About MOTindex

What this site is

MOTindex is a free MOT history lookup. Enter a registration and you get the vehicle's complete test record: every pass and fail, the defects and advisories recorded at each test, the odometer reading the garage wrote down, and when the current certificate runs out. No account, no payment, no partial report with the useful half behind a form.

Where the data comes from

Everything on a report comes from the DVSA MOT History, the official record maintained by the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency. It is the same source the government's own MOT checker reads.

Results are cached for up to seven days. MOT records only change when a vehicle is tested, so a cached copy is no less accurate than a live one, and it keeps our load on the DVSA service down. If a vehicle has just been tested and the report looks out of date, add ?refresh to the URL to force a fresh read.

What the MOT record does not contain

This matters, because several sites imply otherwise. The MOT history record returns exactly eleven fields, and these are not among them:

• Road tax rate, tax status or tax expiry date
• CO2 emissions
• Insurance status
• Vehicle weight, wheel plan or type approval category
• The date the last V5C logbook was issued
• Number of previous keepers
• Written-off, stolen or outstanding finance markers

Rather than show those as rows reading "N/A" on every vehicle, we leave them out and link to the services that genuinely hold them: the DVLA vehicle enquiry service for tax, and the Motor Insurers' Bureau (MIB) for insurance.

The estimated figures, and how far to trust them

Three things on a report are worked out rather than read, and each is labelled where it appears:

Euro status

Inferred from the first registration date and fuel type, against the dates each Euro standard became compulsory for new vehicles. A car registered after a standard came in certainly meets it; one registered shortly before may still meet it, which is why the wording says "likely". TfL's checker is definitive.

Fuel cost per mile

The MOT record has no fuel economy figure, so we use a typical real-world mpg for that engine size and fuel type, against the current UK average pump price from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero weekly statistics. Driving style and condition move real economy by 20% either way. Treat it as an order of magnitude.

Mileage comparison

"Mileage last year" is measured, not estimated: it is the difference between two real odometer readings roughly twelve months apart. The benchmark it is compared against is the national average for cars of that age, from the Department for Transport National Travel Survey. It is an all-makes figure - we hold no mileage data for individual models and do not pretend to.

Coverage and gaps

Vehicles under three years old have no MOT history because they have not needed a test yet. Northern Ireland is tested by the DVA rather than the DVSA, so NI records can be incomplete. A test carried out in the last few days may not have reached the public record. And a registration that has been transferred to another vehicle will show the history attached to the plate, not the car you are standing in front of.

Who runs it

MOTindex is run by the same people as findpetrol.co.uk, which compares live pump prices across more than 7,000 UK forecourts. We are not affiliated with the DVSA, the DVLA or gov.uk, and we are not a vehicle history check company - we do not sell HPI-style reports and this site has nothing to upsell you to.

Licence

MOT data contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.