Blog / Car tax

Tax · 5 min read

UK car tax (VED) explained: how much will you pay?

Vehicle Excise Duty, usually just called car tax or VED, works differently depending on when a car was first registered. There are effectively three separate rate systems in use at once, which is part of why the same question, "how much is my road tax," can have such different answers for two cars that look similar on the outside.

Cars registered from April 2017 onward

This is the simplest system. After the first year, almost every petrol, diesel, and hybrid car pays the same flat standard rate, currently £200 a year for 2026/27, regardless of engine size or emissions. The only exception that pushes the cost higher is the expensive car supplement: an extra £440 a year, on top of the standard rate, for the first six years, if the car's list price when new was over £40,000 (or £50,000 for electric vehicles registered from April 2025). This applies based on the original list price, not what you paid for it second hand, so a car that was expensive when new still carries the supplement even if you bought it cheaply years later.

Cars registered between March 2001 and March 2017

These fall into CO2 emissions bands, labelled A through M, each with its own fixed annual rate. A lower-emission car in Band A or B pays significantly less than a high-emission car in Band L or M. Unlike the post-2017 system, the rate here depends entirely on the car's official CO2 figure, so two cars of the same age and fuel type can have noticeably different tax bills if their emissions differ.

Cars registered before March 2001

The oldest system uses just two rates, based on engine size rather than emissions, since CO2 figures generally weren't recorded for cars this old:

Why the same-looking car can have a different rate

Because the system a car falls into depends entirely on its registration date, two visually identical cars from different production years can be on completely different tax rules. This catches people out most often when comparing a car just before and just after the April 2017 change, where a small age difference can mean a genuinely different tax bill.

Checking your own rate

The most reliable way to know which system applies and what the actual figure is, is to check against the specific registration rather than working it out from memory of when "roughly" the car was registered.