What does a free car check actually show?

The two records everything is built on

The first is the DVLA vehicle record, exposed free through the Vehicle Enquiry Service and keyed on the registration mark alone. It returns tax status and due date, MOT status and expiry, make, colour, year of manufacture, month of first registration, engine capacity, fuel type, CO2 emissions, Euro status, wheelplan, revenue weight, type approval, whether the vehicle is marked for export, and the date the V5C was last issued.

The second is the DVSA MOT history, also free and also keyed on the registration. It covers tests since 2005 for cars, motorcycles and vans, and returns for each test the result, the date, the odometer reading the tester recorded, the defects that caused a failure, the minor defects and advisories, and the testing location. GOV.UK also surfaces possible vehicle recall information alongside it.

That is the complete raw material. Any free check offering something outside those two lists is either inferring it, buying it, or not actually providing it.

What is deliberately not in a free check

Four categories of information sit outside the free records, and understanding why is more useful than a list.

Outstanding finance is on a private register that lenders pay into and that resells lookups commercially — there is no government copy. Insurance write-off categories are recorded by insurers on MIAFTR, run by the Motor Insurers' Bureau, which is an industry database rather than a public one. Stolen markers come from police and industry sources with the same commercial structure. And service history is not a free-versus-paid question at all: there is no national service-history database in the UK, so nothing returns one from a registration.

This is why a genuinely free check cannot tell you a car is clean. It can tell you what two government registers contain. Absence of an adverse record in those registers is not evidence about registers they do not cover.

How to tell a real free check from a teaser

The commercial model of most "free check" sites is to show you enough of the free data to establish that they have data, then present the paid fields as blurred, padlocked or colour-coded so that the shape of an answer is visible without the answer.

That is legitimate marketing, but it changes what you should do next. A red icon next to "Finance" does not mean finance was found; nothing has been queried yet.

The tell is simple. Ask what happens when you never pay. If the free tier gives you the full MOT timeline including per-test mileage, the defects and the advisories, it is a real free check. If the MOT history itself is truncated or gated, the free tier is a shop window.

• Real free tier: full MOT timeline, every test, per-test mileage, defects and advisories, all visible
• Teaser: MOT history truncated to the latest test, or mileage hidden behind a sign-up
• Teaser: status icons for finance, write-off or stolen with no result behind them
• Email wall: a results page that requires an address is selling your contact details, not data
• Honest wording: a good check says "no record was returned", never "this car is clear"

What we show for free, stated exactly

Our free check returns the DVLA vehicle record and the complete DVSA MOT history for any UK registration on one page: tax status and due date, MOT status and expiry, make, colour, year, engine, fuel type, CO2 and Euro status, every MOT test since 2005 with the mileage the tester recorded, the defects and the advisories, and any open DVSA safety recall for that make and model. No card, no account, no email address.

We do not hold outstanding finance, insurance write-off records, stolen markers, insurance status or service history. We do not blur them or put an icon next to them, because we do not have them.

And the caveat we would want if we were the buyer: nothing here is a certificate. A clean result means nothing adverse appeared in the two government registers we can see. A car can have a spotless record and outstanding finance, an unrecorded accident repair, or no servicing at all.

HPI is a registered trade mark of HPI Limited. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to HPI Limited; the term appears only because it is what people search for when they mean a paid provenance report.

When to pay for more

The honest threshold is the value of the car against the cost of being wrong. Below a couple of thousand pounds, the free records plus a careful inspection and a look at the V5C are a defensible place to stop.

Above that, the three things you cannot get free — finance, write-off category, stolen markers — start to outweigh the price of a report, because any one of them can cost you the entire purchase.

If you do pay, read the wording on what a negative result means. Finance registration is voluntary and MIAFTR depends on insurers reporting, so any provider claiming certainty is overselling a probabilistic answer.