jhumbl/dft-vehicle-licensing

DfT vehicle licensing statistics

Quarterly counts of licensed vehicles in the United Kingdom, produced by the Department for Transport from DVLA registration data: how many vehicles are licensed, of what body type, running on what fuel, under private or company keepership, registered in which local authority. All tables here share the same publisher, Open Government Licence, quarterly cadence and DVLA-stock caveats — that is what makes them one family.

Curated by uk-open-data: a weekly pipeline re-downloads each publisher file, tidies it into analysis-ready parquet, validates it against a declared schema, and uploads it here. main is always the latest data; a git tag archive-YYYY-MM snapshots every month, so silent revisions by the publisher stay visible. The raw file as published is stored alongside every tidy parquet.

How to use

Files are served with CORS and HTTP range support (verified on every pipeline run), so browsers can query them directly — DuckDB-Wasm, or plain fetch():

latest:    https://huggingface.co/datasets/jhumbl/dft-vehicle-licensing/resolve/main/<filename>
snapshot:  https://huggingface.co/datasets/jhumbl/dft-vehicle-licensing/resolve/archive-YYYY-MM/<filename>
duckdb:    hf://datasets/jhumbl/dft-vehicle-licensing/<filename>

SELECT * FROM 'hf://datasets/jhumbl/dft-vehicle-licensing/dft_veh0105_licensed_by_la.parquet' LIMIT 10;

VEH0105: Licensed vehicles by body type, fuel type and local authority

Licensed vehicles at the end of each quarter, by body type, fuel type, keepership (private/company) and upper and lower tier local authority, United Kingdom. Produced by the Department for Transport from DVLA registration data. This is the all-vehicles denominator for VEH0132 (ULEVs).

• Provider: DfT / DVLA
• Update cadence: Quarterly (July, September, December) with the full annual release around April/May. Most weekly pipeline runs will therefore detect no change.
• Homepage: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/vehicle-licensing-statistics-data-tables
• Licence: Open Government Licence v3.0
• Source: Department for Transport / DVLA — Vehicle licensing statistics

Files

• dft_veh0105_licensed_by_la.ods — The unmodified file as published by DfT.
• dft_veh0105_licensed_by_la.parquet — Best-effort long/tidy extraction of the main data sheet: one row per geography x body type x fuel x keepership x quarter. May be absent if the published layout changed; the raw ODS is authoritative.

Columns of dft_veh0105_licensed_by_la.parquet

column	type	description
ons_code	string	ONS geography code (e.g. E09000033). Includes aggregate codes such as K02000001 (United Kingdom).
ons_geography	string	Geography name as published by DfT (the ODS's hierarchy indentation is trimmed).
ons_sort	integer	DfT's presentation sort order for geographies.
body_type	string	Vehicle body type (e.g. Cars, Motorcycles, Light goods vehicles). Includes the publisher's 'Total' rows — filter before summing.
fuel	string	Fuel type. Includes the publisher's 'Total' rows — filter before summing.
keepership	string	COMPANY, PRIVATE, or the publisher's 'Total'.
quarter	string	Publisher quarter label 'YYYY Qn' (e.g. '2025 Q4'); lexicographic order equals temporal order.
count_thousands	number	Licensed vehicles at the end of the quarter, in THOUSANDS (e.g. 109.441 = 109,441 vehicles). Null where DfT suppressed the value ('[x]' in the source).

Caveats

• The tidy parquet's count_thousands column is in THOUSANDS of vehicles, exactly as DfT publishes it (the source's constant 'Units: Thousands' column is dropped). Multiply by 1000 for a vehicle count, e.g. 109.441 means 109,441 vehicles.
• Vehicles are allocated to a local authority by the registered keeper's postcode, which is not necessarily where the vehicle is located. Company fleets registered to a single head office can distort local figures.
• In the tidy parquet, cells DfT suppressed (published as '[x]') become nulls in the count_thousands column.
• The tidy parquet keeps the publisher's aggregate rows: body_type='Total', fuel='Total', keepership='Total', and aggregate geographies (United Kingdom, Great Britain, England, regions). Filter these out before summing or you will double-count.

VEH0132: Licensed ultra low emission vehicles (ULEVs) by local authority

Licensed ULEVs at the end of each quarter, by fuel type, keepership (private/company) and upper and lower tier local authority, United Kingdom. Produced by the Department for Transport from DVLA registration data.

• Provider: DfT / DVLA
• Update cadence: Quarterly (July, September, December) with the full annual release around April/May. Most weekly pipeline runs will therefore detect no change.
• Homepage: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/vehicle-licensing-statistics-data-tables
• Licence: Open Government Licence v3.0
• Source: Department for Transport / DVLA — Vehicle licensing statistics

Files

• dft_veh0132_ulev_by_la.ods — The unmodified file as published by DfT.
• dft_veh0132_ulev_by_la.parquet — Best-effort long/tidy extraction of the main data sheet: one row per geography x fuel x keepership x quarter. May be absent if the published layout changed; the raw ODS is authoritative.

Columns of dft_veh0132_ulev_by_la.parquet

column	type	description
ons_code	string	ONS geography code (e.g. E09000033). Includes aggregate codes such as K02000001 (United Kingdom).
ons_geography	string	Geography name as published by DfT (the ODS's hierarchy indentation is trimmed).
ons_sort	integer	DfT's presentation sort order for geographies.
fuel	string	Fuel type. Includes the publisher's 'Total' rows — filter before summing.
keepership	string	COMPANY, PRIVATE, or the publisher's 'Total'.
quarter	string	Publisher quarter label 'YYYY Qn' (e.g. '2025 Q4'); lexicographic order equals temporal order.
count	integer	Licensed ULEVs at the end of the quarter. Null where DfT suppressed the value ('[x]' in the source).

Caveats

• Vehicles are allocated to a local authority by the registered keeper's postcode, which is not necessarily where the vehicle is located. Company fleets registered to a single head office can distort local figures.
• ULEV classification depends on reported CO2 figures, whose test regime changed over time (NEDC -> WLTP in April 2020); take care comparing across that boundary.
• In the tidy parquet, cells DfT suppressed (published as '[x]') become nulls in the count column.
• The tidy parquet keeps the publisher's aggregate rows: fuel='Total', keepership='Total', and aggregate geographies (United Kingdom, Great Britain, England, regions). Filter these out before summing or you will double-count. The constant Units column ('Numbers') is dropped.