UK Operator Licences: HGV and PSV O-Licence Register with Weekly Changes

Get UK goods vehicle (HGV) and bus and coach (PSV) operator licences from the official Traffic Commissioner register, as an API or a scraper alternative. Look up a licence number, search by traffic area, licence type, status, fleet size or operator name, or get the weekly feed of new, changed and removed licences. Each licence is one row with the licence number, operator legal name and trading names, licence type and status, traffic area, vehicles and trailers authorised, operating centres, company number, continuation date and the list of changes. The data is the register DVSA publishes every week on data.gov.uk for Great Britain, plus the Northern Ireland register, both under the Open Government Licence. The Northern Ireland file is old (data as of 8 January 2023) and every Northern Ireland row says so in sourceDate. No login, no proxy and no scraping of the VOL website.

The actor downloads the official weekly CSV files. There is no login, no browser, no proxy and no scraping of the "Check a vehicle operator licence" service.

What people use it for

• New hauliers and fleet changes, every week. A new operator licence is the moment a haulier buys fuel cards, telematics, insurance, finance and trailers. Schedule changesSince: "7 days" every Monday and get the licences that are new since last week's file, the ones whose authorised fleet grew or shrank, the ones curtailed or suspended, and the ones that dropped out of the register. Each row says what changed, from what to what, and in which weekly file.
• Market lists. All standard international licences in the North West with 10 to 50 vehicles, restricted licences in Scotland, every PSV operator in Wales. Filters run inside the actor, so you pay only for licences that match.
• Vetting. Paste licence numbers and get type, status, fleet size and continuation date for each. Numbers that are not in the register, and values that are not licence numbers at all, get a free row each and are listed in the run summary.
• CRM enrichment. Add the licence, fleet size and Companies House number to accounts you already hold.

How to use it

The weekly changes feed:

{
    "changesSince": "7 days",
    "trafficAreas": ["northWest", "westMidlands"],
    "maxItems": 5000
}

A market list:

{
    "trafficAreas": ["northWest"],
    "licenceTypes": ["standardInternational"],
    "statuses": ["valid"],
    "minVehicles": 10,
    "maxVehicles": 50,
    "maxItems": 1000
}

A lookup:

{
    "licenceNumbers": ["OB1234567", "pk 0123456"]
}

A lookup cannot be combined with search filters, because the filters would be ignored. A field name the actor does not know stops the run with a hint such as "status" (did you mean "statuses"?), so a typo cannot turn into a run of unfiltered licences.

Input

Field	What it does
changesSince	Only licences that are new, changed or removed in a weekly file of this date or later. A date (2026-10-19) or a period back from today (7 days, 2 weeks, 1 month). See "How the changes feed works".
trafficAreas	northEast, northWest, westMidlands, east, wales, westOfEngland, londonSouthEast, scotland, northernIreland. Area names such as "Wales" or "London and the South East of England" work too. Empty means all nine.
licenceCategory	goods (default, licence numbers starting with O), psv (starting with P) or any.
licenceTypes	standardNational, standardInternational, restricted, specialRestricted (PSV).
statuses	valid, curtailed, suspended, revoked, surrendered. Empty means every status in the file. The Great Britain files hold only valid, curtailed and suspended licences (about 99% are valid); a revoked or surrendered licence is not in them and shows as removed in the changes feed. The Northern Ireland file has no status, so a status filter leaves Northern Ireland out.
minVehicles, maxVehicles	Range of vehicles authorised. Licences without a number are dropped when you set a range.
operatorName	Words that must all start a word of the legal or trading name. smith haul finds SMITH HAULAGE LTD.
licenceNumbers	Licence numbers to look up, up to 10,000 per run, returned in the order given. Spaces, dashes and lower case are fine. The second letter is the traffic area, and the actor reads that area's file first; a licence that moved area is found in the others.
includeSoleTraderContacts	Default false. See Personal data below.
maxItems	Stop after this many licences, up to 1,000,000. Left empty, a search or changes run stops at 100 and a lookup returns every licence it finds.
historyStoreName	Default uk-operator-licences-history. The key-value store on your account that holds the history for the changes feed. Use another name to keep a separate history.

Output

One row per licence. An example built from the actor's test data (invented operator, real row shape), from a changes run:

{
    "licenceNumber": "OG1000001",
    "listed": true,
    "licenceCategory": "goods",
    "licenceType": "standard international",
    "status": "curtailed",
    "trafficArea": "Wales",
    "trafficAreaKey": "wales",
    "operatorName": "EXAMPLE HAULAGE 1 LTD",
    "tradingNames": ["QUICKMOVE"],
    "holderType": "limited company",
    "individualHolder": false,
    "contactsHidden": false,
    "companyNumber": "01234001",
    "companyNumberKind": "companies house",
    "correspondenceAddress": "Unit 1, Sample Industrial Estate, Sampletown, CF21 1XY",
    "correspondencePostcode": "CF21 1XY",
    "operatingCentres": [
        { "address": "Yard 1, Depot Road, Sampletown, CF22 1ZZ", "postcode": "CF22 1ZZ", "postcodeDistrict": "CF22" }
    ],
    "operatingCentreCount": 1,
    "vehiclesAuthorised": 6,
    "trailersAuthorised": 1,
    "vehiclesSpecified": 1,
    "trailersSpecified": 0,
    "transportManagerCount": 2,
    "directorOrPartnerCount": 1,
    "continuationDate": "2029-02-02",
    "firstSeen": null,
    "lastChanged": "2026-10-25",
    "changes": [
        { "date": "2026-10-25", "kind": "changed", "field": "status", "from": "valid", "to": "curtailed" },
        { "date": "2026-10-25", "kind": "changed", "field": "vehiclesAuthorised", "from": 2, "to": 6 }
    ],
    "companiesHouseUrl": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/01234001",
    "sourceDate": "2026-10-25",
    "source": "Traffic Commissioners: goods and public service vehicle operator licence records (DVSA), https://www.data.gov.uk/dataset/traffic-commissioners-goods-and-public-service-vehicle-operator-licence-records, file \"Wales\", Open Government Licence v3.0",
    "fetchedAt": "2026-10-26T08:00:00.000Z"
}

Field	Meaning
licenceNumber, licenceCategory	The operator licence number, and goods or psv from its first letter.
licenceType, status	standard national, standard international, restricted, special restricted; valid, curtailed or suspended (the register writes them as lsts_valid and so on; any other status code is passed through in lower case and counted in the run summary). status is null for Northern Ireland.
trafficArea, trafficAreaKey	The Traffic Commissioner area whose file the licence is in.
operatorName, tradingNames	The licence holder's legal name, and the names after "T/A" or "trading as".
holderType, individualHolder, contactsHidden	limited company, llp, sole trader, partnership, public body or other; whether the holder is one or more private persons; whether addresses were left out for that reason.
companyNumber, companyNumberKind, companiesHouseUrl	The company number from the register (GB files only; null for most sole traders and partnerships). companyNumberKind is companies house for numbers in Companies House's eight-character form (padded with zeros, e.g. 01234001, SC012345), with companiesHouseUrl linking to the company's page, or registered society for the numbers of co-operatives and other societies, kept as the register writes them (IP22866R, SP1369RS, 2353RS), with no link. 41 of the 69,027 GB licences had one in October 2026.
correspondenceAddress, correspondencePostcode	The address the licence holder gave for letters.
operatingCentres, operatingCentreCount	The operating centre (where the vehicles are kept) that the register file gives for the licence, with its postcode and postcode district. The files carry one operating centre address per licence, so this is a list of one (empty when the file has none): a licence with several operating centres shows one of them, and operatingCentreCount is 1, not the number of centres the licence has.
vehiclesAuthorised, trailersAuthorised, vehiclesSpecified, trailersSpecified	How many vehicles and trailers the licence allows, and how many are specified on it.
transportManagerCount, directorOrPartnerCount	How many transport managers and directors or partners the register lists. Their names are never returned.
continuationDate	When the licence is next due for continuation (every five years). It is not an expiry date.
listed	false for a licence that has dropped out of the register file since an earlier run; the row then holds the last values seen and no addresses.
firstSeen, lastChanged, changes	From the history the actor keeps (see below). firstSeen is the weekly file in which a licence first appeared, null when it was already there when the history started. changes lists new, changed (with field, from and to), removed and relisted, each with the date of the weekly file. With changesSince, only the changes since that date; otherwise the last 20.
sourceDate, source	The date of the file the row comes from, and the dataset and licence it was published under. For Great Britain this is the date the weekly file was published (its Last-Modified). For Northern Ireland it is the date in the file's name, which is when the data was extracted: 2023-01-08 at the time of writing, and the source text says "data as of" that date. The run also warns in its log and summary when the Northern Ireland file is older than 60 days.

A lookup also saves a free row for every value that gave no licence: outcome is invalid (not a licence number) or not found (not in the register files), query is the value and error says why. These rows are never charged and do not count against maxItems. To keep only licences in an export, filter on outcome being empty.

The run also saves a SUMMARY record in the key-value store: the files read with their dates and how many licences were new, changed and removed in each, the files that could not be read, the numbers not found, the rows with addresses hidden, and any values the actor could not read.

How the changes feed works

The register files are a snapshot. They say which licences exist this week, not when one was granted or changed. The actor therefore keeps its own history: a record of every licence it has seen, per traffic area, in a key-value store on your Apify account (historyStoreName). Each run compares the current weekly file with that record and dates every difference with the file's date.

• The first run records the starting point and returns no changes. Its status message says so, and it costs only the start of the run. From the following Sunday's file on, changesSince returns what changed.
• Running twice in one week returns the same changes, because both runs see the same file.
• Any run, including a search or a lookup, updates the history of the areas it reads. A run limited to some trafficAreas leaves the other areas' history as it was, and their next run reports everything since then under the date of that file.
• The fields compared are status, licence type, vehicles and trailers authorised, number of operating centres, name, company number, continuation date and holder type. A change of address alone is not reported.
• A file that suddenly holds less than half of last week's licences is treated as a broken download and not used.

Send results to Make, Zapier, n8n or a CRM

Long runs do not need to keep a Make or Zapier scenario waiting:

1. Start the actor or one of its saved tasks on a schedule, or from your scenario with the asynchronous "Run Actor" step. For the changes feed, a weekly schedule on Monday morning (UK time) picks up the Sunday file.
2. Trigger the next step on the finished run. In Make use the Apify module "Watch Actor Runs", in Zapier the Apify trigger for a finished actor run, in n8n the Apify node.
3. Read the rows with "Get Dataset Items" using the run's dataset ID.

For your own endpoint, open the actor's Integrations tab and add an HTTP webhook on "Run succeeded". The payload contains resource.defaultDatasetId, which you can read at https://api.apify.com/v2/datasets/<datasetId>/items?format=json. Add &format=csv for a spreadsheet, or &view=changes for the changes columns.

Pricing

You pay per licence saved (event licence), and the price is on the Pricing tab. Numbers that are not found and values that are not licence numbers (both come back as free rows), the first changes run that only records the starting point, and rows past your cost limit are not charged. When a run reaches the maximum cost you set, it stops and keeps what was saved, and it never saves a licence the remaining budget cannot pay for. If the platform migrates or restarts a run, the run picks up its own record of what it saved (RUN_STATE in the key-value store) and does not save or charge those licences, or the free rows, again.

Source and licence

• Great Britain: "Traffic Commissioners: goods and public service vehicle operator licence records", published by the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency from the Vehicle Operator Licensing (VOL) database: https://www.data.gov.uk/dataset/traffic-commissioners-goods-and-public-service-vehicle-operator-licence-records. One CSV per traffic area, refreshed weekly (the publisher says on Sundays; the files recorded on 21 October 2026 were dated Wednesday 7 October 2026, so read sourceDate rather than assuming a day).
• Northern Ireland: "Northern Ireland goods vehicle operator's licence records", Department for Infrastructure: https://www.data.gov.uk/dataset/northern-ireland-goods-vehicle-operator-s-licence-records. This file is not refreshed every week: the copy on data.gov.uk is dated 8 January 2023 (it was copied to the server again on 1 January 2024, which the Last-Modified header shows, but the data is the same), so treat Northern Ireland as a snapshot from January 2023. Every Northern Ireland row carries that date in sourceDate. The file has no status, continuation date or company number columns (its header has 12 columns, the GB header 16), so those are null for every Northern Ireland row.
• The actor finds the files through the data.gov.uk catalogue API on every run, so a renamed file does not break it.
• The published files are "a similar version" of the internal VOL database (Department for Transport, Statement of Administrative Sources), not the database itself, and it is refreshed once a week, so a licence granted on a Monday shows up in the file of the following Sunday at the earliest.
• Licence: both datasets are published under the Open Government Licence v3.0 (https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/), which allows commercial reuse with attribution. Attribution for your own use of the data: "Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0." Every row carries a source field that names its dataset.

Personal data

Many operator licences are held by sole traders and partnerships. Their name is on the public register, but their correspondence address and operating centre are often their home. The register says for each licence whether it is held by a company, an LLP, a sole trader or a partnership; where it does not, the actor reads the name, and a name without a legal-form word such as Ltd, Limited, PLC or LLP is treated as a person. For licences held by persons the actor leaves out both addresses and the full postcodes by default and keeps only the postcode district (for example CF10), which places the operating centre without naming a house.

The register also names transport managers and directors or partners. The actor never returns these names, with no option to turn them on: it returns only how many there are. The Open Government Licence does not cover personal data.

Set includeSoleTraderContacts to true only if you have a lawful basis for processing personal data. Under the UK GDPR you are the one who decides how the data is used and who must meet its rules. For calls and e-mails to businesses, PECR applies to you as the sender, and sole traders and partnerships count as individuals there. The actor provides public register data and does not give legal advice.

When a run fails, an error report with the error message and the shape of the input (which fields are set, how long the lists are), never your input values or your results, is sent to the developer to fix bugs.

Limits

• The changes feed needs two weekly files: the first run only records the starting point.
• Licences granted and removed within the same week never appear in a weekly file, so the feed cannot show them.
• Status filters drop Northern Ireland licences, because the Northern Ireland file has no status.
• The Northern Ireland file is from January 2023 (see sourceDate); do not use it for the current state of the register.
• The Great Britain files list only licences in force (valid, curtailed or suspended). A revoked or surrendered licence shows as removed in the feed rather than with a revoked status.
• The files give one operating centre address per licence, so operatingCentres never lists more than one.
• A full run over all areas downloads nine files of several megabytes each. The actor reads them one at a time with a pause between downloads, and stops downloading if three files fail in a row; files it could not read are named in the status message and the summary, and if none could be read the run fails without charging anything.
• The actor stops with an error if a file changes its columns or a column suddenly holds values it cannot read, before anything from that file is saved.

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