Australian fuel prices by city

Every calculator on this site needs a fuel price, and a wrong default quietly makes every result wrong. This page is the single figure those defaults come from — what unleaded and diesel actually cost in each capital city on 19 August 2026, transcribed from the ACCC’s weekly monitoring report rather than estimated.

Unleaded petrol — capital city averages

Daily average retail price for regular unleaded, in cents per litre, alongside the same city in February 2026 before the escalation in the Middle East pushed international refined petrol benchmarks up.

Diesel — capital city averages

Diesel does not follow the weekly price cycle that unleaded does in the five largest cities, so a diesel figure is stable for longer — but it has moved much further from its February level than petrol has. The five-city diesel average is 67.3 cpl above 20 February, against 29.8 cpl for unleaded. If you run a diesel vehicle, a fuel budget built on last summer’s numbers is understating your cost by roughly a third.

Shopping around beats moving city

The headline city averages sit within about 10 cpl of each other. The spread inside a single city is far larger: Melbourne ran from 179.9 to 239.9 cpl at the same moment on 19 August 2026 — a 60.0 cpl gap between the cheapest and dearest monitored site. On a 60-litre fill that is $36.00 difference for the same fuel on the same day.

This is why the calculators here take a price you type in rather than assuming one. Use a state price app — FuelCheck in NSW and Tasmania, FuelWatch in WA, MyFuelNT in the NT — and enter what you will actually pay.

Regional prices

Across the 190-plus regional locations the ACCC monitors, the aggregate daily average on 19 August 2026 was 208.7 cpl for unleaded and 250.3 cpl for diesel — 8.0 cpl and 6.4 cpl above the respective five-city averages. Regional prices also moved further after the excise restoration than city prices did.

If you are planning a trip that leaves a capital city, budgeting at the city average will understate the cost of the fuel you buy on the way. Add roughly 8 cpl for unleaded and 6 cpl for diesel to the legs you expect to refuel regionally, or plan your fill-ups around the last metropolitan site on the route.

The 2026 fuel excise timeline

Fuel excise is a flat per-litre tax, so a change to it moves pump prices almost one-for-one. Australia moved the rate twice in 2026, which is the main reason any fuel figure published earlier this year is now wrong.

• 30 March 2026 — 18.7 cpl

  Temporary cut announced — 32 cpl off the standard rate, to 30 June 2026

• 1 July 2026 — 34.7 cpl

  Relief reduced to a 16 cpl discount, extended to 2 August 2026

• 3 August 2026 — 53.7 cpl

  Full restoration — remaining 16 cpl restored plus a 1.1 cpl CPI indexation (2% factor)

The current rate is 53.7 cpl. Because GST applies on top of excise, the ACCC put the total tax effect of the 3 August restoration at up to 18.8 cpl at the pump. Actual retail increases in the capital cities came in at or below that — between 11.4 cpl in Sydney and 18.1 cpl in Perth — partly because international refined benchmarks fell over the same fortnight.

How this page is maintained

The ACCC publishes a fuel price monitoring report every Friday under a Ministerial Direction that currently runs to 30 September 2026. Each week we transcribe tables 1 and 2 of the latest report into a single data module, which is what the tables and charts above and the default prices in every calculator read from. No figure on this page is modelled, smoothed or carried forward from a previous week — if the ACCC did not publish it, it is not here.

Where a previously published figure turns out to have been transcribed wrongly, the correction is recorded on our corrections page rather than silently edited. The full approach to sourcing is set out in our methodology.

Source

• ACCC, Weekly fuel price monitoring report, Friday 21 August 2026 (PDF) — the twenty-fourth weekly report, carrying prices to 19 August 2026. Tables 1 and 2 supply every city figure above; the key messages section supplies the five-city and regional aggregates and the excise timeline.
• ACCC weekly fuel price monitoring update index — where each new week’s report is published.
• Underlying price feeds named by the ACCC: Informed Sources, FuelCheck NSW, WA FuelWatch, FuelCheck TAS, MyFuelNT and PetrolSpy. Sites requiring membership are excluded.