On 29 September 2026 at 9 a.m., 11% of French filling stations were facing supply problems according to the official prix-carburants.gouv.fr website, with peaks of 18% in Pays de la Loire and Grand Est, and 13% in Île-de-France and Brittany. To keep fuel distribution going amid the armed conflict in the Middle East, a decree of 24 September 2026 lifts, until Monday 12 October at 10 a.m., the weekend and public holiday driving bans for trucks over 7.5 t delivering petroleum products to filling stations. Only these tankers are covered: drivers must be able to prove the delivery if checked, and other trucks remain subject to the usual bans.
What it means for your routes
- The exemption changes nothing for your vehicles unless you operate tankers. It is meant to resupply stations faster, with no date for a return to normal. What weighs on your routes is the shortages.
- Read the figure with care: a station counts as short as soon as it lacks either petrol or diesel. The 11% does not tell you how many stations are out of diesel.
- Keep a fuel margin for each vehicle: leave with a full tank rather than relying on refuelling on the way, and set a level below which a vehicle does not set off again without refuelling.
- Identify fallback stations on each itinerary, not just the usual one, especially in the hardest-hit regions.
- Check availability by region before dispatching routes: finding out at the pump costs a detour and a customer time slot.
- Treat refuelling as a stop in the plan: a refuelling detour shrinks the delivery window, as the heat did this summer. A plan recalculated in the morning absorbs it better than improvising at the end of the route.