Sources and methodology

Every number on this site comes from an official, public source. We do not republish exchange futures prices, so you will not see a tick-by-tick “live” quote here. Instead we publish official figures: the UK ETS Authority’s monthly average price, EU auction results and the European Commission’s CBAM certificate prices. Our data was last refreshed on 11 November 2026 at 11:26 (UK time).

UK carbon price

The UK figure is the average price of a UK Allowance (UKA) on the secondary futures market for each month, as published by the UK ETS Authority in its Cost Containment Mechanism table on GOV.UK. It is updated once a month. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

EU carbon price

EU prices are the clearing prices of EU ETS primary auctions, from the EEX primary market auction reports. EEX runs the common auction platform and the German and Polish auctions. We use spot EU Allowance auctions (phase 3 and 4, and phase 2 in 2012) and exclude aviation allowance auctions. Where more than one auction ran on a day, or when we show a monthly or yearly figure, we use the volume-weighted average clearing price. Data is © European Energy Exchange AG.

CBAM certificate price

Official EU CBAM certificate prices are taken from the European Commission’s Price of CBAM certificates page (reuse allowed under CC BY 4.0). The Commission calculates the price as the weighted average of EU ETS auction clearing prices. Applying that rule to the EEX auction data reproduces the official Q1, Q2 and Q3 2026 prices to the cent, so we publish a running estimate for the current quarter, clearly labelled.

Exchange rates

Pound conversions use the European Central Bank euro reference rate for sterling: the daily rate for single prices and the monthly average for monthly comparisons.

UK vs EU comparison

For each month we convert the volume-weighted EU auction average into pounds at that month’s average ECB rate, then subtract the UK ETS Authority’s official monthly average. The two figures are not identical measures (one is a futures average, the other an auction average) but both are official and track their markets closely.

Guides

Our guides are checked against GOV.UK, HMRC, the UK ETS Authority, the European Commission and EUR-Lex. Each guide lists its sources and the date we checked them. Nothing on this site is tax, legal or investment advice.

Corrections

If you spot an error, please tell us and we will fix it quickly.