Vehicle tax on a used car

Vehicle excise duty is the running cost people most often get wrong when buying used, for three reasons: it does not transfer with the car, the amount depends on when the car was first registered rather than on what it is, and the rules have changed more than once in the last decade.

It does not transfer

When a vehicle changes hands, any remaining tax does not go with it. The seller applies for a refund of full remaining months; the buyer must tax it in their own name before driving it. A car cannot legally be driven away untaxed on the strength of the previous keeper’s disc — there has been no disc for years, and enforcement is automatic against the register.

The rate depends on the registration date

Different systems apply to cars registered in different periods, which is why a general statement about “the road tax on that model” is close to useless. The government publishes the rate tables and, more usefully for a buyer, a lookup that returns the current rate for a specific registration.

For cars registered from April 2017 onwards there is a CO2-based first-year rate followed by a flat standard rate from the second year, and an additional supplement for cars whose list price when new exceeded a threshold, payable for a defined period. For cars registered before that, the annual rate is banded by CO2 throughout the vehicle’s life — which is why an older car with a large engine can cost considerably more to tax than a newer one that is worth far more money.

The threshold amounts and the rates themselves change with each Budget. Deliberately, this page does not quote them: look them up against the registration on the day.

Electric cars are no longer exempt

Battery electric vehicles lost their long-standing exemption from vehicle excise duty in April 2025. They now pay a first-year rate and then the standard rate like anything else, and the expensive-car supplement can apply to them as well, at a higher list-price threshold than for petrol and diesel cars. Any advice written before 2025 that says electric cars are free to tax is out of date.

How to get the real number

Use the DVLA services rather than a model-level generalisation:

• The vehicle enquiry service returns the tax status, when it expires, the first registration date, the CO2 figure and the emissions status for a given registration.
• The tax service will tell you the current rate for the vehicle when you go to tax it, using the reference number from the log book.

Do this before you agree a price. On some older large-engined cars the annual tax is a significant fraction of what the car itself is worth.

Not the same thing as emissions charges

Vehicle tax is a national tax on keeping a vehicle. The ULEZ and clean air zone charges are local charges for driving one in a particular place. A car can be cheap to tax and still liable for a daily charge, or expensive to tax and entirely exempt from charges. Check both.