Sweden Has the EU's Cheapest Petrol. Yes, Really — Now Checked Against All 27.

Sweden has the European Union's cheapest petrol, at €1.308 a litre for Euro-Super 95 — a full €1.017 below Denmark's €2.325, the EU's most expensive. This is now checked against all 27 EU member states, not a partial sample: every country's figure comes from the European Commission's Weekly Oil Bulletin for the week ending 10 August 2026, at the pump, including all duties and taxes, cross-checked against two independent mirrors.

Sweden's price is a tax cut, not cheap fuel

Sweden's pre-tax price, €0.903 a litre, is ordinary — close to the EU norm. What makes it the cheapest is a temporary energy-tax cut of 82 öre a litre, running 1 May to 30 September 2026, which drops Sweden's fuel duty all the way to the EU's legal minimum of €0.359/litre. Denmark charges €0.72/litre in duty on top of the EU's highest pre-tax price, €1.142/litre, then adds 25% VAT. The gap between the two countries is almost entirely tax policy, not the underlying cost of fuel.

The temporary Swedish discount ends 30 September 2026 — after that date, expect Sweden's price to move back up toward the EU-27 weighted average of €1.911/litre (the unweighted 27-country mean is €1.790/litre).

Why the EU sets a floor, not a ceiling

The EU doesn't set petrol prices. It sets a floor under one piece of them. Brussels requires every member state to charge an excise duty on petrol that meets or exceeds a bloc-wide minimum — but nothing stops a country taxing well above it. That's why Sweden's temporary cut works the way it does: the discount pushes Sweden's duty down to that legal minimum, €0.359 a litre, and it can't legally go lower without a change at EU level. Denmark hasn't used the same room at the bottom. Its duty, €0.72 a litre, is more than five times Sweden's, charged on top of the highest pre-tax price in this comparison, then taxed again at 25% VAT. None of that is required by EU law. It's a national choice — and most of the countries near the top of this chart have made the same one.

One oil market, 27 different pump prices

Petrol is a global commodity before it's a national product. Every EU refiner buys crude off the same world market, and the EU's refined-fuel trade is integrated across borders — a litre of Euro-Super 95 costs a refiner roughly the same whether it's heading for a station in Sweden or Denmark. If crude and refining costs were the whole story, pump prices across the bloc would sit close together. They don't: the gap between the EU's cheapest and most expensive petrol, €1.017 a litre, is more than half the EU-27 average price on its own. Crude sets a floor. Refining margins and distribution add a bit more. Excise duty and VAT — both set entirely by national governments, not Brussels — add the rest, and it's that last layer that moves the most from one member state to the next. A shared oil market doesn't produce a shared pump price, because no rule forces 27 governments to tax it identically.