How we measure car hire prices
Every figure on this site is the middle of a set of real car hire quotes, collected from the same booking system month after month. Nothing is modelled and nothing is a brochure rate.
What one price is
A quote for a seven-day hire picked up on a Saturday, for a renter resident in the United Kingdom, in pounds. Every figure on the site is that same shape, which is what makes two airports comparable without adjusting for anything.
Medians, not averages
We take the middle price. A handful of £800-a-day supercars drags an average 30% above what anyone actually pays, and the middle price does not move at all. Labels say typical because that is what a median is in plain words; the footnote says medians so the claim stays exact.
What we throw away
Quotes under £5 or over £500 a day are dropped — raw rates in the feed reach £181,000. Any cell standing on fewer than 30 quotes is shown as a dash with its count, never as a price.
Where the prices come from
An archive of every batch collected since November 2023, plus the newest batch, which sits in its own table until the next import moves it across. We read both, so a build straight after an import includes that import. A batch lands about once a month, and every page names the batch it was cut from.
The currency you are reading in
The archive measures pounds, always: every quote is collected priced for a renter resident in the United Kingdom, which is what makes two airports comparable. Pages for other markets convert those figures at a daily exchange rate and say so under each one, with the date the rate was taken. The conversion is applied to the archive BEFORE anything is worked out from it, so a percentage on the page is the percentage between the two numbers printed beside it rather than between the pounds they came from. Live prices are not converted at all — the price check quotes your own market directly.
How far ahead you booked
Lead time is counted in calendar months between the search and the pickup, not in days: the collector runs monthly, so every lead time in the archive sits in a cluster, and a day-range boundary landing inside one moves the figure. The five rungs are the same month as the search (shown as 2 weeks), one month, three, six and nine.
The price check
The archive is a UK-renter benchmark in pounds on every page of this site. The live check is the one exception: it prices for the market you are reading in, so an American reader's check is quoted for a US renter — a price you are asked to act on has to be one you could book.