Methodology and sources

Pumpday rebuilds the regulated fuel price for every magisterial district in South Africa from public, official files. Nothing is estimated except where this page says so.

Zone prices. Each month the DMPR – the Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources – puts out a Fuel Price Schedule (an Excel workbook) with the pump price of 93 and 95 and the wholesale price of diesel and illuminating paraffin in each of the 54 zones, plus the maximum retail price of LP gas. We download it from the department’s Fuel Prices page and read every zone.

Provisional months. The minister’s media statement comes out a day or two before the zone table. In that gap we add the announced national adjustment to the previous month’s zone price and label the result provisional. The adjustment is the same in every zone, so the result normally matches the official table to the cent; when the table appears it replaces the calculation automatically.

Towns. The district-to-zone list is the “MDZ zones” file of 10 May 2011, the latest one the department links. Dots on the map are the district’s seat town located with GeoNames (CC BY 4.0); a few rural districts have no reliable point and appear only in the tables.

History. Monthly coast and Gauteng prices since 2012 come from the Fuels Industry Association of South Africa table “Fuel Prices (Current & Past)”; recent months are cross-checked against the DMPR files.

Next month. The Central Energy Fund publishes a daily PDF with the running over/under-recovery. We read the average for the current window and show it as a projection, together with a test of how it compared with every 2026 adjustment.

What we do not have. Retail diesel prices per forecourt, and any real-time price: the regulated price changes once a month.

DMPR 2026-07-01: 54 zonas · 95 9C=2610.0 · 1A=2523.0; DMPR 2026-06-03: 54 zonas · 95 9C=2806.0 · 1A=2719.0; DMPR 2026-05-06 no descargado: HTTP Error 404: Not Found; DMPR 2026-02-04 sin Fuel Price Schedule; FISA: 178 meses · (2012, 1) → (2026, 10); CEF: última hoja 2026-10-02 · finales de ventana: 10