About this site
A search layer over one public register. Not the register itself, and not a substitute for it.
The source
Everything here comes from one dataset: Traffic Commissioners: goods and public service vehicle operator licence records, published by the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency on data.gov.uk under the UK Open Government Licence. It is eight regional CSV files, refreshed weekly.
The dataset was first published on 2014-09-12. There is nothing new about the data — what did not exist is a way to search it. The official file is a download, not a lookup: to answer “is this licence in normal standing?” you have to know which of the eight regional files to open, and then find one row among tens of thousands.
This copy was collected on 2026-08-18 and holds 69,173 licences.
What this site is not
- Not the official register. It does not replace consulting DVSA or the Office of the Traffic Commissioner, and a restriction can be lifted the week after our collection.
- Not a quality mark. Holding a licence is the minimum legal requirement to operate goods vehicles. It says nothing about whether an operator is any good.
- Not affiliated with DVSA, the Traffic Commissioners or the Department for Transport.
- Not a broker. Where this site invites you to describe something you need moved, it passes the requirement on. It does not quote, hold prices, or take a booking.
What is deliberately left out
The source publishes, on every one of its 179,876 rows, the names of transport managers and directors as natural persons. This site removes both at the point the file is read, before anything is written to a database. They appear on no page, in no search index, and in no dataset we deliver. Street addresses are dropped in the same pass: the geography here goes no finer than the postcode area.
Neither omission is a technical limitation we might relax later. Republishing a searchable index of who directs which haulier would create something the source does not make searchable, and that is a decision, not an accident.
Coverage
Great Britain only. Northern Ireland runs a separate operator licensing system, and its licences are not in this file. Of the 69,173 licences, 306 have an operating centre address from which no valid postcode area could be read; they are searchable but appear on no area page.