Guide · reading the public record
How to read your MOT history
Every test a car has taken is published against its registration. Here is what the record proves, what it cannot, and the four checks that take ten minutes.
Official DVSA record Every advisory priced Works on any registration No sign-up needed
A car’s MOT history is published against its registration and free to check. Each entry holds the date, the result, the odometer reading and every defect the tester wrote down. Read across tests rather than at one, and the record turns into something an advert cannot give you: a decade of what a professional noticed, in their own words.
2005
is where the online record begins, so an older car can carry twenty entries
2.7×
the gap between the best and worst model at exactly ten years old — the individual record matters more
4
checks worth doing, in this order, on any car you are about to buy
What the record actually holds
Five fields per test, and the fifth is the one most people skim past.
| Field | What to do with it |
|---|---|
| Test date | Gaps between tests are as informative as the tests themselves. |
| Result | Pass or fail. A fail followed quickly by a pass is a different story from a fail followed by silence. |
| Odometer reading | The only independent record of a car’s mileage anywhere. |
| Expiry date | Shows whether the owner used the early testing window or ran to the wire. |
| Defects and advisories | In the tester’s own wording, verbatim. This is the substance. |
What the record does not hold: anything about the clutch, gearbox, cambelt or engine internals, because the test never inspects them. A spotless history is evidence about the tested half of a car and silent on the rest — what the MOT actually checks sets out both lists.
The four checks, in order
Read this way and a used car’s history takes about ten minutes. Read it as a list of pass and fail results and you learn almost nothing.
One: does the mileage make sense
This is the check to do first, because it is the only independent mileage record that exists. Do not compare the car against a national average — compare it against itself. Take the first and last readings, divide by the number of years between them, and you have that car’s own annual figure. Then look at each step against it.
Two patterns matter. A reading lower than the one before it is the obvious one, and it needs an explanation before anything else is discussed. The subtler one is a sudden change in rate — four years at nine thousand followed by one at two thousand can be perfectly innocent, but it is a question worth asking. Our mileage check does this arithmetic from the record automatically.
Two: which advisories repeat
Count the same wording across tests rather than reading each certificate alone. An advisory that appears once and never returns was dealt with. One that appears at three consecutive tests has been looked at three times by three testers and left alone three times — and it is still on the car unless somebody produces an invoice.
Which repeats matter depends on the category, and the spread is wide. Suspension advisories return as failures 18.7% of the time and oil leaks 1.3%, so a repeated spring advisory and a repeated oil weep are not the same finding at all. What MOT advisories mean has the full table.
Three: what happened after each fail
A fail on its own is not a bad sign, and can be a good one. A car that failed and passed a retest within days had an owner who dealt with it immediately. That is better evidence of care than a run of clean passes with a slowly lengthening advisory list.
What to look for instead is the gap. A fail followed by a retest weeks later, at a different test station, usually means the car went looking for a cheaper answer — worth knowing, and worth asking about.
Four: where the gaps are
A year with no test means the car was not being used on the road. Declared off-road, undergoing a long repair, abroad, or sitting on a drive. None of those is automatically a problem, and a low-mileage car with a gap often simply had an owner who stopped driving.
The combination to watch is a gap plus a jump. A missing year followed by a test with unusually low added mileage, or a first test after a long silence with a fresh list of advisories, is a car that was stored rather than maintained — and things deteriorate while parked, particularly brake fluid, tyres and anything rubber.
It is the strongest free evidence available about a used car, and it is routinely over-read. A pass means the car met the roadworthiness standard on the day, against the specific items in the inspection manual. It says nothing about the clutch, the gearbox, the cambelt, the turbo or anything inside the engine, because none of those is ever inspected.
Those are also the repairs that run into four figures. Ask when the cambelt was last changed and ask for the invoice — that single question covers more risk than the entire test record does.
Turning the record into a number
The government service shows you the history. What it does not do is tell you what any of it costs.
Every open advisory has a price attached, and on a car you are buying that price is negotiable. “Nearside front brake disc worn, pitted or scored” is a phrase; the repair behind it is a figure, and it belongs in the conversation before you agree anything. Walking in already knowing a car needs four hundred pounds of brakes and tyres changes what happens next.
Price the whole list
Our used car check reads the same DVSA record, maps each outstanding advisory to the repair it points to, and prices it for that exact model rather than for cars in general.
Run it before you view, not afterDecode anything unfamiliar
Testers write in a hurry and in their own words. The same six words can point at a ten-pound fix or a four-hundred-pound one, depending on which qualifier is attached.
The advisory decoder covers 16 common phrasesCheck the quote afterwards
Once a garage has given you a figure for the work, it is worth knowing whether it sits inside the normal UK range for that job before agreeing.
Use the quote checkerOne number to keep in mind while reading
When an advisory does become a failure, the median gap is 376 days. That is one test cycle almost exactly, and it holds across every kind of fault we measured. So an outstanding advisory on a car you are looking at is not a distant worry — on the national evidence it is roughly next year’s bill, arriving on schedule.
It also explains why repeated advisories are worth so much attention. An item that has survived three tests without becoming a failure is either genuinely stable, or it is the one that converts next. Which of those it is depends almost entirely on the category — and that is knowable.
Common questions
How far back does an MOT history go?
The online record begins in 2005, so a car older than that will have earlier tests that were never digitised. For most cars on the road the history is complete, and an older vehicle can carry twenty entries or more.
Can I check the MOT history of a car I do not own?
Yes. The record is public and searchable by registration alone — no ownership, no documents and no permission needed. That is what makes it the single most useful thing you can look at before viewing a used car.
What does it mean if the mileage goes down between tests?
It should not happen, and it needs an explanation. Legitimate causes exist — a replaced instrument cluster, or a reading entered wrongly by a tester — but both leave a paper trail somebody should be able to produce. Without one, treat it as the most serious thing in the record.
Is a car with several MOT failures a bad buy?
Not necessarily, and it can be the opposite. A fail followed by a retest pass within days shows an owner who dealt with problems as they appeared. What is worth more caution is a run of clean passes carrying the same advisories year after year, because nothing in that record was ever addressed.
Why is there a gap in the MOT history?
The car was not being used on the road — declared off-road, under long-term repair, abroad, or simply parked. None of those is automatically bad, but a car that sat still deteriorates in specific ways, so pay attention to what appears on the first test after the gap.
Does the MOT history show who owned the car?
No. It shows the vehicle’s tests, results, mileage and defects, and nothing about owners or where the tests took place. The number of tests and the pattern between them is all the record gives you about the people involved.
The conversion rates and the 376-day median on this page come from our own analysis of the DVSA MOT testing dataset — 145,103,213 advisories tracked across 216,057,619 pairs of consecutive tests on the same vehicles. Figures are grouped by DVSA defect category rather than by individual component.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.