Data Methodology

PetrolPricesNearMe aggregates fuel price data from multiple complementary sources to maximise coverage across Melbourne and Victoria. Primary sources include voluntary station operator submissions, aggregated retail price feeds, and cross-validated public datasets made available by regulatory and consumer advocacy bodies.

Station-level records include the business name, street address, suburb, postcode, fuel types offered, and the most recently reported price per litre for each fuel variant. Where coordinates are provided by the source, they are stored directly; otherwise, geocoding is applied using a tiered fallback strategy to minimise location errors.

We do not manufacture or interpolate prices. Every price displayed on suburb and station pages originates from a source record timestamped to a specific reporting window. If a station has not submitted a price update within a defined window, it is flagged as potentially stale and visually differentiated from freshly confirmed prices.

Price data is ingested and processed on a rolling refresh cycle. Station pages are set to revalidate every 30 minutes using Next.js Incremental Static Regeneration, ensuring CDN-cached pages remain within 30 minutes of the source data at all times under normal traffic conditions.

Suburb summary pages use a 30-minute revalidation window. The homepage and aggregate views revalidate every 5 minutes to reflect broad market movement quickly.

During high-volatility periods — such as the beginning of a Melbourne weekly price cycle — manual refresh triggers may be applied to critical pages to reduce the observed lag between market movement and published prices.

A price is considered stale when its source timestamp exceeds 48 hours. Stale prices are not removed from the index immediately — removal can obscure station coverage and penalise stations with intermittent reporting cadences — but they are labelled with an age indicator and ranked lower in price comparison lists.

When a suburb has no stations with fresh prices, the suburb page displays the most recent available data alongside a clear data-freshness disclaimer. This approach preserves discoverability while maintaining transparency about data recency.

If a station's last reported price is more than 7 days old, it is temporarily excluded from the live cheapest-station rankings but remains visible under a "recently inactive" section to preserve historical reference.

All incoming price records are subject to automated range validation. Prices outside a configurable band (currently 100–300 cents per litre for unleaded, with fuel-type-specific thresholds for diesel, premium, and E10) are flagged for review rather than published directly.

Station coordinates are validated against a bounding box covering Victoria. Records with coordinates outside this region are quarantined and reviewed manually before being associated with Melbourne suburb data.

Duplicate station detection uses a composite key of business name normalisation, suburb, and postcode. Potential duplicates are surfaced for manual deduplication to avoid inflating station counts or splitting price history across ghost records.

The fuel cycle forecast shown on the fuel cycle guide and suburb sections uses a rule-based heuristic model anchored to Melbourne's observed weekly price cycle patterns. The model does not access proprietary refinery or terminal gate pricing data; instead, it analyses the current average price relative to historical cycle ranges to estimate whether prices are at a low, rising, peak, or declining phase.

The prediction engine outputs a qualitative signal (e.g. "Likely to rise", "At or near peak", "May dip soon") alongside a confidence level. Confidence is reduced when the current price is ambiguous relative to the typical cycle window, when data freshness is low, or when market conditions appear unusual.

Prediction signals are advisory only. They are designed to provide useful context for refuelling timing decisions, not to guarantee price movement. Drivers should combine the prediction signal with current station prices and their own route constraints when making fill-up decisions.

Future improvements planned for the prediction system include integration of international crude oil benchmarks, terminal gate price tracking, and historical machine-learning models trained on extended Melbourne price time series.

PetrolPricesNearMe is committed to providing accurate, timely, and transparent fuel price information to Melbourne drivers. Every data point published has a traceable origin, a freshness timestamp, and a validation status. We do not pad station counts or inflate coverage claims.

Our editorial team reviews methodology documentation quarterly and updates validation thresholds as market conditions evolve. If you notice a price discrepancy on any page, please use the contact form to report it — all reports are reviewed within 24 hours.

The site's suburb and station pages are generated from live data and structured to be independently verifiable: you can cross-check any published price against the station's direct signage or operator website.