[LOOKUP BOX] Reg input. Button reads Check tax status. Returns tax status, expiry, SORN status and MOT expiry together. Free, no account.

Enter a registration and you will see whether the bike is taxed, when it runs out, whether a SORN is in force, and when the MOT expires. It takes a couple of seconds, it costs nothing, and you do not need an account.

The rest of this page is what the answer means, what the bike will cost you to tax, and the two rules that catch people out when they buy.

What it costs to tax a motorbike

Bike tax runs on engine size and nothing else. Not emissions, not power, not what the thing is worth. A 30-year-old 600 and a brand new one sit in the same band.

These are the rates from 1 April 2026.

Four things in that table are worth pulling out, because they are not obvious.

A sidecar changes nothing. The tax class covers motorcycles with or without a sidecar, at the same rate. This is worth knowing because a sidecar does change your MOT fee, so people reasonably assume it changes the tax too. It does not.

Under 151cc you cannot buy six months. Small bikes are twelve months or nothing, which catches out anyone laying a 125 up for winter and expecting to buy half a year. Your options are a full year or a SORN.

Paying monthly costs 5 per cent more. Every band works out the same way: £27 becomes £28.35, £125 becomes £131.25. Spreading the cost is a reasonable thing to do, and it is worth knowing what the convenience is priced at.

The step from 600cc is the big one. Going from a 600 to a 650 adds £35 a year, which is the largest jump in the table and the only one worth thinking about when you are choosing between two bikes. Everything below that is small money.

Trikes follow a different table. A trike up to 150cc or zero emission is £27, and any other trike is £125 flat. Anything over 450kg stops being taxed as a bike at all and moves into the private light goods class, which is a different and considerably larger number.

The rule that catches every used bike buyer

Tax does not transfer with the bike.

When a bike is sold, the seller's tax is cancelled and the DVLA refunds them the full months remaining. Nothing carries across to you. That means every used bike you buy is untaxed the moment it becomes yours, whatever the seller's paperwork says and whatever the lookup showed yesterday.

So the sequence matters. You tax the bike before you ride it away, not after. You can do it on your phone at the kerb using the 12-digit reference on the green new keeper slip, which is the part of the V5C the seller hands you at the point of sale. No slip means no reference, which means no tax, which means the bike goes home on a van.

Riders get caught by this constantly, because the tax disc disappeared in 2014 and there is nothing on the bike to remind anyone. A check that says "taxed" the day before you buy is telling you about the seller's tax, not yours.

What you need to tax it

A reference number. Either the 16-digit number on a V11 reminder, the 11-digit number on your own V5C, or the 12-digit number on the green new keeper slip if you have just bought the bike.

A valid MOT, if the bike is old enough to need one. The system checks automatically and will refuse you if the MOT has expired. Bikes need their first MOT at three years old, so a newer bike passes this without one.

Insurance. The system checks the Motor Insurance Database rather than asking for a document, so the policy needs to be live and showing against that registration before you try. A policy bought five minutes ago may not have reached the database yet.

If the V5C is missing entirely, you cannot tax the bike until you apply for a replacement. That is worth establishing before money changes hands rather than after, and a seller who cannot produce a logbook has given you a reason to pause on more than just the tax.

SORN, and why bikes use it more than cars

A SORN is a declaration that the bike is off the road. It is free, it stops the tax, and it refunds you the full months you have left.

Bikes get laid up over winter far more than cars do, so on a bike a SORN is ordinary rather than a warning sign. A gap in the tax record from October to March on a machine that was sitting in a garage is exactly what a sensible owner does.

What a SORN does not allow is any use of the road at all. Not a quick run to check it starts, not moving it to a different parking spot, not around the block to charge the battery. The only exception is riding to a pre-booked MOT appointment. A bike parked on a public road cannot be SORN either; off the road means private land, a garage or a driveway.

When you are buying, read the SORN pattern against the story. Three consecutive winters of SORN on a bike advertised as an all-year commuter is a question worth asking. The same pattern on a summer-only sports bike is just an owner doing the right thing.

What happens if it is not taxed

Worth being plain about, because the penalties work differently depending on whether the bike is being used.

Sitting there untaxed. The DVLA runs its register against its own records and issues an automatic late licensing penalty of £80, reduced to £40 if you pay within 33 days. Ignore it and it goes to a debt collection agency. This applies to the registered keeper whether or not the bike has moved.

Used on the road with no SORN. An out of court settlement of £30 plus one and a half times the outstanding tax. If that goes unpaid it becomes a criminal matter, and the magistrates' penalty is £1,000 or five times the tax chargeable, whichever is greater. The bike can be clamped, and getting it back costs more again.

Used on the road while a SORN is in force. The same out of court settlement, at £30 plus twice the outstanding tax. Riding a machine you have declared off the road is treated more seriously than simply forgetting to tax it.

None of this puts points on your licence. It is money, and on a bike it is money that can quickly exceed what the tax would have cost for several years.

Classic bikes: the gap nobody warns you about

If your bike is around 40 years old, the tax and the MOT stop applying at different times, and assuming they move together is how people end up taxing a bike they did not need to or riding one they should not have.

MOT exemption starts on the bike's 40th birthday. The day it turns 40, provided it has not been substantially altered.

Tax exemption starts on the 1 April after that. The historic tax class runs on build year rather than birthday. From 1 April 2026, bikes built before 1 January 1986 qualify. A bike built any time in 1986 waits until 1 April 2027, however many candles were on the cake.

So there is a window, sometimes most of a year, where a bike needs no MOT but still needs taxing. Riders who assume the two arrived together end up with a late licensing penalty on a machine they thought was exempt from everything.

And it is not automatic. You have to apply to move the bike into the historic tax class. Until you do, you keep paying whatever your engine size says, no matter how old the bike is. Once you are in the class, you still tax it every year, at £0, and you still declare a SORN if it goes off the road. The paperwork does not stop, only the payment does.

One more thing specific to bikes. A machine on a Q plate, or one assembled from parts of different makes and models, counts as substantially changed, which means it does not get the MOT exemption even at 40 years old. Plenty of older bikes have been rebuilt from more than one donor, and this is where that history shows up.

Checking tax on a bike you are buying

Run the registration before you travel. It costs nothing and it tells you three useful things at once.

Whether the bike is what the seller says it is. The lookup returns the DVLA's own record of make, model and engine size. An advert describing a 600 against a record showing something else is a conversation worth having early.

Whether the story holds together. Tax and SORN dates sit alongside the MOT record, and the two should tell the same story about how the bike has been used. A machine advertised as ridden every weekend with four years of continuous SORN was not.

What it will cost you to run. The engine size in the record puts the bike in one of the bands above, so you know the annual figure before you commit rather than after.

What the tax status will not tell you is whether the bike has finance owing, has been recorded as stolen, or carries a write-off marker. Those sit on registers the DVLA does not hold, and they are what a full history check covers. Tax status is the cheapest sanity check available and the shallowest.

FAQs

How do I check if a motorbike is taxed?

Enter the registration in the box on this page. You will get tax status, expiry date, SORN status and MOT expiry together, free and without an account. The government's own vehicle enquiry service will also confirm tax status if you prefer to go direct.

How much is road tax on a motorbike?

It depends only on engine size. From April 2026 it is £27 a year up to 150cc, £59 from 151 to 400cc, £90 from 401 to 600cc, and £125 over 600cc. Paying monthly by direct debit adds about 5 per cent.

Does motorbike tax transfer when I buy a bike?

No. The seller's tax is cancelled and refunded to them when the bike is sold, so every used bike is untaxed the moment you buy it. Tax it before you ride it away, using the 12-digit reference on the green new keeper slip.

Can I tax a motorbike without an MOT?

Only if the bike does not need one. Bikes under three years old have no MOT requirement yet, and bikes in the historic tax class are exempt. Otherwise the system checks the MOT record and will refuse.

Do I need to tax a 125?

Yes, at £27 a year. There is no exemption for small capacity, and under 151cc you cannot buy a six-month licence, so it is a full year or a SORN.

When does a classic motorbike become tax exempt?

On the 1 April after it turns 40, based on build year. From 1 April 2026 that means bikes built before 1 January 1986. It is not automatic; you have to apply to change the tax class, and you still tax it annually at £0.