The European Commission publishes a price sheet every week showing what motor fuel costs in each member state, before and after tax. Its bulletin for the week of 27 July, released on 29 July, shows the EU average pre-tax price of Euro-super 95 petrol at €994 per 1,000 litres — up 42.4% on the equivalent week of 2025. At the pump, including all taxes, the same 1,000 litres cost €1,941, up 20.2%.
Diesel shows the same pattern more strongly. Its EU average pre-tax price rose 51.4% over the year, to €1,162 per 1,000 litres, while the price drivers actually paid rose 29.1%, to €2,011.
The explanation is in how the tax is written rather than in anything a government has done recently. Excise on motor fuel across the EU is a specific duty — a fixed number of euros per 1,000 litres — rather than a percentage of the price. When the pre-tax price climbs, the duty does not climb with it, so tax falls as a share of the total. Over the year the tax component of EU average petrol fell from 56.7% of the pump price to 48.8%. For diesel it fell from 50.7% to 42.2%.
That arithmetic accounts for most of the divergence but not all of it, and the difference is worth stating precisely. Freezing every member state’s excise and VAT rates at their July 2025 levels and rerunning the calculation gives a petrol pump price up 22.2% over the year rather than the 20.2% actually recorded. Roughly nine-tenths of the fall in the tax share is therefore mechanical; the remaining tenth comes from duty rates that member states changed.
They changed a great many of them. Twenty of the twenty-seven member states altered petrol excise or another specific fuel duty over the twelve months, and four changed VAT — Spain, Sweden and Italy among the cutters, Germany, the Netherlands and Romania among the risers. The net effect across the bloc was to deepen the cushion slightly rather than offset it.
The figures are EU-27 consumption-weighted averages in euros per 1,000 litres, taken from the price-history workbook the Commission published on 29 July; the 27 July row is the newest in the file and the most likely to be revised. The bulletin records prices and taxes and nothing else, so it does not explain why the pre-tax price rose, and none of the above should be read as an account of that.