Five sources, and none of them are ours.

A history check is not a database somebody built. It is a set of official and industry registers, queried in one go and presented in one place. Knowing which register each answer comes from tells you how much weight to put on it.

The five sources

DVLA. The vehicle record. Make, model, engine capacity, year of first registration, colour, weight, fuel type, tax status, SORN status, keeper count and keeper change dates, plate and colour changes, and import and export markers. This is the machine's official identity.

DVSA. The test record. Every MOT, the result, the mileage logged at the time, and the full wording of every advisory and failure item.

The finance registers. Held by the credit reference agencies. Outstanding hire purchase, PCP, conditional sale and lease agreements, with the lender, the agreement type and the start date. Note what is not here: an unsecured personal loan used to buy a bike is a debt between a person and their bank, carries no claim against the machine, and does not appear.

Vehicle Salvage & Theft Data (VS&TD). The insurance industry's own register, run by the Motor Insurers' Bureau. Write-off categories, the date recorded, the insurer where available, and salvage entries.

This register was known as the Motor Insurance Anti-Fraud and Theft Register (MIAFTR) until 24 November 2025, when it moved into the MIB's Navigate platform and was renamed. You will still see the old name used widely, including by providers who have not updated their own pages.

This is the only reliable record of a Cat N write-off, because Cat N does not require the logbook to be surrendered and so leaves no trace on the DVLA record.

One limitation worth stating: reporting into this register is done by subscribing insurers, so a write-off handled entirely outside the insurance system was never recorded anywhere.

The Police National Computer. Theft markers. Whether a bike is currently recorded as stolen by its keeper or their insurer, and whether its V5C appears on the register of stolen documents.

Which source answers which question

Why some of it is free and some is not

The split is not a commercial decision dressed up as a limitation. It follows the cost of the query.

DVLA and DVSA data is government data, available through official channels at effectively no cost per lookup. Giving it away costs us nothing, which is why every site in this market does.

The finance registers, VS&TD and the Police National Computer are not public. Every provider who queries them is charged a fee for each individual lookup, every time. Nobody in the country can absorb that across unlimited free checks, which is why any site advertising a free finance or stolen check is either not querying those records or is about to ask for your card.

The part most providers do not say out loud

The provenance data behind a £19.99 branded report and a £[X.XX] one is coming from the same registers.

The stolen, finance and write-off data comes from the same underlying databases whether you pay £4.99 or £19.99. Every paid service pulls from broadly the same sources, and the difference is what each of them does with the data.

We would rather tell you that than let you believe the price difference buys better records. What the price buys is presentation, interpretation, support and whatever guarantee sits behind it. Ours is interpreted for bikes: two identifiers rather than one, mileage analysis that understands there is no test record before three years, and write-off guidance written around what happens to motorcycles.

What the data cannot do

Registers record what somebody reported. That produces four known limits, and being clear about them is more useful than pretending otherwise.

Recency. A bike stolen this morning may not be on the police record this afternoon. Settlement of a finance agreement can take weeks to show as settled.

Unreported events. A crash repaired privately with no insurance claim was never recorded anywhere. Plenty of dropped bikes never touch a claims database.

Errors. Mileages get mistyped at test centres. A transposed figure produces an apparent anomaly that is nothing at all.

Cloning. A properly cloned bike carries a clean identity by design, because the identity belongs to a real and legitimate machine. This is why the frame and engine number verification matters alongside the register checks.

A history check narrows the risk considerably. It does not remove it, and it does not replace looking at the bike.

FAQs

Do you hold your own database?

No, and neither does anyone else in this market. The registers belong to the DVLA, the DVSA, the credit reference agencies, the insurance industry and the police. Providers query them.

How current is the data?

It reflects the registers at the moment of the query. How quickly an event reaches a register varies by source, from close to immediate for a theft report through to several weeks for a finance settlement.

Why did my bike return no MOT history?

Almost always because it is under three years old and has not needed a test. Also possible after a very recent plate transfer, or on a registration too new to have reached the public dataset.