HPI Check vs Free Car Check: What’s the Difference?

What a provenance check actually covers

A provenance check is about the car’s past, not its condition. It answers questions that no amount of looking at the car will answer:

• Insurance write-off. Whether an insurer has ever recorded the car as Cat A, B, S or N, or the older Cat C or D. Explained in the write-off categories guide.
• Outstanding finance. Whether a hire purchase, PCP or loan agreement is recorded against the car, and with whom. The outstanding finance guide covers what to do if one is found.
• Stolen marker. Whether the car is recorded as stolen. See how to check if a car is stolen.
• Registered keepers. How many there have been and when the car last changed hands.
• Plate changes. Any previous registrations the car has carried.

Most provenance checks also cover colour changes, import and export status and whether the car has been recorded as scrapped. What none of them cover is wear. A car can come back clear on every one of these and still need £1,000 of suspension work, because provenance is not condition.

What a free check covers

A free check reads the records that are public, and for condition those are the ones that matter:

• MOT history since 2005: every pass, fail, advisory and the mileage recorded at each test. Our guide to what MOT advisories mean shows how to read it.
• Tax and MOT status, including the expiry date. See the MOT due date check.
• ULEZ compliance, from the car’s emissions standard. See the ULEZ check.
• Mileage trend, and whether any reading breaks it.
• AI condition score, a repair cost estimate from the current advisories, and where the asking price sits against similar cars.

What it cannot show is anything in the first list. Write-off, finance and theft records are not public. They are held by insurers, lenders and the police, and reach a check only through licensed industry data. No free check has them, and a free check that claims to is guessing.

Where provenance data comes from

The write-off, finance and theft records behind a provenance check are licensed industry data, used across the motor trade and the insurance industry. A check does not create these records; it reads them. That is why different checks tend to agree on the facts.

Where they differ is in what they do with the facts: how a mileage discrepancy is separated from a recording error, whether a write-off is shown as the insurer recorded it, how clearly an absent record is distinguished from a clear one, and what the check costs. Those are the things to compare, not the underlying data.

One practical consequence: running two provenance checks on the same car rarely tells you anything the first one didn’t. If a result surprises you, the better use of time is to ask the seller for the paperwork behind it — a settlement letter, an engineer’s report, the old V5C — rather than buying the same records again.

When a free check is enough — and when it isn’t

Usually enough

• A cheap car, a few hundred pounds, where the worst case is a small loss.
• A seller you know, where the car’s history is known to you as well.
• A full service history and an MOT record that tell the same story, on a car that has had one or two keepers.

Not enough

• Any car worth more than about £3,000, where a write-off or a finance agreement changes what it is worth or whether it is the seller’s to sell.
• Any private sale. A trader has to clear finance before selling; a private seller may not know it is there.
• Any mileage discrepancy on the free check. The mileage discrepancy guide explains what the paid analysis adds.
• Any gap in the story: a seller who has only just bought the car, a plate that has changed, a keeper count that doesn’t match what you were told.

The free check tells you whether the car is worth pursuing. The provenance check tells you whether it is worth paying for. Run them in that order, and you only pay for the second one on cars that passed the first.

What the £9.99 Full History Report adds

The Full History Report is the provenance check built on top of the free one, so you get both in one place. Alongside everything in the free check it adds:

1. Insurance write-off, with the category as the insurer recorded it
2. Outstanding finance
3. Stolen marker
4. Mileage discrepancy analysis, shown as Clear or Discrepancy
5. Registered keepers
6. Plate changes
7. Colour changes
8. Imported or exported status
9. Scrapped status
10. An in-depth AI verdict that reads all of the above together
11. Road tax and emissions detail
12. Taxi and private-hire history

It is £9.99, one-off, with no subscription, delivered instantly and available for 60 days. Where a record is absent the report says so; not recorded is not the same as clear. Like every history check, it shows what the records hold, and no check can guarantee a car’s past. The pricing page sets out the free and paid checks side by side.