Six Months of Balkan Fuel Prices: What 173 Days of Our Own Data Show
By the Karburanti Sot team · Published 2026-08-05 · 8 min read
What this dataset is
Since 14 February 2026 this site has recorded country-level petrol, diesel and LPG prices across Europe once a day, every day, and appended each reading to a public file. As of 5 August 2026 that record holds 173 consecutive daily observations covering 42 markets, with no gaps. The raw prices come from public aggregators; the historical record, and everything we derive from it below, is ours — and it is published openly so anyone can check our arithmetic.
Six months is long enough for patterns to appear that a daily price snapshot simply cannot show. Here is what ours shows.
Finding 1: Albanian fuel has become dramatically more expensive
On 14 February 2026 Albanian diesel sat at €1.801 per liter. On 5 August 2026 it was €2.207 — a rise of 22.5% in under six months. Petrol went from €1.801 to €2.025 (+12.4%), and LPG from €0.594 to €0.740 (+24.6%). Diesel touched its floor of €1.794 on 28 February and its peak of €2.325 on 29 July.
Two things stand out. First, diesel rose almost twice as fast as petrol, which is unusual — the two normally track each other closely because they come off the same barrel. Second, LPG, usually the sleepiest of the three, posted the largest percentage increase of all. A driver who converted to LPG in February to escape rising costs has watched the cheap option get proportionally more expensive than the thing they were escaping.
Finding 2: Albania has quietly become one of the most expensive markets in the region
This is the finding that surprised us most, because it inverts the advice that circulated for years. As of 5 August 2026, Albanian diesel at €2.207 is more expensive than Greece (€2.068), more expensive than Italy (€2.105), and far more expensive than every other Balkan neighbour we track:
- Kosovo — €1.465 (€0.742 cheaper than Albania)
- Bosnia and Herzegovina — €1.696
- Bulgaria — €1.713
- Croatia — €1.775
- Serbia — €1.930
- Greece — €2.068
- Italy — €2.105
- Albania — €2.207
Only Switzerland (€2.326) and the Netherlands (€2.380) sit meaningfully above Albania among the markets in our set. For a country whose average wage is a fraction of the Swiss or Dutch equivalent, that is a striking position to occupy — and it is a recent development, not a longstanding fact.
Finding 3: The old cross-border advice is now wrong
For years the standard guidance for Albanian drivers was: fill up at home before driving to Greece or Italy, because fuel there is dearer. On today's numbers that advice loses you money.
Diesel in Greece is €0.139 per liter cheaper than in Albania — about €7 on a 50-litre tank in favour of waiting until you cross. Italian diesel is €0.102 cheaper, roughly €5 a tank. Petrol between Albania and Greece is, as of this reading, exactly level at €2.025. The one piece of old advice that still holds — and holds more strongly than ever — is Kosovo: at €1.465 for diesel, a full 50-litre tank costs about €37 less there than in Albania.
We keep the live version of this comparison on the compare page, because a gap this volatile can invert again. That is precisely the point: cross-border refuelling advice written once and left alone becomes wrong, quietly.
Finding 4: Some markets barely move, others lurch daily
Measuring the standard deviation of daily percentage price moves across all 173 days gives a clean read on how jumpy each market is. Kosovo is by far the most stable in our set at 0.21% — its retail prices change rarely and in visible steps, consistent with a market where pricing is administered or slow to pass through. Serbia (0.57%) and Belarus (0.67%) are similarly placid.
At the other end, Luxembourg (2.78%), Moldova (2.64%) and Poland (2.60%) reprice almost continuously, tracking wholesale costs closely. For a driver, volatility is practical information: in a stable market there is no point timing your fill-up, while in a volatile one waiting a few days genuinely can change what you pay. Current figures for every market are in the daily market report.
What we cannot tell you
Being straight about the limits matters. Our dataset records country-level averages, not individual stations, so it cannot tell you which pump in Tirana is cheapest today. It began in February 2026, so it cannot speak to multi-year trends. And it records prices, not causes — we can show you that Albanian diesel rose 22.5%, but attributing that split between crude costs, exchange rates, excise changes and retail margins would require data we do not hold.
What it does do is turn a daily snapshot into a record, and a record into context: whether today is expensive or cheap by recent standards, which way things have been moving, and where it pays to fill up. Every country page now carries that analysis — see Albania or Greece — and the underlying method is documented in our methodology.