Garages Warn MOT Testing Capacity Is at Risk After 16 Years With a Frozen Fee

Garages across the country are cutting back the number of MOT bays they run. Demand has not fallen. The maximum fee they can charge for a Class 4 MOT test has stayed at £54.85 from April 2010, while every other cost in a workshop has climbed around it, and something has to give.

The Independent Garage Association says the freeze is now doing more than squeeze profit margins. Workshops are quietly shifting their bays toward servicing and diagnostics, where the same hour of a technician’s time earns far more than testing a car for roadworthiness. The result, the trade body warns, is a shrinking national testing network at exactly the moment more than 20 million MOTs need to be carried out every year across Great Britain.

For an ordinary driver, that sounds like an industry squabble over money. It is not. Fewer garages willing to run MOT bays means longer waits, fewer local options, and a testing system that gets tighter precisely as the government leans on it to keep unsafe vehicles off the road.

A 16-Year Freeze Meets a Fresh Rise for Everyone Else

The timing is what has pushed garage owners into open frustration. On 6 July 2026, the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency raised the maximum service charges that Authorised Testing Facilities can bill for HGV, bus, coach and trailer tests. HGV testing rose from £55 to £70. Trailers went from £40 to £50. Buses and coaches climbed from £70 to £90.

DVSA ran a public consultation on the change between September and November 2025 and received 634 responses. Ninety-nine percent of testing facilities supported an increase. The agency agreed, noting that had the old fees simply tracked inflation from 2010, the HGV charge would already sit closer to £85.

Class 4 testing, the category that covers ordinary cars and light vans, got nothing. Stuart James, chief executive of the Independent Garage Association, said members are reporting that the stagnant fee cap is pushing them to prioritise more profitable work over MOT bays, “reducing the national capacity” for testing.

Who Pays When a Garage Stops Testing

A frozen test fee sounds like a trade problem until you try to book a slot. The Independent Garage Association’s warning lines up with what drivers have already been reporting through 2026: longer waits for appointments, especially outside major towns, and testing centres in rural areas at the greatest risk of closing their bays first.

Independent garages carry the bulk of the UK’s testing capacity. If a meaningful share of them stop offering MOTs, whether the fee no longer covers wages, energy, rent, insurance, calibration or the specialist equipment now needed for hybrid and electric vehicles, the remaining stations absorb the overflow. That means longer bookings, less local choice and, for drivers in areas with only one or two testing garages, a real risk of having nowhere nearby to get a car through its annual check.

The Independent Garage Association lists rising technician salaries amid a skills shortage, higher business rates, calibration costs and new investment in EV-safe lifting and diagnostic equipment as costs that have piled up from 2010 with no corresponding rise in what a garage can legally charge for the test itself. Many workshops have used the MOT as what the trade calls a loss leader, accepting a thin margin on the test as it brings in repair work behind it. That model is getting harder to keep running as every other input cost rises, and once a garage decides the maths no longer works, the bay is more likely to be turned over to servicing than reopened for testing later.

Why Cars Missed Out While Lorries Got a Rise

DVSA has given no indication that a review of the Class 4 fee is imminent. The agency’s own consultation response focused entirely on heavy vehicles, and there is no published timetable for reassessing car and motorcycle testing charges. Motorcycle MOTs remain capped at £29.65, also unchanged from 2010.

The disparity has not gone unnoticed within the trade. Garage owners have pointed out that DVSA moved within months to raise HGV and PSV charges once operators asked, while the same request for cars has gone unanswered for well over a decade. The agency’s own justification for the commercial vehicle rise, that testing facilities need to stay financially stable to keep a working network running, applies just as directly to the thousands of independent garages that test ordinary cars.

Ninety-nine percent support among HGV and PSV operators for their own fee rise shows the trade is not opposed to paying more when the money clearly goes toward keeping testing facilities open. The frustration among car garages is not that fees went up elsewhere. It is that the same argument, put to DVSA repeatedly over more than a decade, has produced no equivalent action for the tests that ordinary drivers rely on every year.

What This Means for Your Next MOT

Drivers are not yet paying more for the test itself. The £54.85 cap holds for now. The practical risk is availability rather than price: fewer bays, longer waits, and in some areas the loss of a local testing option altogether. If garages keep shedding MOT bays for more profitable work, that pressure could eventually show up in longer round trips to reach a working test centre, or bookings pushed weeks out when a certificate is about to expire.

There is also a knock-on cost risk. A garage running MOTs as a loss leader has an incentive to keep the price competitive to bring in servicing work. A garage that has given up on testing altogether removes that competitive pressure locally, which can leave the stations that remain freer to raise the amount they charge for parts and labour once your car is already up on the ramp.

Rural drivers face the sharpest version of this problem. A driver in a large town typically has several garages within a short drive, so one closing its MOT bay barely registers. A driver in a village or a small market town has often relied on a single local garage for years, and if that garage decides testing no longer pays its way, the nearest alternative could be a round trip of thirty minutes or more, adding real cost and inconvenience to what used to be a routine annual check.

How to Protect Yourself

• Book your MOT two to four weeks before it expires rather than waiting for the last few days, when local capacity is tightest.
• Use the free gov.uk MOT history checker (gov.uk/check-mot-history) to see your car’s past advisories before you book, so you know what a garage might reasonably flag.
• If your regular garage has stopped offering MOTs, ask why. Independent Garage Association members report this is a direct effect of the fee freeze, not a lack of demand.
• Compare prices locally. Garages are not required to charge the maximum £54.85, and many still price below the cap to bring in repair work.
• If a garage quotes repair work off the back of an MOT advisory, check the test certificate to see whether DVSA graded the item “minor” or “major”. Minor advisories do not need to be fixed to pass.
• Report any garage refusing to hand over your MOT certificate or pressuring unnecessary work to the DVSA via gov.uk, which investigates complaints against approved test centres.

The Independent Garage Association is pushing the Department for Transport and DVSA to open a full review of the Class 4 fee structure before testing capacity declines any further. Until that happens, the gap between what garages can charge and what it actually costs them to run a testing bay will keep widening, and drivers are the ones who will feel it first through waiting times rather than through their wallets.

None of this changes what the law requires. Every car over three years old still needs a valid MOT to stay on the road legally, and driving without one carries a fine of up to £1,000. The pressure sits entirely on the supply side, in how many garages are still willing to offer the test at all, which makes forward planning around your own renewal date more important than it has ever been.

Sources:

• https://motester.co.uk/mot-fee-increase-iga-calls-government-dvsa-action/
• https://motester.co.uk/dvsa-confirms-increase-to-hgv-bus-and-trailer-mot-centre-service-charges-from-july-2026/
• https://www.gov.uk/check-mot-history