Licensed Vehicles & New Registrations (DVLA)
Every vehicle licensed in Great Britain, counted by neighbourhood — by body type, fuel, make, model and whether it is privately or company owned. The free way to find where the vans, the lorries or the electric cars actually are.
Motor trade & automotive Energy Logistics Retail Transport & travel
| Publisher | Department for Transport / DVLA |
|---|---|
| Licence | Open Government Licence v3 what this means |
| Updates | Updated quarterly |
| Cost | Free — open data |
| Last verified | 2026-07-16 |
What your business can use it for
Territory planning
Size each patch by the vehicles actually in it — vans for a trade supplier, HGVs for a truck dealer, EVs for a charging installer — down to neighbourhood level.
Sales prospecting
Find the neighbourhoods where your market already exists: where electric cars cluster, where company fleets sit, where the old diesels still are.
Market analysis
Track how the vehicle mix is shifting in your area and nationally — the underlying evidence for any claim about EV adoption or fleet renewal.
Works with data you already have
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Your territory, catchment or site postcodes
Postcodes
Published by LSOA — map your postcodes to LSOA with the free ONS lookup and join on the LSOA code
How to get it
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Bulk download
Vehicle licensing statistics data files (VEH series)
No account needed, CSV throughout. Quarterly tables give vehicle stock by small area; annual tables go deeper on make, model and engine size. Quarterly data lands three to four months after the quarter ends.
What's involved in using it
- The figures are laid out with a separate column for every quarter or year, so before you can join them to anything else someone has to reshape the file from wide to tall — an unavoidable technical step.
- Small counts are replaced with a "[c]" symbol to protect privacy, so the number columns aren't purely numeric and have to be cleaned before you can add anything up.
- The finest location it goes down to is a small statistical neighbourhood, not a postcode, so linking it to your own patch needs the free ONS postcode lookup and some rolling-up.
Worth knowing before you start
- Vehicles are counted at the registered keeper's address, which for company cars and fleets is head office — not where the vehicle is driven or parked. It badly distorts fleet-heavy areas.
- The small area (LSOA) is the finest grain published. There is no postcode-level or even local-authority breakdown in the quarterly tables.
- Areas that have never had five or more vehicles in scope are excluded and rolled into a miscellaneous row, so the parts add up to less than the whole.
- The publisher warns that make, model, fuel and engine-size fields have recording inconsistencies, and that imported, pre-1972 and rare variants are patchy.
- Great Britain only — Northern Ireland licenses vehicles separately.
- It counts vehicles, not owners. A household with three cars is three rows' worth of stock, not three customers.
Ask us about Licensed Vehicles & New Registrations (DVLA)
Ask a factual question about Licensed Vehicles & New Registrations (DVLA) — what it covers, how often it changes, whether it matches the records you keep — and we will answer, free. Or tell us what you are trying to work out, and we will tell you what it would take to get this data working next to the numbers you already have.