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Driving licence reminder

UK photo-card driving licences expire every ten years. There's nothing on your dashboard to nag you, no MOT-style mandatory check, and the DVLA reminder letter often gets binned with the council tax junk. If you miss it, you're technically driving without a valid licence.

GarageHQ now picks this up alongside your existing MOT, tax, and insurance reminders.

Setting your renewal date

  1. Open Settings → Account.
  2. Find the Driving licence renewal card.
  3. Enter the date on the front of your photo-card licence labelled 4b (Date of issue + 10 years), or just check the back of the card for the "valid until" date.
  4. Click Save.

That's it. The reminder pipeline picks it up on the next overnight run.

If you don't know the exact date, the valid until field on the back of your UK photo-card licence is the authoritative source. You can also check it on the GOV.UK view your driving licence service if you have a Government Gateway login.

What you'll get in the digest

Your regular GarageHQ reminder email gains a You section above the per-vehicle sections:

Hello,

You
  • Driving licence renewal expires in 30 days (12 June 2027)

Your vehicles
  • AB12 CDE: MOT expires in 14 days
  • CD34 EFG: Insurance expires in 7 days

[unsubscribe link]

The licence reminder appears at the 60-day, 30-day, and 7-day windows by default, the same cadence the per-vehicle reminders use unless you've customised yours under Notification reminders.

Updating after you renew

Once you've renewed your licence (the DVLA website takes about 5 minutes, costs £14, and physical card arrives in a week), come back to Settings → Account and update the renewal date to the new "valid until" date. The reminder window resets.

There's no automatic detection. We deliberately don't sync against DVLA's photo-card data because it would require asking for your driver number + national insurance number every time, which is too much friction for a once-per-decade event.

Removing the reminder

If you'd rather not track this, leave the Driving licence renewal field blank, or clear it if you've previously set it. With no date, no reminders fire. The rest of your reminder cadence is unaffected.

Provisional licences

GB provisional photo-card licences also expire after ten years and need renewing on the same schedule. Use the same field; the reminder doesn't distinguish between provisional and full.

I drive in the UK on a non-UK licence

The reminder is designed around the UK photo-card. If you hold a non-UK licence, the expiry date on yours may follow a different rule (some EU licences expire at 15 years, US ones vary by state). You can still use this field, just enter your card's expiry date, but the messaging will say "driving licence" rather than e.g. "International driving permit".

If you'd like first-class non-UK licence support (hello@garagehq.uk), let us know and we'll prioritise.

Why this isn't on the vehicle page

The licence is yours, not the vehicle's. If you have multiple vehicles, you'd see the same reminder duplicated on every vehicle, which is noise. So we surface it on Settings → Account, the right home for personal compliance dates.

The reminder digest pulls vehicle and personal events into a single email so you only get one daily / weekly message, not a separate licence email.

Common questions

Will the reminder fire even if I've disabled email reminders for all my vehicles? Yes. The licence reminder is per-user, and uses your account-level reminder cadence (set under Settings → Notification reminders). It's independent of the per-vehicle on/off toggles.

Can my organisation's owner see my licence renewal date? No. The renewal date is per-user data, stored on your account row, and is never surfaced in org reporting, the compliance dashboard, or any other shared view. Only you see it.

Does this work with shared family / household accounts? Each GarageHQ user has their own account and their own licence date. If two people in a household share a vehicle but have separate GarageHQ accounts, each sets their own licence renewal independently.