BookMyGarage Data Shows Drivers Now Pay £425 to Fix a Failed MOT

• The average bill to fix a car that fails its MOT has climbed to £425 for cars aged 6 to 8 years, up 70 percent on 2022, according to BookMyGarage.
• One nationwide garage chain’s average MOT repair invoice is now £227, also up 70 percent on 2022, while smaller regional garages have gone from £122 in 2023 to £183 in 2025, a 50 percent rise.
• The DVSA’s own test data puts the current failure rate at 28.1 percent, with drivers in the worst postcode areas failing at close to double the rate of the best.

Getting a car through its MOT is meant to cost £54.85 for the test itself. For close to nine million UK motorists a year, that figure is only the start. Car service booking platform BookMyGarage has gone through thousands of invoices from garages across the country covering full calendar years from 2022 to 2025, and the pattern is consistent: whatever a failed MOT used to cost, it now costs up to 70 percent more.

For cars aged 6 to 8 years, the average repair bill after a failure is now £425. Cars aged just 3 to 5 years are not spared either, with owners typically facing £332 in repair costs. Both figures include the capped test fee, but the bulk of the bill is parts and labour, and that is where the real rise has happened.

The Bill Depends Almost Entirely on Which Garage You Use

The BookMyGarage analysis breaks the market into two groups, and the gap between them is stark. One nationwide garage chain now has an average MOT repair invoice of £227, a 70 percent rise on 2022. At smaller regional garage networks, which tend to see more older vehicles come through the door, the typical cost of an MOT that turns up extra repairs has gone from £122 in 2023 to £183 in 2025, a 50 percent increase in two years.

Karen Rotberg, co-founder of BookMyGarage, said repairs are not optional after a failure, so drivers are stuck paying whatever the bill comes to. “Most people don’t know exactly what their car needs, and that’s where transparency is key,” she said. “Our advice is to carefully compare trusted local garages, understand their pricing and read real reviews before making a choice.”

Average UK garage labour rates now sit at £68.51 an hour, and that is before parts are added. Modern cars carry more sensors, more complex suspension components and more electronics than older models, all of which cost more to source and fit when they fail. At the extreme end, some repair claims on high-end luxury SUVs have topped £13,000, a figure that would buy a decent used car outright rather than fix the one already on the drive.

The items most likely to trip a car up at the test centre remain the cheapest ones on paper: lighting and signalling faults, worn tyres and defective brakes make up a large share of all failures every year, and each of these can often be fixed for under £100 on their own. The trouble comes when several of these show up on the same certificate. A car that fails on a brake pipe, a pair of tyres and a headlight bulb all at once can quickly turn a £50 job into a £400 one, most of all on cars where a rusted brake pipe means a garage has to remove other parts to reach it, adding hours of labour to what looks on paper like a small repair.

Suspension and exhaust work sit at the more expensive end of the same test, and these are exactly the components that get weaker as a car passes the six to eight year mark that BookMyGarage’s data covers. A worn coil spring or a corroded rear exhaust box on an older car can each run to £200 or more once labour is added, and it is common for a car that has been driven carefully but rarely serviced to fail on two or three of these at once, pushing the final bill well past the £425 average.

None of this is unique to any one manufacturer. BookMyGarage’s data was drawn from garages working across the whole market, not a single make or dealer network, which is why the rise applies to ordinary family cars as much as it does to anything more unusual. A nine-year-old car, roughly the current UK average, sits close to the point where several wear items reach the end of their life within the same year or two, which is part of why the bill has grown even as the headline failure rate has fallen.

The rise in bills has not come from a rise in failures. DVSA figures show the overall MOT failure rate currently stands at 28.1 percent, down from 40 percent just over a decade ago in 2013 to 2014. Cars are, on average, better maintained than they were then. What has changed is how much it costs when a car does fail, and how long drivers are keeping their vehicles before they replace them. The average age of Britain’s 36 million cars is now just over nine years, well past the point where wear items such as brakes, suspension bushes and exhaust components start to need attention at the same time.

Failure rates are not spread evenly across the country either. A look at the DVSA’s own test database shows some postcode areas, including Kirkcaldy, Dundee and Truro, fail more than a third of the cars that come through, while some outer London postcode areas such as Romford see roughly one in five fail. Drivers in the worst-performing areas are not just more likely to fail. Repair costs are broadly similar wherever the work is done, so they are also more likely to be hit with one of these bills in the first place.

Can You Avoid the Higher Bill?

The single biggest saving available to drivers is simply not accepting the first quote. BookMyGarage’s own advice, echoed by comparison platforms across the trade, is to get a second opinion on any repair a garage says is needed after a failure. Prices for identical work can vary by hundreds of pounds between garages in the same town, and comparison tools built specifically for MOT and repair pricing let drivers check this before booking any work.

Timing helps too. A car can be tested up to a month before its current MOT expires without losing any of the remaining time on the certificate. Booking early gives a driver room to shop around for repair quotes if the car fails, rather than being forced into whatever the testing garage quotes on the day, once the car is no longer legal to drive.

Simple checks before the test can also cut the bill substantially. Bulbs, wiper blades, tyre tread depth and tyre pressure account for a meaningful share of failures every year, and all of them cost a few pounds to fix at home rather than being rolled into a garage’s repair invoice. Drivers should also ask whether a garage is quoting for genuine manufacturer parts or more affordable compatible alternatives, as the difference on brake pads, discs or filters can run into hundreds of pounds without changing whether the car passes.

It is also worth understanding the difference between an advisory and a reason for failure. Only faults that cause an outright failure need fixing before a car can be driven away with a valid certificate. Advisories flag things worth watching, not immediate repairs, and a garage that quotes for fixing every advisory at once, on top of the actual failure items, is adding cost that is not required to pass the test that day.

Finally, for owners of cars old enough that repair bills are edging toward the vehicle’s actual value, it is worth getting an independent valuation before committing to a repair. A £425 bill on a car worth £1,200 is a very different proposition to the same bill on a car worth £8,000, and BookMyGarage’s data suggests that gap is only going to widen as parts and labour costs continue to climb.

Sources: BookMyGarage invoice analysis 2022 to 2025, reported by Motoring Research (“Car MOT failure costs rocket to record levels”, published 4 June 2026) and Regit (“How to save on MOT repair costs as bills jump 70%”, published 8 August 2026); Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency, MOT anonymised test data (open.data.dvsa.gov.uk, last updated 22 June 2026).