A leap year technical glitch is being blamed for causing outages at fuel stations across the country.

Fuel provider Allied Petroleum and Gull say they are aware of nationwide technical problems affecting motorists across all fuel brands.

RNZ has spoken to one motorist who says he tried four petrol stations this morning and was told the outage was caused by leap day not being factored into the system.

Gull spokesperson Julien Leys confirmed it was a leap day glitch with their technology provider.

"We were aware from this morning about a nationwide technical issue that's affecting motorists across all fuel brands where they can't pay for their fuel."

Julien says Gull was working very closely with self-service payment provider Invenco to try to resolve it as quickly as possible for its customers.

"We do understand it's a software technical glitch to do with leap day," he says.

Gull will have a Discount Day next week to make up for the inconvenience.

Invenco is the self-service payment provider for all fuel providers.

BP says its fuel card transactions were unaffected.

"We are aware of an issue with Eftpos and credit card transactions at Outdoor Payment Terminals at BP truckstops and are sorry for any inconvenience this is causing.

"The provider for these Eftpos and credit card transactions at OPTs nationwide is urgently working on a fix."

Worldline New Zealand says the problem only affected unattended fuel terminals.

"We were advised by the fuel terminal provider of an issue affecting unattended fuel terminal software across New Zealand. This is resulting in transactions not being able to be processed through those terminals.

"This issue is specific to those unattended fuel terminals only. In-store fuel station terminals continue to process payment transactions as normal.

"The unattended fuel terminal software provider is currently investigating this issue and working on finding a solution and implementing a fix as quickly as possible."

- RNZ