An MOT advisory is the tester telling you, in writing, what's going to need money soon. On a car you own it's a reminder. On a car you're thinking of buying it's the most honest thing anyone has ever written about it, and it's free to read.
The trick isn't reading one advisory. It's reading all of them, test after test, and seeing which ones got fixed and which ones just kept being written down.
How do you check MOT advisories?
Put the registration into the GOV.UK MOT history service. It's free, you only need the number plate, and for cars it shows every test since 2005: pass or fail, the mileage recorded on the day, and every failure item, minor defect and advisory the tester wrote down.
That's the whole lookup. Where people go wrong is what they do next, which is look at the most recent test, see "Pass", and close the tab. The latest result tells you the car was legal on one day. The advisories across every test tell you how it's been looked after.
If you'd rather not do it by hand, our free scan runs the same official record, lines the advisories up across the years and marks the ones that keep coming back. GOV.UK gives you the list. It doesn't tell you which line matters.
What does an advisory mean on an MOT?
An advisory means the part passed, but the tester thinks it's heading towards a fail. DVSA's own wording is that the problem "could become more serious in the future" and the action is to "monitor and repair it if necessary". The car still passes, and nothing obliges the owner to do anything about it before the next test.
DVSA's MOT blog put it more usefully when the categories changed in 2018: advisories are "very similar to minor defects but rather than a component already being defective, they indicate a component will become defective soon". That's the line worth remembering when you're buying. An advisory is a forecast, and you're the one who'll be owning the car when it comes true.
What's the difference between minor, major and dangerous defects?
Since 20 May 2018 every MOT item lands in one of five outcomes. Two of them fail the car, three of them don't:
| Result | What DVSA says it means | Pass or fail | What you're told to do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dangerous | "A direct and immediate risk to road safety or has a serious impact on the environment" | Fail | "Do not drive the vehicle until it's been repaired" |
| Major | "It may affect the vehicle's safety, put other road users at risk or have an impact on the environment" | Fail | "Repair it immediately" |
| Minor | "No significant effect on the safety of the vehicle or impact on the environment" | Pass | "Repair as soon as possible" |
| Advisory | "It could become more serious in the future" | Pass | "Monitor and repair it if necessary" |
| Pass | "It meets the minimum legal standard" | Pass | "Make sure it continues to meet the standard" |
Source: DVSA's MOT changes announcement.
The bit that matters for a buyer is the gap between minor and advisory. A minor defect is something already wrong that the tester let through. An advisory is something not wrong yet. Both pass, both show up in the history, and a car can collect a long list of both without ever failing.
What are the most common MOT advisories and failures?
Lights, suspension, tyres and brakes, in that order. DVSA publishes the figures every quarter, and for cars and light vans in the year to March 2026 the biggest initial failure categories were:
| Category | Share of tests failing on it |
|---|---|
| Lamps, reflectors and electrical equipment | 10.44% |
| Suspension | 8.90% |
| Tyres | 6.23% |
| Brakes | 6.10% |
| Visibility (wipers, washers, windscreen, mirrors) | 4.28% |
| Body, chassis and structure | 3.23% |
| Noise, emissions and leaks | 3.08% |
| Steering | 1.94% |
Source: DVSA, MOT testing data for Great Britain, classes 3 and 4, financial year 2025 to 2026. In all, 27.51% of those tests failed first time.
Advisories cluster in the same places, because an advisory is mostly a failure that hasn't happened yet. The ones you'll see most often on a used car fall into five groups:
- Tyres: "close to legal limit", "worn on edge", "slight damage to sidewall". The legal minimum on a car is 1.6mm across the central three-quarters of the tread, per the Highway Code. Cheap on their own. An edge-worn pair says something about the tracking or the suspension.
- Brakes: pads or discs "wearing thin", "slightly pitted", a pipe "slightly corroded". Pads and discs are a service item. Corroded brake pipes are a different thing, because they get replaced, not monitored.
- Suspension: bushes "slightly deteriorated", a ball joint "has slight play", a spring "corroded". Rarely urgent alone, often several at once by the time a car's ten years old.
- Corrosion: "underside corroded", "sill corroded but not seriously weakening structure". The one to weigh heaviest, for reasons below.
- Leaks and emissions: "oil leak", "exhaust has a minor leak". An oil leak advisory is often harmless and occasionally the first line of an expensive story.
Which MOT advisories should actually worry you?
The ones that repeat, and the ones about rust. Almost everything else on an advisory list is a normal wear item with a normal cost.
Corrosion first. Rust doesn't plateau. The MOT inspection manual has testers check load-bearing structure within 30cm of the mounting points for things like seat belts and suspension, and to fail it when "the area does not feel firm when you press it with your finger and thumb" or the corrosion has made a hole. An advisory for structural corrosion is the tester telling you it hasn't got there yet. Next year, or the year after, it will, and welding isn't a service item.
Brake pipes and steering second. "Brake pipe corroded" is a part that carries fluid under pressure and is slowly getting thinner. It's not a big job on most cars, but it's not one to leave, and a seller who's left it through several tests has probably left other things.
Anything that's appeared twice. That's the real tell, and it's the next section.
How do you read a run of MOT advisories across several tests?
Line them up oldest first and track each advisory from the year it appears. Three shapes cover almost everything you'll see:
| Pattern | What it usually means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Appears once, gone next year | Somebody fixed it | Nothing. That's a looked-after car |
| Same wording, three tests running | Nobody fixed it, and it's three years closer to a fail | Price it in, and ask why |
| Advisory one year, failure the next | It was left until it had to be done | Fine if it's now fixed. A pattern of it says how the car's been run |
| A long list that vanishes in one go | A big bill was paid, or the car went to a kinder tester | Ask for the invoice. One will exist if the work was done |
| Advisories that change garage and wording | Normal. Testers describe the same thing differently | Read for the part, not the exact phrase |
The second row is the one that matters on a purchase. The seller has seen that advisory as many times as you have. If it's been on the certificate for three years and it's still there, you're being sold a job that someone's already decided not to pay for.
Read the mileage at the same time. The MOT history records it at every test, and advisories make much more sense against it: worn pads after 12,000 miles is normal, worn pads after 1,500 says the car barely moved, and a year with almost no miles is worth a question of its own. If the numbers look wrong rather than just low, how to spot a clocked car goes through the shapes.
What is the advert not telling you?
Paste the advert text and the registration. We read it against the car's DVSA MOT history and our known-faults database, then tell you what the seller left out.
Check an advert now (free) →Should you buy a car with MOT advisories?
Usually, yes. Nearly every car past its third birthday has some, and a clean sheet on an older car is less common than you'd think. What decides it is the kind and the pattern, not the count.
Buy it if the advisories are wear items (tyres, pads, a wiper blade), the ones from earlier tests have disappeared, and the price leaves room for whatever's on the latest certificate. Think hard if structural corrosion is advised, or the same suspension or brake-pipe advisory has been carried for several years. Walk away if a dangerous defect was found and there's no retest, or if the history shows a pile of advisories and the advert says "no advisories" or "nothing needed". That's not optimism. It's a claim the seller knows is false, because it's printed on their own certificates.
For the wider version of this decision, high mileage and no history included, should I buy this car? walks through it in ten minutes.
Does a fresh MOT with no advisories mean the car's fine?
No. It means it met the minimum legal standard on the day of the test, which is exactly what an MOT is for. It doesn't cover the engine's internal health, the gearbox, the clutch or the timing belt, and it's a snapshot, so "new MOT" on an advert tells you about one afternoon.
Two things are worth checking when an advert leans on a fresh ticket. First, the previous history: a car with three years of advisories that suddenly passes clean either had the work done (ask for the invoices, they'll exist) or found a different tester. Second, the date: an MOT done a week before a car was listed is the seller preparing it for sale, which is normal, so the history before it is the bit that tells you about the car rather than the sale.
What do MOT advisories cost to fix?
It depends on the part, the car and who does the work, and any single figure on a page like this would be wrong for your car. The useful question is narrower: what does this advisory, on this model, usually turn into? A "slight play" on a ball joint is a small job on one car and the start of a known, expensive failure on another.
That's where the model matters more than the advisory. Our pages on the Ford Focus, Vauxhall Corsa and Nissan Qashqai list what each model is known to go wrong with and what it costs, which is the context an advisory needs. A suspension advisory on a model known for a particular suspension failure reads very differently from the same words on one that isn't.
Which of these jobs can a check actually do for you?
Start with the concession, because it's true: the MOT data is the same for everyone. It's DVSA's record, it's free on GOV.UK, and every check on the market, ours included, reads the same tests. Nobody has a better copy of it.
What differs is whether anyone reads it. GOV.UK hands you a list, test by test, and leaves the pattern-spotting to you on a phone screen. Our free scan does the reading: it pulls the full history, lines the advisories up across every test, flags the ones that have been carried forward rather than fixed, and plots the mileage so the odd year stands out.
It also does the one thing the MOT service can't, because the MOT service has never seen the advert. It reads what the seller wrote against what the testers wrote. "No advisories" against a record full of them, "new brakes" against a brake advisory still on last month's certificate, "low mileage" against a sequence that says otherwise: those get flagged, and they're the findings that tell you most about the seller rather than the car.
Then it checks the car against the known faults for that model, from 871 documented faults across 41 makes, so an advisory that matches a known expensive failure is called out as one. You get a verdict, a risk score and the biggest single finding.
The Smart Check takes the advisory list further: every advisory explained and costed rather than just the biggest, the questions to put to the seller, and a figure to negotiate from, because an advisory you can put a number on is a discount.
What none of it can do is see the car. An advisory is what a tester saw on one day; the brake pipe may have been replaced last week, or it may have got worse. And nothing in any record shows damage that was repaired without a claim or a test noticing. That's still your half of the job, with the car in front of you.
So what should you actually do?
Run the car you're looking at through the free scan before you message the seller. It takes about a minute, and you'll go into the conversation knowing which advisories were fixed, which weren't, and whether the advert's being straight with you. If the car's worth pursuing, the same report upgrades on the same link, with nothing re-run, so starting free costs you nothing even if the answer is walk away.
