For organisations

UK taxi licensing fee dataset

A sourced, dated and standardised record of published taxi and private hire licensing fees across 318 licensing areas in England, Wales and Scotland.

The website stays free

Everything here is already free for drivers on taxitools.co.uk and always will be. This page is for organisations that need the same information as structured data rather than as web pages, and it changes nothing about the free site.

What it is

There is no single place licensing authorities publish their fees. Some use a web page, some a PDF, some only committee papers. They are structured differently in almost every authority: different licence durations, different splits between hackney carriage, private hire and dual, different bundling of knowledge tests and DBS checks into an application fee.

Anyone who needs to compare across authorities has to find, read and standardise several hundred inconsistent sources. This dataset removes that work.

318

Licensing areas

315

With published fee data

No readable schedule found

318

Carry source and date

England, Wales and Scotland. Northern Ireland licenses taxis through the Driver and Vehicle Agency under separate legislation rather than through district councils, so it is not comparable and is not included.

What is in each record

Field	What it holds
area	The licensing area
slug	A URL-safe form of the name, for joining to other systems
status	`published`, or `not_published` where no readable schedule was found
driver_fees	What it costs to licence a driver, with durations and new/renewal rates where the authority distinguishes them
vehicle_fees	The same, for a vehicle
operator_fees	The same, for an operator or booking office licence
ambiguity_flag	Whether a manual review found recorded doubt about the source
ambiguity_types	The kind of doubt, where flagged
source_domain	The council domain the figure was read from
source_url	The exact page or document
checked_date	The date a person read that source
checked_note	Any caveat recorded at the time of reading

Supplied as CSV for spreadsheets and JSON for software, with identical content, plus a data dictionary and a methodology document.

One record, in full

area Trafford status published driver_fees £318.60 new (1yr) · £136.60–£297.60 renewal (1-3yr) vehicle_fees £183 + £106 compliance tests (≈£289) source_url trafford.gov.uk/business-licences-and-consumers/… checked_date 2026-07-31

That last line is the point. Every figure can be taken back to the page it came from and checked.

Try it before anything else

A ten-authority sample, identical fields to the full set, chosen by evenly spaced index across the alphabetical list so it is reproducible rather than curated. Four of the ten carry an ambiguity flag, against 39% in the full set, so the sample is if anything harder on itself than the whole.

No email address required. No form. Just the file.

Sample, CSV Sample, JSON Methodology Data dictionary

Open any record's source_url and compare it against the figure. That is the intended test, and it is the one that matters.

What it does not claim

Fees change without notice. Each record states what was found published when the source was checked on its stated date — not that the figure was correct then, and not that it remains so. Nothing here detects a change between checks.
122 of the 315 published records carry an ambiguity flag. That reflects real disagreement and gaps in authorities' own published material: a licence period not stated, a schedule year that has lapsed, an authority whose own pages give different figures. A flag is not a finding that the figure is wrong — it marks a record worth checking at source first.
The review covers what was recorded. Every published record was read and judged individually. It cannot find doubt that was never written down, and it is not a fresh re-check of all 318 council sources.
Source URLs decay as authorities reorganise their websites and withdraw committee papers.
No refresh interval is committed. A cadence will be offered only when it can be kept.

How it was built

One person read each authority's own published material, wrote a concise factual summary, and recorded the source and the date. Search summaries, trade press and automated PDF summarisation were each tested during collection and rejected after producing figures that did not match the authority. The methodology document sets out the specific failures.

Need the full set?

Terms depend on what you need it for — a one-off comparison, ongoing internal analysis, publication, or building it into a product are different things. Tell me which and we can work out what makes sense.

Discuss organisational access

or email taxitoolsuk@gmail.com

Version 1.1.0 · built 22 August 2026 · sources checked 31 July to 22 August 2026