About Road Tax Rates

This site exists because I needed answers about car tax myself and couldn't find one place that gave them quickly and accurately.

Every search led me to slow, ad-heavy pages where the actual rates were buried under tracking popups and affiliate banners. The DVLA's own guidance on gov.uk is accurate but scattered across multiple pages with no proper search. The third-party tax calculators are mostly stuck a decade behind the modern web, slow to load, cluttered with adverts, and often wrong on the detail that matters (the £40,000 list price surcharge, the changes to EV rates from April 2025, what your specific registration year actually means for your annual bill).

So I built this.

What this site does

Road Tax Rates is a fast, accurate reference for UK Vehicle Excise Duty. It covers:

Current and historic VED rates by registration year (1 March 2001 onwards)
The £40,000 list price surcharge and which vehicles it applies to
The April 2025 changes that brought electric vehicles into VED for the first time
The April 2017 system changes and how they affect cars registered after that date
First-year showroom tax rates and standard rates for years two onwards
DVLA registration check by number plate for current tax status

Every rate on the site is dated. Every page shows when the data was last verified. When the Budget changes the rates, the site updates within hours, not weeks.

How I keep the rates current

Vehicle tax rates change with the Budget, usually in the Spring Statement or Autumn Statement. When they do, I update them by hand against the published HMRC and DVLA documentation, run the test suite, deploy, and update the last verified date on every affected page.

The verification date is shown on every rate page in the footer. If you're reading this site and the date looks stale, please email me. Corrections happen quickly because the data architecture is built for fast updates rather than CMS hand-holding.

Built for speed

Most car tax sites take five seconds to load and weigh ten megabytes by the time the page settles. This one loads in well under a second and weighs less than most images on those sites.

That's because Road Tax Rates is built on Astro and deployed on Cloudflare's edge network. Every page is static HTML with minimal JavaScript. No advertising. No newsletter pop-ups. No third-party tracking. The only analytics is Cloudflare's privacy-preserving page-view counter, which stores nothing on your device and identifies no one. No cookie banner because nothing on the site needs your consent. The full position is on the terms of use page.

The whole site scores 100/100/100/100 on Google Lighthouse — Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO — on every page. You can test any page yourself by running it through PageSpeed Insights.

Road Tax Rates Lighthouse score: 100 Performance, 100 Accessibility, 100 Best Practices, 100 SEO — Lighthouse audit, homepage, mobile preset.

This isn't bragging. It's the standard reference data should be held to. The other sites are slow because they monetise aggressively. This one doesn't, and never will.

A Supra Digital project

I'm Matt. I run Supra Digital, a small web development agency in Hertfordshire that builds websites and digital products for UK businesses. Road Tax Rates is one of a small portfolio of UK reference sites I'm building, all on the same principles: fast, accurate, ad-free, free to use.

You can see what else Supra Digital does at supradigital.co.uk.

Spotted an error?

Email me directly at [email protected].

Mistakes happen, particularly right after Budget updates when several rates change at once. Corrections go in within hours of being flagged. The site is small enough that I read every email myself.

Sources

All data on this site is compiled from official UK government sources:

gov.uk Vehicle Tax Rates
HMRC published rate tables
DVLA Vehicle Enquiry Service (for the registration lookup tool)
HMRC and HMT Budget publications (for newly-announced rate changes)

Last comprehensive verification: 15 May 2026.

This site is editorially independent. It accepts no advertising, no affiliate partnerships, and no paid placements. If that ever changes, this page will say so first.