New South Wales Vehicle Registration Renewal (Rego)

This file is the source-review record for this document version, per the manual-source-review-v1 practice.

Current claim

• status: draft
• verification.method: manual-source-review-v1
• verification.lastVerifiedAt: 2026-07-04

Why this schema exists

GOV-960's per-country x per-vertical audit found 7 of this registry's 11 jurisdictions (AU, SG, CA, IE, NZ, IN, NL) had a Drivers-Licence schema but no Vehicle Registration/Tag/Title schema in the DMV vertical, unlike DE/FR/GB/US which have both. GOV-968 closed IE's leg (ie/revenue/vehicle-registration-tax-vrt, via a downloadable paper form). ca/on/mto/vehicle-permit-renewal remains blocked (its live wizard requires an already-issued Ontario plate/permit for a real eligibility lookup). This cycle's own catalog re-audit (GOV-979) confirmed the remaining gap (AU, SG, CA, NZ, IN, NL) and picked New South Wales as the next candidate: it already has a published sibling schema from the same authority (au/nsw/service-nsw/driver-licence-renewal), giving this registry a direct convention (eligibility-gate style, authority naming) to follow.

Sources examined

• Document (id, version): au/nsw/service-nsw/vehicle-registration-renewal / 1.0.0
• Spec version: GovSchema 0.3.0
• Authority: Transport for NSW (TfNSW), delivered via Service NSW — the same authority/delivery-channel split already used for the sibling au/nsw/service-nsw/driver-licence-renewal.
• Primary source: the live service.nsw.gov.au "Renew a vehicle registration online" guidance page (https://www.service.nsw.gov.au/transaction/renew-a-vehicle-registration), fetched directly as raw HTML via curl with a standard desktop user agent, 2026-07-04. No bot-block was encountered (HTTP 200, full page content). There is no downloadable paper form for this process (unlike the VRT/DS-82 precedents) — Service NSW mails a renewal notice and the transaction is online-only or in-person at a service centre.
• Live transaction walkthrough: a headless Playwright browser (Chromium, desktop user agent) followed the guidance page's "Renew online" link, which resolves to https://registration-renewal.service.nsw.gov.au/find-vehicle — confirmed live, 2026-07-04. Its DOM was inspected directly (not just screen-scraped text): exactly one live input field is present, labelled "Enter a NSW plate number or billing number" with the helper text "Enter a plate number, for example ABC123. Or, enter the 8 digit billing number on your renewal notice or Certificate of Registration." A mock plate number (ABC123) was submitted; the service returned "Registration not found — There is no vehicle registration associated with the plate number entered. Please check the details and try again." This is a real-time server-side lookup against Transport for NSW's registration database, not a generic client-side format-validation error — the same class of gate previously documented for ca/on/mto/vehicle-permit-renewal (Ontario's ServiceOntario wizard). No further screens (registration term, CTP, safety inspection, payment) could be reached without a real, already-issued NSW plate or billing number.
• Retrieved / reviewed: 2026-07-04.
• Reviewer: GovSchema Engineering (Standards Engineer — initial authoring source review).

What was confirmed against the source

| Source element | Field(s) | |---|---| | Eligibility — "the vehicle has been unregistered for more than 3 months" | vehicleUnregisteredOverThreeMonths | | Eligibility — "you ordered special number plates... have not received the new plates yet" | orderedSpecialPlatesNotYetReceived | | Eligibility — "the vehicle is registered under the Common Expiry Date (CED) Scheme" | registeredUnderCommonExpiryDateScheme | | Eligibility — "the vehicle is conditionally registered and requires an inspection" | conditionalRegistrationRequiresInspection | | Eligibility — "the vehicle is conditionally registered and requires changes to the operating conditions" | conditionalRegistrationRequiresOperatingConditionChange | | Live find-vehicle screen — "Enter a NSW plate number or billing number" (confirmed via headless browser, 2026-07-04) | vehicleIdentifierOrBillingNumber | | Note on conditional registration bundling CTP / auto concessions / no detail changes | isConditionalRegistration | | "What you need" — CTP not required for trailer/caravan/conditional | vehicleIsTrailerOrCaravan | | Introduction — "you may be able to make changes to details like your usage type and the registration term" | wantsToChangeRegistrationTerm, wantsToChangeUsageType | | "Registration renewal terms" — 6-month (light, ≤4.5t) vs 3-or-6-month (trailers/heavy, >4.5t) | registrationTermMonths | | Introduction — "If you want to change the term, you must have bought... CTP... for the same term" | ctpTermMatchesRequestedRegistrationTerm | | "Light vehicles and safety inspections" section | requiresSafetyInspection, safetyInspectionReport document | | "Payment and fees — How to pay" (BPAY, in-person cash) | paymentMethod | | "Rebates and concessions — Pensioner Concession Card holders" | pensionerConcessionCardHolder | | "More information" — voluntary carbon-offset contribution during renewal | voluntaryCarbonOffsetContribution | | "What you need" — CTP policy (green slip) | ctpInsurancePolicy document |

Honesty flags (deliberate, recorded rather than glossed over)

• paymentMethod's card_online value is an inference, not a directly sourced label. The guidance page's "How to pay" section names BPAY and in-person cash explicitly, but does not separately describe the online renewal transaction's own card-payment screen (the live transaction itself could not be reached past the vehicle-lookup gate — see above). card_online is included by analogy to every other online vehicle-registration/tax renewal already in this registry (e.g. gb/dvla/vehicle-tax, us/ca/dmv/vehicle-registration-renewal), which all take an online card payment as their default method. Flagged as inference-by-analogy, the same discipline recorded for ie/revenue/vehicle-registration-tax-vrt's vin length.
• wantsToChangeUsageType has no enumerated usage-type values. The source states only that usage type can be changed during renewal, without naming the possible values (e.g. private/business/primary-producer), so this schema models the yes/no choice to change it rather than inventing an unsourced enumeration.
• registrationTermMonths's 12-month baseline is inferred, not a quoted figure. The guidance page's "Registration renewal terms" section only describes the 6-month and 3-month alternative terms; it never states the standard/default term length directly on this page. 12 months is modelled as the implicit baseline by domain convention (an annual registration is the norm this page is describing exceptions to), consistent with how every other annual-cycle vehicle process in this registry treats its default term.
• No live transaction beyond the vehicle-lookup screen was reachable. Exactly as recorded for ca/on/mto/vehicle-permit-renewal, the real server-side lookup at registration-renewal.service.nsw.gov.au/find-vehicle requires an already-issued NSW plate or billing number that does not exist for a fabricated test case. Registration term selection, the CTP/safety inspection screens, and the payment screen are transcribed from the guidance page's prose, not independently screen-captured — the same sourcing shape as gb/dvla/vehicle-tax (which also has no downloadable form and no independently reachable live wizard).
• Scope excludes re-registration, CED-scheme handling, conditional registrations that need an inspection/condition change, special-plate ordering, and the toll-relief rebate, per the eligibility gates and the catalog candidate's own scope note — each is a distinct process requiring its own schema.

Worked example (mock data, not a live submission)

Scenario: an individual renewing a standard (non-conditional) passenger car's 12-month registration online, keeping the same term and usage type, with CTP already held and no safety inspection required.

| Field | Mock value | |---|---| | vehicleUnregisteredOverThreeMonths | false | | orderedSpecialPlatesNotYetReceived | false | | registeredUnderCommonExpiryDateScheme | false | | conditionalRegistrationRequiresInspection | false | | conditionalRegistrationRequiresOperatingConditionChange | false | | vehicleIdentifierOrBillingNumber | BFG47T | | isConditionalRegistration | false | | vehicleIsTrailerOrCaravan | false | | wantsToChangeRegistrationTerm | false | | wantsToChangeUsageType | false | | requiresSafetyInspection | false | | paymentMethod | card_online | | pensionerConcessionCardHolder | false | | voluntaryCarbonOffsetContribution | false |

Walking this data through the modelled steps[]: all five eligibility_to_renew_online gates are false, so the flow falls through to find_vehicle (no exit triggered) → registration_details, where registrationTermMonths and ctpTermMatchesRequestedRegistrationTerm are correctly left unset because wantsToChangeRegistrationTerm is false → safety_inspection → payment, the final step, with ctpInsurancePolicy correctly required in documents[] (neither isConditionalRegistration nor vehicleIsTrailerOrCaravan is true) and safetyInspectionReport correctly not required. This is a self-consistency check of the schema's own branching and conditional-requirement logic (also run mechanically — see conformance/au/nsw/service-nsw/vehicle-registration-renewal/1.0.0/), not a substitute for a live renewal transaction — see the honesty flags above.

Path to verified

1. Obtain a real (or realistically complete) NSW registration renewal notice to walk the live registration-renewal.service.nsw.gov.au transaction past the vehicle-lookup screen and confirm the registration-term, CTP, safety-inspection, and payment screens field-by-field.
2. Confirm the online renewal transaction's actual payment-method screen (card type, saved-payment-method support) rather than relying on the card-payment inference recorded above.
3. Consider a companion schema for re-registering a vehicle unregistered more than 3 months, and for the Common Expiry Date (CED) scheme, both explicitly out of scope here.