Almost nothing advertised as a free motorbike check is free in the way you would expect. The pattern is familiar to anyone who has tried one. You enter a registration, you see the make, model and colour come back, and then a message appears telling you the bike has issues or red flags you will need to pay to view. The free part was DVLA data that cost the website nothing to fetch. The actual check sat behind a paywall the whole time.

Ours works differently, and the rest of this page sets out exactly where the line falls and why it falls there. No card, no account, no drip-feed.

What you get for nothing

Enter a registration and the free check returns 16 data points on any UK-registered motorbike, scooter, moped or trike. All of it, immediately, with nothing held back for an upsell.

The bike itself. Make, model, engine size, year of first registration, colour, fuel type, kerb weight and body type, exactly as the DVLA holds them. Useful straight away, because a surprising number of adverts describe the wrong model year or the wrong capacity.

Legal status. Whether the bike is currently taxed and when that runs out, whether the MOT is valid and when it expires, and whether a SORN declaration is active. Bikes sit off the road over winter far more often than cars do, so a SORN in January tells you very little on its own. A SORN in July, on a bike being advertised as a daily ride, is worth a question.

Full MOT history. Every recorded test, with passes, failures, advisories and the exact wording of each one. This is the most useful thing in the free report by a distance. Advisories repeat themselves when a fault has been ignored rather than fixed, and a bike carrying the same corrosion or brake advisory three years running tells you more about how it has been looked after than any advert ever will.

Mileage at every test. The odometer reading logged at each MOT, in order, so you can see whether the numbers climb the way they should.

Plate change indicator. Whether the registration has been changed at any point.

That is the whole free report. There is no second tier of free, no email wall, and no limit on how many bikes you run through it.

One caveat worth knowing on newer bikes

A motorbike does not need its first MOT until it is three years old. On a bike younger than that, the free check will come back thin through no fault of the data, because there simply are no test records yet.

This matters more on bikes than on cars, because a two-year-old bike with 800 miles on the clock is a completely normal thing to find for sale, and there is no independent record to confirm it. On a nearly-new bike, the paid records carry proportionally more weight.

What the free check cannot show you, and why

There are five things the free check will never tell you, on any bike: whether it still has finance owing, whether it has been reported stolen, whether an insurer has written it off, whether it has been scrapped, and how many keepers it has had.

That is not a commercial decision dressed up as a limitation. It comes down to where the data lives.

The details in the free report come from the DVLA and the DVSA. Government data, available to any provider through official channels, at effectively no cost per lookup. Giving it away is easy, which is why every site in this market does.

The five items above come from somewhere else entirely. Finance agreements sit with the credit reference agencies. Write-off records sit on Vehicle Salvage & Theft Data, the register insurers maintain between themselves, known until recently as MIAFTR. Stolen markers come from the Police National Computer. None of those are public, and every provider who queries them is charged a fee for each individual lookup.

So when a site promises a free finance or stolen check, one of two things is true. Either it is not checking those records, or it is about to ask for your card. There is no third option.

We would rather tell you that plainly than let you find out at the paywall.

Free against full, side by side

How to use a free check properly

The sensible way to use this is as a filter rather than a decision.

Run every bike on your shortlist through the free check before you contact a single seller. It costs nothing and takes seconds, and it will remove two or three of them on the spot. A bike whose advert says 12,000 miles when the last MOT recorded 31,000 is not worth a phone call.

Read the advisories properly on whatever survives that first pass. Look for the same fault appearing across consecutive years, which usually means it was noted and never dealt with. Corrosion advisories on frames and brake lines are worth more attention than a worn tyre, because a tyre is a fifty pound problem and structural corrosion is not.

Then check the mileage pattern against the bike's age and type. A commuter scooter doing 4,000 miles a year is unremarkable. A sports bike showing the same is either a garage queen or is not telling you the truth, and the physical wear on the pegs, grips and sprockets will settle which.

By that point you will usually be down to one or two bikes you want. Those are the ones to pay for, and paying on two is a great deal cheaper than travelling to see six.

When the free check and the advert disagree

Sooner or later a free check will contradict something a seller has told you, and how you handle that moment decides whether you get a straight answer or a story.

Raise it early and raise it plainly. A message saying the last MOT recorded 31,000 miles rather than the 12,000 in the advert will get one of two responses. A genuine seller will explain it, usually because they have listed the wrong figure or are quoting the mileage from when they bought it. Someone hoping you would not look will become vague, or the bike will suddenly have another buyer.

Some contradictions have innocent explanations more often than not. An MOT gap of two years on a bike that was declared SORN over two winters is normal. A plate change is usually somebody who bought a private registration and later sold it on.

Others rarely do. A bike advertised as one owner with an MOT trail that jumps between opposite ends of the country every eighteen months is worth a longer conversation.

The free data gives you the questions. It will not give you the answers on finance, theft or write-off status, which is where most sellers who are hiding something are hiding it.

What you can already get from GOV.UK

Some of what is in our free report is available directly from the government, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

The DVLA vehicle enquiry service will confirm tax status, MOT expiry and basic bike details from a registration. The separate DVSA service will show you the MOT history, including test results and mileage. Both are free, both are official, and both are perfectly good for what they do.

What they will not do is put it in one place, flag the patterns for you, or add anything beyond their own remit. You will be working across two government services, reading raw test records, and doing the comparison yourself. Neither will tell you a thing about finance, theft or write-offs.