Official heating oil tariff: the MazoutMax 2026 method

A single dataset drives the site: the official tariff of petroleum products, which the FPS Economy sets and Statbel releases on its be.STAT platform. A replayable script in the repository reads it, dates it, and every page uses it: no price is typed by hand into a text. The only fixed figures are those of the Social Heating Fund and the VAT rate, kept in a dated parameter file.

The official tariff: read from Statbel several times a day

The script scripts/update-data.mjs queries be.STAT’s open interface and reads four tables: the tariff for the last 365 days, the latest tariff excluding and including VAT, the averages of the last 24 months and those of the last 8 years. It checks that no day is missing, that every price stays between €0.20 and €5 a litre, and refuses a series older than the previous one. A scheduled job rebuilds and republishes the site five times a day. If Statbel does not answer, the last successful reading is kept and its date stays on screen. Last reading: 31 October 2026; 13 products, from 4 November 2025 to 3 November 2026. Statbel data are published under the CC BY 4.0 licence and are reused with their source.

A day’s tariff is often published the day before: when the series already holds tomorrow, the site shows it as tomorrow’s official tariff. The Chamber’s bill DOC 56 1452/001 quotes a maximum of €0.8724 for heating oil under 2,000 litres on 28 February 2026, and €1.2958 on 27 March 2026. The site’s tests check that the be.STAT series gives back those values to within a thousandth.

The next-day estimate, and what it is worth

When tomorrow’s tariff is not yet published, the site shows an estimate, always labelled as such. The programme contract calculates the maximum price from international product quotations, under the technical annex of 9 October 2006; those quotations are paid for and not published, so no site can redo the official calculation in advance without buying them. We therefore do not make up a formula. The central estimate is the last published tariff: over the past year it is the estimator with the smallest error, better than extending the latest rise or fall (a test checks this at every build). Around it, the range uses the changes actually seen on the same weekday (10% of cases below, 10% above), and the probability shown is the share of those days on which a new tariff came into force.

Error of the “last published tariff” estimate, recalculated on the be.STAT series at every build.
Product	Days with a new tariff	Average error, 52 weeks	Average error, 4 weeks	Error ≤ 1 cent
Heating oil < 2,000 L	243 / 364	2.0 c	2.3 c	52 %
Diesel B7	68 / 364	1.2 c	1.2 c	82 %
95 E10	48 / 364	0.6 c	0.6 c	88 %
LPG	35 / 364	0.3 c	0.4 c	93 %

The price does not move at the same pace every day. Heating oil changes almost every working day; diesel and petrol far less often; on Mondays almost no new tariff comes into force.

Number of days on which a new maximum price came into force, by weekday, on the be.STAT series.
Day of the new tariff	Heating oil < 2,000 L	Diesel B7	95 E10	LPG
Monday	0 / 52	0 / 52	0 / 52	0 / 52
Tuesday	48 / 52	11 / 52	9 / 52	9 / 52
Wednesday	46 / 52	16 / 52	14 / 52	7 / 52
Thursday	51 / 52	12 / 52	6 / 52	4 / 52
Friday	48 / 52	15 / 52	13 / 52	8 / 52
Saturday	49 / 52	13 / 52	5 / 52	7 / 52
Sunday	1 / 52	1 / 52	1 / 52	0 / 52

The formulas

Heating-oil delivery: litres × the band’s maximum price. Under 2,000 litres, the “under 2,000 L” price; from 2,000 litres, the “2,000 L or more” price, for the whole volume. Checked example: 1,500 litres = €2,367 at the tariff of 31 October 2026.
VAT included: amount × 0.21 ÷ 1.21. The 21% rate is the one given by the latest tariff’s prices excluding and including VAT.
2,000-litre threshold: equivalent volume = 2,000 × upper-band price ÷ lower-band price (1,946 litres at today’s tariff); above it, ordering 2,000 litres costs less.
Social Heating Fund allowance: litres taken into account (at most 1,500 per calendar year) × the scale’s amount per litre, from 14 to 20 cents depending on the invoiced price.
Car budget: kilometres × consumption per 100 km ÷ 100 × maximum price.

Tests that block publication

The series: thirteen products, at least 300 days each, no gaps, plausible prices, the 2,000-litre band always cheaper.
The cross-check against the tariffs quoted by the Chamber (28 February and 27 March 2026), as long as they stay within the 365-day window.
Delivery, VAT, threshold, budgets and the Social Heating Fund scale, to the cent, scale boundaries included.
The estimate: never shown when the tariff is published, a range that contains the central price, fallback to the last published day when a reading is late.
Every mini-calculator, in all three languages, with no missing value.

What the site does not do

It does not know dealers’ prices: the maximum price is a ceiling, and many deliveries are made below it.
It does not forecast the price beyond tomorrow.
It does not decide on the Social Heating Fund allowance: only the CPAS/OCMW does, after an assessment.
It does not cover natural gas or electricity, whose prices are not capped in the same way.

Updates

Tariff: five readings a day. Social Heating Fund scale: reread whenever the Fund announces a change. An error reported to contact@mazoutmax.be is checked against the source, corrected and turned into a test. See the editorial policy.

All sources

Parameters read on 21 October 2026 · tariff read on 31 October 2026 · page rebuilt on 31 October 2026.