MG service history: who holds the record

MG's own service record

MG's dealer network logs services to a digital service record rather than a paper book. What we could not establish from MG's own published material is how consistently owners can see it themselves, or from what date the system applies — so treat the dealer, not an app, as the reliable route.

How to actually get it

1. Ask an MG dealer to check the Digital Service Record against the VIN.
2. Ask specifically whether every service in the book is on the system. MG's warranty conditions turn on the servicing schedule being followed with the right parts, and a service carried out outside the MG network may be perfectly valid yet digitally invisible.
3. Collect the invoices for anything that is not on the system.

What we could not verify

A row of sites will tell you all of this with total confidence. We checked MG's own published material and could not, so here is the list rather than a plausible guess. If one of these matters to your purchase, it is a question to put to the dealer directly.

• The date MG's UK network moved to digital records.
• Whether the My MG app reliably shows service history to owners.
• The precise terms of MG's extended warranty years and how they treat non-franchised servicing. MG's own warranty documents were not retrievable at the time of writing, so we are not summarising terms we have not read.

What the MOT trail shows about a MG

This is not a service history and cannot be turned into one — the MOT record says nothing about oil changes, cambelts or brake fluid. What it is, is the one independent record of the car’s life that the seller has never been able to touch. Two things in it are real evidence about maintenance: the mileage the invoices have to agree with, and what testers keep writing up.

The mileage spread is the number to take to a viewing. Half of all MG vehicles in our data average between 4,383 and 9,180 miles a year across their whole life. A car well outside that band is not automatically suspect — but it should match the story the seller and the invoices tell, and a service book whose intervals imply a very different annual mileage from the odometer is the discrepancy you came to find.

Read that list as a checklist rather than a verdict. Every item on it is something a service should have caught before a tester saw it, so when you look at a specific MG’s MOT history, the question is not whether these appear — they appear on most cars — but whether they appear and then stop. An advisory that is written up at three consecutive tests is a fault the owner was told about three times and left alone, and it is telling you more about how the car was looked after than the folder is.

Across all 31 makes we cover, 53.3% of latest tests logged at least one item, so treat MG's 43.9% as a brand-level comparison and nothing more. It says nothing about the particular car you are looking at, and brands whose fleets are younger and less heavily used will read lower for reasons that have nothing to do with servicing. For the individual car, run its registration.