Car Tax Bands Explained: What You'll Pay in 2026

What changed on 1 April 2026

If you're buying second-hand, the single most important thing to know isn't in the rate tables at all: car tax does not transfer to you when you buy a car. The seller's tax is cancelled the moment the sale is registered, and you have to tax it in your own name before you drive it away. There's no grace period. We'll come back to that, because every rival guide seems to skip it.

Three changes matter for most people:

• The standard rate went up by £5, from £195 to £200 a year. This is the flat rate that most cars registered on or after 1 April 2017 pay from their second year onwards, whatever the fuel.
• The Expensive Car Supplement threshold for electric cars rose from £40,000 to £50,000. New zero-emission cars with a list price between £40,000 and £50,000 no longer get caught by the supplement. For petrol, diesel and hybrid cars the threshold stays at £40,000.
• Electric cars still pay tax. The old free ride ended on 1 April 2025, not 2026 — so if you read older guides saying EVs are exempt, that's out of date. EVs now pay a £10 first-year rate and the same £200 standard rate as everyone else.

A lot of the confusion online comes from mixing up the April 2025 changes (when EV tax started and low-emission first-year rates jumped) with the April 2026 changes above. Every rate in this guide has its year attached for that reason.

How VED bands work for cars registered from April 2017

Cars first registered on or after 1 April 2017 follow a two-stage system.

Year one — the "showroom tax". The first year's rate is based on the car's official CO2 emissions. It's usually rolled into the on-the-road price of a new car, so it mostly matters to you if you're buying something nearly new. The 2026/27 first-year rates run like this:

Diesels that don't meet the "RDE2" standard — Real Driving Emissions Step 2, the current test for nitrogen oxide emissions — pay the rate one band higher. The first-year charge tops out at £5,690 for the highest-emitting cars.

Year two onwards — the standard rate. After the first year, almost every car drops to the flat standard rate of £200 a year (£210 if you spread it over monthly Direct Debit payments, or £110 for six months). It doesn't matter whether the car does 40 g/km or 240 g/km — the standard rate is the same. This is the number that matters most when you're buying used, because any car more than a year old is already on it.

The Expensive Car Supplement

If a car had a list price of more than £40,000 when new (£50,000 for electric cars, from 1 April 2026), there's an extra charge on top of the standard rate: £440 a year, for five years, from the second time the car is taxed — so years two to six. That's £640 a year in total during those years for an affected petrol or diesel car.

This is worth checking on a used buy. A car that cost over £40,000 new can still be within its supplement years even at three or four years old, so the tax can be higher than the list price alone suggests. It's based on the original list price, not what you're paying now.

Older cars: tax bands before April 2017

A big chunk of the used market sits below the April 2017 line, and these cars work differently — they pay a single annual rate, with no separate first-year charge.

Registered 1 March 2001 to 31 March 2017. These use CO2 bands lettered A to M. For 2026/27 the annual rates run from £20 (bands A and B, up to 110 g/km) up to £790 (band M, over 255 g/km), with most ordinary family cars landing somewhere in the £170–£445 range. Note the old £0 band A no longer exists — even the cleanest cars in this group now pay £20.

Registered before 1 March 2001. These are taxed on engine size alone: £230 a year for engines up to 1549cc, and £375 a year for anything over 1549cc.

If a car's CO2 figure puts it in a nasty band, that's a genuine running cost worth factoring into what you offer.

Buying a used car? Tax does not transfer with it

Here's the bit rival guides bury. When you buy a used car:

• The seller's tax is cancelled automatically. As soon as they tell DVLA they've sold it, the tax is stopped and they get a refund for any full months left. gov.uk is blunt about it: "The tax is not transferred to you when you buy the vehicle."
• You must tax it before you drive it. In gov.uk's words: "You must tax a vehicle you've bought before you drive it, or declare it off the road (a SORN)." (SORN is short for Statutory Off Road Notification — more on this below.) There is no grace period — not even a day to drive it home on the old keeper's tax.
• You can tax it on the spot using the 12-digit reference number on the green "new keeper" slip (V5C/2) the seller hands you. Do it online or by phone before you set off, and it takes effect immediately.

So budget the tax in before you agree a price, and factor a high-emissions band into the deal.

How to check a car's tax status and band before you buy

You don't have to take the seller's word for any of this. Our free car check needs just the number plate and shows whether the car is currently taxed or declared off-road with a SORN, alongside its MOT record. It's the quick sanity check before you hand over any money — a car showing as SORN or untaxed is a flag worth asking about.

One related check worth doing at the same time: if you'll drive it in London or another city with a charging zone, run the registration through our ULEZ check — an older diesel that's cheap to buy can be expensive to drive daily if it's non-compliant.

Electric and low-emission car tax in 2026

Electric cars are no longer tax-free, but they're still cheap to tax:

• First year: £10 for a zero-emission car registered from 1 April 2026.
• Standard rate: the same £200 a year as petrol and diesel, from the second year.
• Expensive Car Supplement: applies to EVs with a list price over £50,000 (up from £40,000 on 1 April 2026) — £440 a year for years two to six.

You may also see talk of "pay-per-mile" car tax for electric cars, known as eVED. It is not yet in force — nothing is payable now or in the 2026/27 tax year. Following its consultation, the government confirmed in a response published in July 2026 that it intends to charge electric cars 3p per mile and plug-in hybrids 1.5p per mile from April 2028. That's still a future change, not a current cost — older coverage treating it as something you pay today is wrong.

What happens if you don't pay

Keeping or driving an untaxed car on a public road is an offence, and DVLA now runs mostly on number-plate cameras, so it's spotted quickly. Based on DVLA's enforcement policy:

• An automatic penalty of £80 for keeping an untaxed vehicle, reduced to £40 if you pay within 33 days.
• An out-of-court settlement of £30 plus one and a half times the outstanding tax if the car is caught being used on the road.
• Clamping and impounding. A clamped car costs £100 to release within the first 24 hours; if it's impounded, that's a £200 release fee plus £21 a day storage, and a surety fee (from £160 for a normal car) that you get back later.
• Court action if the settlement goes unpaid — a fine of £1,000 or five times the annual tax, whichever is greater.

If you're keeping a car but not using it on the road, the legal alternative to taxing it is a SORN — a Statutory Off Road Notification. You declare it off the road with DVLA (it must be kept somewhere like a garage, drive or private land, not on a public road), stop paying tax, and get a refund for the full months left. See our guide to SORN explained for how and when to use it.

One more exemption worth knowing: genuinely old cars are tax-exempt on a rolling 40-year basis. For the year from 1 April 2026, a car built before 1 January 1986 can be taxed at £0 — but you still have to apply for the exemption and tax it each year; it isn't automatic.

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