Best HPI check UK 2026: ranked by the job you're doing

Search for the best HPI check and you'll get a dozen providers, most of them ranked by a blog belonging to one of the other eleven. The part nobody puts at the top is that the finance, theft and write-off records are the same records whichever logo is on the report.

So "which is best" isn't really the question. The question is which one is best for the job you're doing today, and that changes depending on whether you're checking one car, five cars, an import, or an advert you've got open in another tab.

Which HPI check is best in the UK?

There isn't a single winner, and any page that names one is usually the company that owns it. Ranked by the job you're actually doing:

• Best for the data guarantee: HPI, at up to £30,000
• Cheapest full check with a guarantee: Total Car Check
• Best free tier: CarVeto, which gives away the whole MOT history including advisories
• Best for an imported car: carVertical
• Best for a car's past adverts: MotorCheck or Brego
• Best if you're reading an advert right now: Car Advert Check, which is us

Do different HPI checks show different data?

Not on the three things you're actually paying for. Outstanding finance comes from the lenders, theft markers come from the police, and write-off records come from the insurance industry, and every provider in the UK is reading those same registers. Nobody holds a private source the others can't see.

You don't have to take our word for that, because two of the biggest names say it themselves. The RAC sells its car data check as "Powered by HPI", from a company "checking vehicle history since 1938". The AA's vehicle check page says "Our vehicle checks are provided by HPI Limited. HPI is a Solera Company." Both read on 22 August 2026. Three of the most trusted brands in British motoring are one dataset wearing three coats.

HPI also publishes the registers it draws on, which is unusually open for the category: police (PNC), DVLA, finance companies, MIAFTR, SMMT, DVSA, manufacturers, leasing and rental companies, wholesalers, auctions, traders, dealerships and remarketing companies.

Once that's on the table, the ranking gets honest. You're not choosing between better and worse finance data. You're choosing on price, on the guarantee, on what each provider adds around the records, and on whether the report interprets anything or just lists it.

How we ranked these checks

Five criteria, applied to us as well as to everyone else: the price of one full check, the size of the data guarantee, what the free tier shows, what the report adds beyond the three registers, and whether it interprets the result or hands you a list.

One thing worth explaining before you read the tables. carVertical shows as "Not shown on their site", and that isn't a gap in our research: its pricing page hands straight to a JavaScript checkout that rendered no figure on either 22 August or 17 September 2026. Two other providers are missing from the ranking for the same reason, PlateInsight, which sells credits inside its app, and Check Car Details, which names its tiers in its FAQ without attaching a price to any of them.

A price only goes in these tables when it was read off the company's own page, never from a comparison blog. Those gave three different carVertical prices in the same month, which is the whole reason for the rule.

Best HPI check for the data guarantee: HPI

HPI, and it isn't close on the headline number. The guarantee runs to £30,000, for two years, on mainland GB vehicles, and it isn't transferable if you sell the car on.

Read the small print, though, because the number shrinks exactly where you'd want it largest: it drops to £15,000 for written-off vehicles. HPI's basic tier carries no guarantee at all and leaves out the mileage and write-off detail, so the guarantee belongs to the comprehensive report rather than to the brand.

HPI is also the name that went generic, the way Hoover did for vacuum cleaners. When someone says "get an HPI check" they almost always mean any provenance check. Worth knowing when you compare: hpi.co.uk itself shows no prices, and the figures sit on its separate checkout site.

What's the cheapest HPI check?

Total Car Check, outright, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. Gold is £9.99 with finance, valuation, salvage records and a £30,000 guarantee. Silver is £3.99 on its own, or £1.99 a car if you buy five, which is the number on their header.

The catch is in what Silver leaves out, and it's the expensive bit: no finance, no valuation and no salvage records. It still carries police stolen markers, write-off status, plate changes, ex-salvage records and keeper duration with a £10,000 guarantee, so "£1.99 a car in a five-pack without finance" is the honest sentence, not "£1.99 for a full check".

If you're checking several cars on a shortlist, a Silver pack for the first pass and one Gold check on the car you're actually going to see is a sensible way to spend eleven quid. But if outstanding finance on a used car is your main worry, and for a private sale it should be, you need the tier that includes it.

Best free car check: CarVeto

CarVeto, by a distance, and it's more generous than our own free scan on the raw provenance signal. Without paying anything you get the DVLA identity fields, tax and SORN status, the full MOT history including the advisory text, every MOT-recorded mileage, a basic keeper indicator, plate-change signals and CO2.

Total Car Check's free tier is the other strong one, with the full MOT history and a stolen check thrown in. HPI gives away an MOT history check with advisory notes, plus a valuation.

What no free tier anywhere shows is outstanding finance, and that's structural rather than mean: the data is licensed per lookup from the lenders, so nobody can give it away and stay in business. We've written up where that line falls in what a free car check actually gets you.

Best check for an imported car: carVertical

carVertical, and this is the one category where we simply can't compete. It's built around non-UK history, and it describes 1,000+ data sources across 45+ countries, damage records drawn from "over 330 million sources" and a billion-plus verified records, with recorded photographs of damage attached where it has them.

If the car was first registered abroad, or the seller mentions it was imported, a UK-only provenance check starts the story at the point the car arrived. carVertical is the one built for the years before that.

Two honest notes. Its free tier is a VIN decoder only, and its own blog says there's no free trial of the report. And its guarantee isn't money: it's a report credit back when key sections come back empty, which is a different promise from the £30,000 ones above.

Best check for a car's past adverts: MotorCheck or Brego

Two providers sell this and we don't, so this one's a straight concession.

MotorCheck's Previous Ads Check draws on a database its help centre describes as "over 1 billion previous ads published in the UK over the previous twelve years", and says 60% of its reports return at least one previous advert. Each record carries the listing date, how many days the car was up for sale, the asking price, the odometer reading at the time and who was advertising it. Brego does the same job from the other end, promising "every advert this car has ever had, not just today's listing", with price cuts, relists, days on market and mileage changes across adverts and MOTs in one timeline. Car Analytics sells a previous-adverts lookup as an add-on, and Check Car Details shows a listing history in its sample report.

That's a real product, it's useful, and our reports don't have it. If you want to know the car has been relisted four times since March at a dropping price, those are the ones to buy.

The distinction that survives the concession is narrow, and worth saying plainly: an advert-history check reads adverts that have already ended. It doesn't read the one in front of you. If you'd rather go looking yourself first, we've covered how to find a car's previous adverts the free way.

Best check if you're reading an advert: Car Advert Check

Ours, and it's the only category on this page we win, so here's the claim stated narrowly enough to defend.

Nothing on any of these providers' public pages, as checked on 17 September 2026, describes reading the text of a specific advert against that car's MOT history and a model-specific faults database. Several come close in part, and they deserve the credit. Brego's homepage describes an AI review of the listing photos and the seller's description. Carhealth's sample report carries AI analysis, a buyer's guide and model faults with cost ranges attached. CarCostCheck maps MOT advisories to typical UK garage prices. PlateInsight scores reliability from 1.67 million MOT tests per model. CarVeto's paid report gives you a risk score with purchase guidance.

All of it starts from the registration, and none of it has seen what the seller wrote.

Is there a free HPI check?

No, and anyone advertising one is using the phrase loosely. "HPI check" is shorthand for a provenance check covering outstanding finance, theft markers and write-off records, and all three come from commercial databases that charge per lookup.

What free tiers genuinely give you is the DVLA registration record and the DVSA MOT history, which is more useful than most buyers expect. Every mileage reading the car has had at test sits in that record, which makes it the cheapest way there is to spot a clocked car. What it won't do is tell you whether the person selling the car is allowed to, or whether it's recorded as stolen.

Most "free car check" pages are lead generators. The free tier exists to put a padlock icon next to the finance result.

What none of these checks will tell you

Two things, and nobody on this page closes either at any price.

The first is unrecorded accident damage. A provenance check only knows about crashes that became insurance claims, and plenty never do. Pay a bodyshop in cash and nothing enters any register, so a car can have had a heavy front-end rebuild and still return a spotless result. The second is repair quality. Even where a write-off is properly recorded, no database says whether it was put back together well, which is the whole problem with Cat N and Cat S cars.

There's a longer list in what an HPI check won't tell you, including the one that catches buyers out most often: a clean check is a statement about paperwork, not about the car.

Which check should you actually run?

Start with the concession, because it's the thing that makes the rest worth reading. We don't sell better provenance data than anyone above. Our finance result comes from the lenders, our theft marker from the police and our write-off record from the insurance industry, exactly like theirs. If it comes back clear on HPI it comes back clear on ours. We don't offer a £30,000 guarantee, we hold no non-UK history, and we cost several times a £1.99 Silver check.

What happens to the records is the part that differs. Every provider on this page pulls the same three registers. Ours is the only one that then reads them against the advert you're looking at and the car's full MOT advisory history, and turns the lot into a single verdict instead of a page of fields.

The Provenance Check runs the same official lookups, then folds in three inputs no registration lookup takes:

• The advert text. What the seller wrote, and more usefully what they carefully didn't. The advert isn't data anyone files, so no plate lookup has ever seen it.
• The full DVSA MOT advisory history. Not the pass or fail, but which advisories keep coming back year after year, which is the closest thing to a condition report you can get.
• Our known-faults database. 736 documented faults across 41 makes, carrying 2,103 advert phrases between them, matched to this model with what each one costs to put right. The model problem pages are built from the same data.

Then it scores the lot as one answer. Finance, a theft marker or a write-off doesn't arrive as a line item for you to weigh up, it pushes the report straight to its highest risk rating, because those three aren't things you negotiate around. A Cat N on a car whose MOT record is already telling a story reads very differently from a Cat N on a car that's been looked after, and the report says which one you're holding.

Two things it still can't do, and they're the same two nobody else can do either: it won't find unrecorded damage, and it won't tell you whether a repair was any good. Those need your eyes and a ramp.

So, practically. If you've got an advert open and you want to know whether the car is worth the drive, run the free scan on that advert. It reads the wording against the MOT history and gives you a verdict and the biggest single finding, with no card and no password. If you're at the point of handing money over, the Provenance Check adds the finance, theft and write-off records and includes the full Smart Check with it, so there's no second purchase to make. And a free report upgrades on the same link without rerunning anything, so starting free costs you nothing even if the answer turns out to be walk away.

The ranking in one table

Providers move their prices and their tiers, sometimes monthly, so treat the date under that table as part of the claim rather than decoration. If one of them has changed something, tell us and we'll go and re-check it.

And whichever name you go with, remember what you're buying. A provenance check tells you what the car has survived on paper. Working out what it's about to cost you is a different job entirely.