Diesel and petrol prices affect all of us both directly and indirectly. It is a vital commodity to the modern world. When you look at this data over the past two and a half years and compare fuel prices between the US and UK, it paints an interesting picture.

Diesel prices in the States are on average 54% lower than they are in the UK, and petrol prices are on average 43% lower in the US.

The reason it is so much cheaper to fill up in the States is they pay less than 1/4 of the tax UK citizens pay on fuel.

You can see from the infographic the peaks and troughs of the fuel prices in the two countries are usually mirrored by each other to a certain extent. But last year you will notice the US prices bucked this trend when fuel prices began to drop in the UK in August 2014, the US fuel prices did not follow suit and did not begin to drop until the beginning of December.

In this four month period between August and December, UK diesel prices dropped an average of 11p per litre compared to US diesel prices which kept steady around 60p per litre.

In this period the big drop in fuel prices in both the UK and the USA are also mirrored by a drop in Brent Crude Oil prices. Between June 2014 and January 2015 Brent Crude Oil decreased in value by ~60%, UK diesel prices decreased by 16 % and US diesel prices decreased by 18 %.

It’s remarkable that we did not see anywhere near the same drop in price at the pump as we did in the value of Brent Crude Oil.