United Kingdom Vehicle Tax (Vehicle Excise Duty)

This file is the source-review record for this document version, per the manual-source-review-v1 practice. It documents the provenance of the published fields and flow and states the current verification claim honestly.

Current claim

• status: draft
• verification.method: manual-source-review-v1
• verification.lastVerifiedAt: 2026-07-01

The document was derived from and cross-checked against the official sources below, but the full field-by-field comparison the practice requires (manual-source-review-v1 → Procedure step 2) has not yet been completed and recorded against the live online service at vehicletax.service.gov.uk. It therefore remains draft, not verified.

Sources examined

• Document (id, version): gb/dvla/vehicle-tax / 1.0.0
• Spec version: GovSchema 0.2.0
• Authority: Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA).
• Primary source URL: https://www.gov.uk/vehicle-tax
• Secondary sources:
  • https://www.gov.uk/tax-vehicle-without-v11-reminder (reference-document alternatives to the V11 reminder)
  • https://www.gov.uk/vehicle-tax-direct-debit and its "Change how often you pay" sub-page (Direct Debit setup and payment-frequency rules)
  • https://www.gov.uk/vehicle-exempt-from-vehicle-tax (exemption categories)
• Official form id: none. Vehicle tax has no downloadable paper form equivalent to the D1/ITR-E precedents used for other reference schemas. DVLA's own guidance states the D1/D2/D4 application packs are Post-Office-only and are for driving licences, not vehicle tax. The online service itself sits behind an authenticated flow at vehicletax.service.gov.uk with no published field-by-field specification of its screens.
• Retrieved / reviewed: 2026-07-01 (all sources confirmed live at authoring time)
• Reviewer: GovSchema Engineering (initial authoring source-review)

Why GOV.UK guidance prose was used as the field-level source

Unlike gb/co/register-to-vote (ITR-E fillable PDF) or gb/hmrc/self-assessment-tax-return-sa100 (SA100 fillable PDF), vehicle tax has no equivalent paper form to extract field-by-field. The GOV.UK guidance pages are themselves the most authoritative public description of what the service asks for: the "What you'll need" section of the landing page, the reference-number formats and digit counts on the "without a reminder" sub-page, the Direct Debit setup and frequency-change sub-pages, and the exemption-category list. This document transcribes those into fields; it is a guidance-derived, not a form-derived, schema, and that distinction is recorded so consumers weigh its confidence accordingly.

What was confirmed against the source

| Source element | Field(s) | |---|---| | "What you'll need" — V11 reminder, V5C log book, new keeper slip | referenceDocumentType, referenceNumber | | Reference-number digit counts (16 / 11 / 12 digit) — "without a reminder" page | referenceNumber validation range | | MOT evidence (certificate, MOT history screenshot, up to 2-day update lag) | motEvidenceType | | "You must tax your vehicle even if... exempt" + exemption categories page | exemptFromVehicleTax, exemptionCategory | | Northern Ireland Post Office requirement: original MOT certificate + insurance certificate/cover note | isNorthernIrelandKeeper, insuranceEvidenceProvided | | Payment by Direct Debit or debit/credit card; Direct Debit cannot be set up by phone | paymentMethod | | Payment frequency (12 months, 6 months, monthly/6-monthly/annual Direct Debit, 5% surcharge on monthly/6-monthly, must cancel-and-retax to change frequency) | paymentFrequency | | Address, date of birth, and bank/building society details needed to set up Direct Debit | applicantDateOfBirth, applicantAddressLine1/Town, applicantPostcode, bankAccountHolderName, bankSortCode, bankAccountNumber |

Scope and jurisdiction notes

• Whole of the United Kingdom, including Northern Ireland. DVLA's vehicle tax service has applied UK-wide since the 2014 abolition of Northern Ireland's separate tax disc; jurisdiction.country is GB per registry convention for DVLA schemas (matching gb/dvla/* sibling entries), even though the process itself covers Northern Ireland too. The Northern-Ireland-specific Post Office requirements are modelled as conditional fields rather than a jurisdiction split.
• The V85/V85/1 reference document (used for HGVs and some larger vehicles) was named in the discovery catalog note but not independently confirmed in the retrieved sources for this pass; it is not included in referenceDocumentType's enum. A future minor version can add it once confirmed.
• Historic-vehicle exemption cutoff is a rolling date (currently vehicles over 40 years old); the field description states this qualitatively rather than a fixed year, since the cutoff moves each year.
• Fees/rates are intentionally not encoded, consistent with other reference schemas (e.g. us/ca/dmv/drivers-license-renewal). DVLA vehicle tax rates change annually and are out of scope for a field-collection schema.
• Conditional requiredness (Direct Debit bank/address/DOB fields; Northern Ireland insurance evidence; exemptionCategory only when exemptFromVehicleTax is true) cannot be expressed structurally in v0.2 and is recorded in field descriptions, per the limitation tracked in GSP-0004.

What is NOT yet independently verified

• The exact screen order and wording of the live vehicletax.service.gov.uk online flow were not captured screen-by-screen; this document is derived from the surrounding GOV.UK guidance pages, which describe what the service needs but not its literal screen text.
• The V85/V85/1 HGV reference-document path noted in the discovery catalog entry was not confirmed and is excluded pending a follow-up review.
• Whether a name field is separately collected during the online flow (as opposed to being read from the V5C/reference lookup) was not confirmed; it is omitted here on the assumption that DVLA resolves the keeper's name from the reference number, matching the "What you need" list which does not mention a name field outside the Direct Debit bank details.

Path to a verified claim (next step)

To advance to status: verified, a reviewer applies manual-source-review-v1 (Procedure step 2 field-by-field against the live vehicletax.service.gov.uk online flow specifically, step 3 flow), confirms the source is authoritative, resolves any discrepancy by shipping a new schema version (immutability — VERSIONING §3, practice Procedure step 5), and records the outcome here plus sets status: verified with a current verification.lastVerifiedAt/nextReviewBy.

Re-verification

Per the practice's Cadence, nextReviewBy is set to 2027-01-01 (6 months). Re-check the source on or before that date and on any source.url change.