MOT pass rates by vehicle age

Why the line falls, and where it bends

Age is a strong signal in the MOT record, and mileage is the stronger one. The two travel together, though, and brakes, suspension, tyres, lamps and emissions all wear with use and time. Of the tests on cars first used in 2000, roughly one in four fails; on cars from 2025, about one in seventy. The fall is steepest across the first decade, then flattens as the cars that survive keep passing.

Two things bend the line. The newest rows are first-time tests only — a car under a year old has had one test and it was its first — so they read far higher than the cohorts behind them. And before about 2018 the MOT defect categories changed: Dangerous and Major were introduced in 2018, and earlier records grade faults on the old scale, so the last ten rows are not directly comparable item-by-item with the first fifteen.

Age also travels with mileage and with how much a car is worth spending on. This table measures none of that — it is the same caveat as everywhere else on the site, and the reason a rate here is a starting point for a model-year page, not a verdict on a car.

Rates are tests passed divided by tests taken for cars first used in that year, across the whole record. Weighted national rate 81.1% — method.