Vehicle licensing statistics: April to June 2025
Source: gov.uk (2025-10-15)

Licensed and registered motor vehicle statistics in Great Britain and the United Kingdom for April to June 2025.

Our statistical practice is regulated by the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR). OSR sets the standards of trustworthiness, quality and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics that all producers of official statistics should adhere to. You are welcome to contact us directly by emailing us with any comments about how we meet these standards.

The Department for Transport is committed to continuously improving the quality and transparency of our outputs, in line with the Code of Practice for Statistics. In line with this, we have recently concluded a planned review of the processes and methodologies used in the production of Vehicle licensing statistics data. The review sought to seek out and introduce further improvements and efficiencies in the coding technologies we use to produce our data and as part of that, we have identified several historical errors across the published data tables affecting different historical periods. These errors are the result of mistakes in past production processes that we have now identified, corrected and taken steps to eliminate going forward.

Most of the revisions to our published figures are small, typically changing values by less than 1% to 3%. The key revisions are:

Licensed Vehicles (2014 Q3 to 2016 Q3)

We found that some unlicensed vehicles during this period were mistakenly counted as licensed. This caused a slight overstatement, about 0.54% on average, in the number of licensed vehicles during this period.

3.5 - 4.25 tonnes Zero Emission Vehicles (ZEVs) Classification

Since 2023, ZEVs weighing between 3.5 and 4.25 tonnes have been classified as light goods vehicles (LGVs) instead of heavy goods vehicles (HGVs). We have now applied this change to earlier data and corrected an error in table VEH0150. As a result, the number of newly registered HGVs has been reduced by:

3.1% in 2024

2.3% in 2023

1.4% in 2022

Table VEH0156 (2018 to 2023)

Table VEH0156, which reports average CO₂ emissions for newly registered vehicles, has been updated for the years 2018 to 2023. Most changes are minor (under 3%), but the e-NEDC measure saw a larger correction, up to 15.8%, due to a calculation error. Other measures (WLTP and Reported) were less notable, except for April 2020 when COVID-19 led to very few new registrations which led to greater volatility in the resultant percentages.

Neither these specific revisions, nor any of the others introduced, have had a material impact on the statistics overall, the direction of trends nor the key messages that they previously conveyed.

Specific details of each revision made has been included in the relevant data table notes to ensure transparency and clarity. Users are advised to review these notes as part of their regular use of the data to ensure their analysis accounts for these changes accordingly.

If you have questions regarding any of these changes, please contact the Vehicle statistics team (mailto:xxx@xxx.xx).

Comparing 2025 Quarter 2 (April to June) with 2024 Quarter 2 (April to June), in the UK there were:
- 610,000 vehicles registered for the first time, a decrease of 3% (VEH0150 (https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/vehicle-licensing-statistics-data-tables#all-vehicles))
- 113,000 vehicles registered for the first time that were zero emission, an increase of 28% (VEH1153a (https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/vehicle-licensing-statistics-data-tables#all-vehicles))
- 105,000 cars registered for the first time that were zero emission, an increase of 26%
As at June 2025, compared to June 2024, in the UK there were:
- 42.3 million licensed vehicles, an increase of 1% (VEH0101a (https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/vehicle-licensing-statistics-data-tables#all-vehicles))
- 1,625,000 licensed zero emission vehicles, an increase of 37% (VEH1103a (https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/vehicle-licensing-statistics-data-tables#all-vehicles)), including 1,505,000 zero emission cars, an increase of 38%
As at June 2025, zero emission vehicles accounted for 3.9% of all licensed road using vehicles, an increase of 1 percentage point compared to June 2024.

Contact details

Vehicles statistics

Email xxx@xxx.xx (mailto:xxx@xxx.xx)