TX TaxiTools · licensing research · August 2026
There is no national fee for a taxi badge. There are 318 of them, the gap between cheapest and dearest is almost eightfold, and the advertised price is very often not what a driver pays.
The short version
Taxi and private hire licensing in Great Britain is run authority by authority. Each one sets its own fees, publishes them in its own format, and answers to nobody else for the level it sets them at.
The result is a market where the same licence, for the same job, costs £80 in the Western Isles and £633 in Warwick. Not a different licence. Not a longer one. The same three-year driver badge.
That variation is legal and, in principle, justified: authorities are only supposed to recover the cost of running the licensing regime. But there is no requirement to publish how the figure was arrived at, no common format, and no central register. A driver deciding where to licence has no straightforward way to compare, and until now neither did anyone else.
What a driver pays
Sixty-eight authorities state a three-year new driver fee cleanly enough to compare like for like. Among those, the median is £324. The distribution is wide and it is not explained by geography alone.
Three-year new driver licence, 68 authorities that publish a single comparable figure. Excludes authorities that quote bands, omit the duration, or price the taxi and private hire routes differently.
Regional medians move in the direction you would expect, but the range inside each region is far larger than the gap between them. The South East contains both the second-cheapest authority in the country and the third-dearest.
| Region | Median | Range | Authorities | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| East of England | £376 | £238–£479 | 10 | |
| Yorkshire and the Humber | £370 | £279–£385 | 3 | |
| West Midlands | £350 | £245–£633 | 11 | |
| East Midlands | £345 | £323–£485 | 3 | |
| South West | £329 | £310–£615 | 7 | |
| South East | £298 | £121–£595 | 15 | |
| Wales | £295 | £270–£398 | 4 | |
| North West | £238 | £140–£391 | 12 |
Regions with fewer than three comparable authorities are omitted rather than shown on a sample of one or two.
The costs that are not in the headline
The licence fee is the number authorities lead with. It is very often not what a driver actually pays. A criminal record check, a knowledge test, a medical, a plate and a vehicle inspection may each be charged separately, and whether they are is entirely a local decision.
| Charge | Authorities | Share | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Knowledge or topographical test | 111 | 35% | |
| Criminal record check | 102 | 32% | |
| Plate or badge | 43 | 14% | |
| Vehicle test | 24 | 8% | |
| Medical | 9 | 3% |
Where these are charged on top, they change the picture materially. Cheshire East advertises a joint driver licence at £140. The criminal record check is £68, the DVLA check £10 and the knowledge test £55, all extra. The real figure to get badged is £273.
Every figure in this report so far is the driver licence — the badge that lets a person drive. A vehicle needs its own licence, and an owner-driver pays both. Those are the two numbers people most often confuse, because authorities publish them on separate pages and both are called a taxi licence in conversation.
| Item | What it licenses | Fee |
|---|---|---|
| Joint driver licence | You, up to 3 years | £140 |
| Enhanced criminal record check | You | £68 |
| Knowledge test | You | £55 |
| DVLA check | You | £10 |
| To be licensed as a driver | £273 | |
| Private hire vehicle licence | The car, per year, includes one test | £362 |
| First year, driving your own car | £635 |
Cheshire East’s own published figures, checked 10 August 2026. The driver licence runs up to three years; the vehicle licence is annual, so years two and three add £362 each.
Read as “£140 for a taxi licence”, Cheshire East looks like one of the cheapest authorities in the country. Read as what an owner-driver hands over in year one, it is £635. Both numbers come off the same council’s website.
The comparison trap
Newcastle upon Tyne charges £180 for a three-year badge and Warwick charges £633. That looks like a scandal until you read the schedules: Newcastle’s fee includes the criminal record and DVLA checks, and Warwick’s does not say either way. The gap is real, but part of it is accounting rather than cost.
Roughly a fifth of schedules fold something into the headline price. Rotherham includes the knowledge test and safeguarding training. Carmarthenshire includes two MOTs in the vehicle fee. Middlesbrough includes tests, livery and plates. Read without that context, those authorities look cheap; read with it, several are simply honest.
Thurrock, Denbighshire, Bolsover and Torfaen all price the driver licence “excluding DBS” and then never state what the check costs. The published fee is, by the authority’s own admission, not the price. A driver cannot budget from it.
Structure
Britain does not have a single taxi licensing regime with local variation. It has genuinely different systems that happen to share a trade.
District and unitary authorities license under the Town Police Clauses Act 1847 and the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1976. Hackney carriage and private hire are separate licences with separate rules, though many authorities now issue a combined “dual” badge.
One authority, Transport for London, licenses 123,636 drivers — almost a third of the national total. It also shows most clearly why a single fee is often a fiction: a private hire driver pays £40 for the topographical assessment, while a black cab driver pays £225 for the Knowledge written examination and a further £425 to appear. Same city, same regulator, wildly different route in.
Licensing runs under the Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982, which is a different statute with different vocabulary. Several Scottish councils call the vehicle licence an “operator licence”, which does not mean what it means in England. Background checks go through Disclosure Scotland rather than the DBS, and are generally not priced by the council at all.
Northern Ireland is not in this comparison, and the reason is structural rather than an oversight. There are no licensing councils. All taxi licensing is handled centrally by the Driver & Vehicle Agency, part of the Department for Infrastructure, under the Taxis Act (Northern Ireland) 2008. One authority, one fee schedule, no local variation to compare. An operator licence application is £140, with separate small and large operator categories.
Put simply, a comparison table of Northern Irish councils would have exactly one row. The interesting question there is not “which council is cheapest” but “how does a centralised system compare with 318 devolved ones” — a different piece of work, and a fair one to do.
The other side of the counter
Operator licensing — the licence to take bookings and dispatch vehicles — follows a different logic. Fees are usually banded by fleet size and run for five years rather than one or three, so the headline numbers are larger but the annual cost is not necessarily worse.
The banding is where the variation bites. Wrexham charges £615 for one to nine vehicles and £1,710 at ten or more, so the tenth car costs a small firm over a thousand pounds. Redditch charges £708.90 for up to three vehicles and £18.90 for each additional one, which scales smoothly. Cheshire West and Chester runs bands all the way to £2,520 for a fleet of 300 to 349, then £200 for each further 50.
For a two-car firm thinking about a third, or a nine-car firm thinking about a tenth, the shape of the band matters more than the headline rate.
Method
Every figure comes from the licensing authority’s own published material: a fees page, a fee schedule PDF, or where nothing else exists, the appendix to a committee report. No trade press, no aggregators, no estimates. Each entry records its source and the date it was checked.
Three limits are worth stating plainly.
The underlying data, with a source link and check date on every authority, is published free at taxitools.co.uk.