The figures come from Forecourt Eye, a company that supplies fuel-debt recovery and number plate recognition systems to petrol stations. It compared the five months after 28 February 2026 with the five months before, and found incidents of fuel taken without payment up around 20%. Because pump prices rose steeply over the same period, the value of that fuel climbed further still — up 48%, to an estimated daily average of £194,000 across the UK's 8,359 forecourts. The estimate is scaled up from reports at a representative sample of 550 stations, and at that rate the sector is on course to lose around £70.7 million a year in unpaid fuel alone.
The detail that has drawn most attention is who is behind the increase. Among first-time offenders, incidents rose 23% and the volume of fuel taken rose 26%. Among repeat offenders, the equivalent figures were 17% and 20%. In other words, the fastest-growing group is people with no history of it — which is a different pattern from the traditional picture of forecourt theft as something largely carried out by people already involved in other crime.
One statistic, two very different situations:
- A drive-off is exactly what it sounds like: fuel is dispensed and the driver leaves without any attempt to pay.
- A "no means of payment" (NMoP) case is when the driver goes into the shop and declares they cannot pay — a declined card, a forgotten wallet, a phone that has died mid-transaction.
Both are counted in that 20% increase, which is worth bearing in mind before reading the whole figure as deliberate theft. They are treated very differently in practice, though, and the distinction is one most drivers only discover at the worst possible moment.
If your card is declined at the pump
This is the genuinely useful bit, because it is far more common than people assume — contactless limits, bank fraud blocks, and the pre-authorisation hold that many pumps place on a card can all cause a payment to fail after the fuel is already in your tank. Handled properly, it is an administrative inconvenience. Handled badly, it becomes an offence.
What to do:
- Go into the kiosk and say so straight away. Every forecourt has a process for this. Staff deal with it regularly and it is not the confrontation people fear.
- Ask to complete a "no means of payment" form. You give your name, address and vehicle registration, and agree to return and settle up — usually within a set number of days.
- Pay it off within the window. This is the part that matters. Complete the form and pay on time and the matter ends there. Ignore it and the debt is typically passed to a recovery company, with an administration fee added on top.
- Keep your receipt or a photo of the form. Useful if there is any later dispute about what you owed or when you paid.
Why driving off is a poor gamble: There is no specific criminal offence of "driving off from a petrol station". It falls under making off without payment, which carries a maximum sentence of two years' imprisonment. In practice, prosecutions have historically been rare — average losses per incident sit well below the £200 threshold that triggers a fuller police investigation, and most cases are closed without a suspect being identified. That is precisely the gap the forecourt industry is now spending money to close.
Enforcement is tightening from September
Alongside the figures, Forecourt Eye announced a partnership with Facewatch. From September, more than 2,000 forecourts already using its number plate recognition and debt recovery services get free access to an app for logging incidents, managing evidence and reporting to police. Stations do not need facial recognition cameras to use it, but they can add Facewatch's live facial recognition system as an option — effectively pairing plate reading outside with face matching inside the shop.
The scale behind it is significant. Forecourt Eye says its private database of vehicle registrations linked to fuel theft now exceeds 300,000 entries, and Facewatch maintains a national database of known retail offenders. Part of the stated aim is simply to build a pattern of incidents at a site or in an area, giving police a stronger reason to act on cases that individually look too small to pursue. The Petrol Retailers Association welcomed the move, pointing to rising abuse and aggression directed at forecourt staff who have no control over the price on the sign.
It is a reasonable point to note that this involves a substantial expansion of private surveillance on forecourts, and live facial recognition remains contested ground in the UK. That debate is worth having on its own terms. What is not in dispute is the practical consequence for drivers: the chance of an unpaid tank going unnoticed is falling.
Why it lands on the forecourt, not the oil company
One misconception comes up repeatedly from retailers. A station carrying BP, Shell or Esso branding is very often not owned by that company at all — it is run by an independent operator or a small family business that has already bought and paid for the fuel before it reaches anyone's tank. Ben Lawrence, a director of Lawrences Garages, which runs five stations in Norfolk and Hampshire, told the Press Association some drivers assume a large energy company absorbs the loss. "It does matter to us," he said — an £80 to £90 drive-off comes out of the site's own margin, not a multinational's.
That is also part of the explanation for something drivers notice constantly: why two stations a mile apart charge very different prices. Ownership, buying power and the losses a site absorbs all feed into the number on the sign. We go into this in more detail in why petrol prices differ so much across the same town and in our look at how forecourt margins actually work.
The prices sitting underneath all this
None of the above happens in isolation. Petrol has climbed to roughly 160p a litre — about 27p more than before the conflict began in late February, and the highest since November 2022 — while diesel is around 179p, some 37p up over the same period. That adds roughly £15 to £20 to the cost of filling a typical family car compared with earlier in the year, and takes a family-sized petrol tank to about £88. We covered the climb in detail as petrol neared its crisis peak and diesel topped £2 at some forecourts.
There is no evidence that higher prices alone explain the rise in unpaid fuel, and operators are clear that organised activity is part of the picture too. But the sequence is hard to ignore: prices rise, a full tank becomes a bigger single outlay, and the number of people who cannot cover it at the till goes up with it.
What this means for you
For the overwhelming majority of drivers, this story is not about crime — it is about the size of a fill-up. The most effective protection against a declined card at the pump is not needing to put £88 through it in one go.
- Check the price before you commit to the pump. The spread between the cheapest and dearest forecourt near you is frequently 10–20p a litre, which is £5 or more on a single tank. You can see the cheapest and most expensive forecourts in the UK right now on our live tracker.
- Set an amount, not "full". Filling to a set figure rather than brimming the tank keeps the transaction inside your contactless or daily limit, and avoids the pre-authorisation surprises.
- Carry a backup payment method. A second card or a phone wallet turns a declined payment into a five-second problem.
- Skip motorway services where you reasonably can. They are routinely 15–20p a litre dearer, which inflates the bill for no benefit.
- If it does go wrong, use the kiosk. A completed NMoP form and a prompt payment is the difference between an errand and an offence.
You can track the national averages on our UK Fuel Price Index, and if you want to understand where the pump-price data itself comes from, we explain the government scheme in the Fuel Finder scheme explained.