The register, prepared
Everything on this site is free to read. What is sold is the work of turning eight regional CSVs into one clean, deduplicated, joinable table — and keeping it that way every week.
The pages of this site are free and will stay free : an official fact belongs to no one. What is sold here is the compilation work — extracting the DVSA operator licence register, reconciling it, dating it, and delivering it in a usable form.
What is worth buying is the flow, not the stock
The DVSA republishes this file every Sunday, and each publication overwrites the last. Nothing anywhere keeps the previous one. So the register can tell you that a licence is curtailed today; it cannot tell you that it was curtailed last month, or that an operator's authorised fleet went from 12 to 4.
We keep every publication. From the first collection on 2026-08-18, each week is compared with the one before and the differences are kept. That history cannot be reconstructed after the fact by anyone who did not start collecting — which is the whole reason the subscription is listed first below and the one-off snapshot last.
We do not publish a monthly rate of new licences, because we have collected once and do not know it. We will say what it is when we have measured it rather than estimated it.
- Change feed — GBP 300 / monthOr GBP 3 000 a year. At every collection, what came in, went out or changed since the previous one. This is the part that does not age.
- One slice — GBP 90 / monthThe feed restricted to a single traffic area or nation, for those who do not need the rest.
- Full snapshot — GBP 4 000, onceThe state of the register on the day of delivery, every field included. Listed last on purpose : a snapshot ages.
What you get, field by field
| Field | Description | Filled |
|---|---|---|
num | Licence number, the key. Two letters and seven digits. | 100.0 % |
operator | Operator name as registered. | 100.0 % |
licence_type | Restricted, Standard National or Standard International. | 100.0 % |
status | Valid, curtailed or suspended. | 100.0 % |
vehicles_authorised | Vehicles the licence permits. | 100.0 % |
trailers_authorised | Trailers the licence permits. | 100.0 % |
vehicles_specified | Vehicles actually specified on the licence. | 88.9 % |
operator_type | Limited company, sole trader, partnership. | 100.0 % |
company_number | Companies House number. | 78.5 % |
traffic_area | One of the eight traffic areas. | 100.0 % |
postcode_area | ⚠️ The postcode area of the operating centre, extracted from a free-text address and validated against the 121 real GB areas. | 99.6 % |
postcode_area_name | ⚠️ The town that names the area — B is Birmingham, PE is Peterborough. | 99.6 % |
nation | ⚠️ England, Scotland or Wales, derived from the area. | 99.6 % |
fleet_band | ⚠️ One of eight bands cut on the real distribution. | 100.0 % |
one_row_per_licence | ⚠️ The source ships one row per licence x director; this is deduplicated to one row per licence, so that any sum is correct. | 100.0 % |
The 5 fields marked ⚠️ do not exist in the source : we add them — a join, a normalisation, or a reconstructed history. That is the part a buyer cannot reproduce by downloading the official file.
The four fields marked with a warning sign are the reason to buy rather than download. The source ships 179,876 rows for 69,173 licences — one row per licence per named director — so every naive sum over the raw file is wrong by a factor of about 2.6. And the operating centre address is free text with no separator: pulling a usable geography out of it, and validating it against the real list of postcode areas rather than whatever the regular expression happened to match, is the join nobody else does.
What we do not sell, at any price: the named transport managers and directors. The source publishes them in clear on every row. They are dropped at ingestion and are in neither the site nor any file we deliver.
Order
Tell us what you need : we reply with a sample, the field dictionary, and an invoice. No payment is taken on this site — an order opens a conversation.
Prices in GBP, before any applicable tax. Delivered as CSV and Parquet, by download link. Every request is answered by hand.