How to read an MOT history properly

The MOT history is free, public, and the most useful thing you can read about a used car. It is also the thing most buyers skim for a pass or a fail and then close.

Read properly, it tells you how a car has been treated for its whole life — and it is very hard to fake, because it is the tester's record rather than the seller's.

You can look up any registration at gov.uk/check-mot-history. Here is what to actually look for.

Start with the mileage, not the results

Every MOT records the odometer reading. Put them in order and you have a graph of the car's life.

What normal looks like: a steady climb, roughly 6,000 to 12,000 miles a year, with the gaps between tests broadly consistent.

What should stop you:

• A reading that goes down. Mileage does not decrease. Either the clock has been wound back, the cluster was replaced, or someone typed it wrong. All three need an explanation.
• A sudden flat spell. Three years at 2,000 miles a year on a car that previously did 12,000 usually means it sat somewhere, often unwell.
• A sudden jump. 30,000 miles in one year on a car that averaged 8,000 suggests it changed hands to a very different kind of use.

A car with 140,000 honest motorway miles is frequently a better buy than one with 70,000 stop-start town miles. The number matters less than the shape.

Then read the advisories, not the passes

A pass tells you the car met the minimum standard on that day. The advisories tell you what the tester was worried about — and that is the interesting part.

Look for the same advisory appearing year after year. "Nearside front tyre worn close to the legal limit" once is a tyre. The same advisory three years running means nobody has fixed it, and that tells you how the car has been looked after.

Watch particularly for advisories that recur and escalate: corrosion noted, then corrosion advisory, then corrosion failure. That is a car rusting on a schedule.

Failures are not automatically bad

A failure followed by a pass a day or two later is completely normal — the car went in, something failed, it was fixed, it was retested. That is the system working.

What is worth a question is a failure followed by a long silence, then a pass months later at a different tester. Or repeated failures for the same item.

Also look for dangerous defects. Since 2018 defects are graded, and a "dangerous" marker means the car should not have been driven away. One is not damning. A pattern is.

Look for the gaps

An MOT is required annually once a car is three years old. A missing year means one of three things: the car was off the road, it was SORN, or the history has a hole in it. All are worth asking about, and the answer is usually mundane. But ask.

Cross-check against the service history

If the seller shows you a service book with a stamp at 90,000 miles in June 2022, and the MOT that month reads 74,000, one of those documents is wrong. This is the single easiest way to catch a doctored history, and almost nobody does it.

What we do with it

We publish the complete MOT history on every listing — every pass, every failure, every advisory, every mileage reading, pulled straight from the DVSA. Not a summary, and not just the good years.

We do it because the alternative is asking you to take our word for the condition of a car we bought at auction, and there is no reason you should. It also means the awkward conversations happen before you drive over rather than after.

If a listing anywhere does not show you the MOT history, it takes thirty seconds to look up yourself. Do it before you travel, not after.