MOT failure rates in Great Britain, 2024–25

Source. DVSA's anonymised MOT test results and failure items for calendar years 2024 and 2025, published on data.gov.uk under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The extracts held 85,365,121 test results; 80,417,823 were class 4 and 66,322,133 of those were initial tests with a pass, fail or PRS outcome.

What counts. Initial tests only (DVSA test type “NT”): retests are left out because a retest happens only after a failure. A test counts as failed if it was recorded as a fail or as PRS — passed after a fault was rectified at the testing station — because the vehicle arrived in a failing state. Abandoned and aborted tests are excluded. Class 4 covers cars, taxis, motor caravans and goods vehicles up to 3,000kg design gross weight, among others — which takes in most light vans and pick-ups.

Age. Whole years from the date of first use to the test date. Only ages 3 to 40 are included: the first MOT is due at three, and over forty most vehicles are exempt, so the few still tested are not representative. Tests with no date of first use, or DVLA's 1971 placeholder date, are excluded, as are the few with no recognised fuel type. That leaves 62,578,366 tests (3,071,967 were outside the age range, 666,559 had an unrecognised fuel, 5,236 had no usable first-use date and 5 had no make).

Fuel. Three groups: petrol (including LPG and other gas), diesel, and hybrid and electric together.

Failure categories. Our grouping of DVSA's defect sections into ten categories. A test is counted once in each category it failed in, however many faults it had there, so a test with three tyre faults and a brake fault counts once for wheels and tyres and once for brakes.

Makes and models. DVSA records make and model as free text (“FOCUS”, “FOCUS ZETEC”, “FOCUS 1.6 TDCI”), so we group model strings into model families using our own curated table. 98.7% of tests matched a family; the rest still count in the national figures above but not in any make or model. A model-and-fuel group is included only if it had at least 1,000 initial tests across the two years. Where DVSA records one model under several names (trim levels written into the model field) or one make under several (Smart), we count them together. The make recorded as “CHRYSLER JEEP” is left out: it is a combined make string DVSA records for both Chrysler and Jeep vehicles, so its figures describe no single make.

Comparing like with like. A make whose vehicles are mostly young will beat one whose vehicles are mostly old, whatever their quality. So for every make and model we work out the failure rate it would have if each of its vehicles failed at the national rate for its exact age (in years) and fuel group, and compare the real rate with that. This is indirect standardisation. “Same age & fuel” in the tables is that expected rate; “Difference” is how far the real rate is from it, in relative terms.

Uncertainty. Each difference is taken from the conservative end of a 95% confidence interval (Wilson score), so small samples are understated rather than overstated. A difference within 5% either way (10% for failure categories) is shown as “About the same”, and a category is compared only when at least 30 tests failed in it.

Thresholds. A make needs 1,000 initial tests for a page and a place in the tables, and 100,000 for the main league table. Model lists on this page need 20,000 tests (100,000 for the most-tested lists). An age band on a make or model page needs 1,000.

Comparing with DVSA's published rate. Our overall failure rate is 28.88%. DVSA publishes its own class-4 initial failure rate, recently around 27.5%. The two are not calculated on the same basis — ours covers calendar years 2024 and 2025 and only vehicles aged 3 to 40 with a known first-use date and fuel type, where DVSA reports by financial year — so they should not be compared directly.

Updates. DVSA publishes the anonymised data once a year; we rebuild these figures when it does. Data last processed 2026-09-17.