dense commercial book, and December call-outs get squeezed behind contracted commercial drops.
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
- 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.
- ONS inflation and price indicesUsed only where a figure on this site is explicitly labelled as inflation adjusted.
- 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.