CARCHECKHQ RESEARCH

What fails an MOT at each car age, and which advisories turn into fails

Written by the CarCheckHQ team. Published November 2026.

If you're buying a used car, two questions come up a lot. What usually goes wrong at this age? And should I worry about the advisories on the last MOT?

We used DVSA's anonymised MOT data to answer both. It's the full set of car MOTs in Great Britain, not a survey.

The short version

About 1 in 9 cars failed their MOT first time at 2 years old or less. By 15 to 19 years it was over 4 in 10.
Up to 7 years old, tyres are the most common reason. From 8 years on, it's lights and electrics, with suspension close behind.
A car with an advisory in an area was usually 2 to 4 times as likely to fail in that same area at its next MOT.
But most advisories still didn't turn into a fail in that area a year later. For suspension, about 8 in 10 didn't.

Part 1: what fails at each age (2025 MOTs)

This covers 33,210,774 first-time MOTs on cars and light passenger vehicles in 2025. "Failed first time" means a Fail or a PRS (passed after a repair done at the test centre within an hour). That's how DVSA counts it too.

Car age	Tests	Failed first time	Most common fail areas (share of all tests)
0-2 years	1,475,242	11.0%	Tyres 4.9%, lights and electrics 2.5%, visibility 2.3%
3 years	1,704,464	12.2%	Tyres 4.7%, visibility 3.2%, lights and electrics 2.6%
4-5 years	3,910,776	14.6%	Tyres 5.1%, lights and electrics 3.4%, visibility 2.9%
6-7 years	4,816,366	19.4%	Tyres 5.6%, lights and electrics 5.2%, suspension 3.9%
8-10 years	7,664,145	26.8%	Lights and electrics 8.4%, suspension 8.2%, tyres 6.8%
11-14 years	7,026,376	36.2%	Lights and electrics 15.4%, suspension 13.9%, brakes 8.1%
15-19 years	4,776,678	42.3%	Lights and electrics 20.5%, suspension 17.3%, brakes 11.0%
20+ years	1,836,727	38.4%	Lights and electrics 18.9%, suspension 14.1%, brakes 11.9%

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Source: Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA), MOT Anonymised Data. Analysis by CarCheckHQ. Not endorsed by DVSA.
CarCheckHQ is independent and isn't affiliated with DVSA.

"Lights and electrics" is DVSA's "Lamps, reflectors and electrical equipment" section. "Visibility" covers the windscreen, wipers, washers and mirrors. A test counts once in an area however many items it had there, and one test can fail in more than one area.

A few things stand out.

Tyres are the young car problem. On cars up to 7 years old, tyres are the top fail area every time. These cars haven't worn much else yet, but tyres wear out whatever the age.

Suspension climbs fast after 7. It goes from 3.9% of tests at 6 to 7 years to 13.9% at 11 to 14. That section covers springs, shock absorbers, ball joints and bushes.

Rust shows up late. Body, chassis and structure fails are under 1% of tests up to 5 years, then 4.5% at 11 to 14 years and 8.7% at 20 years plus.

The 20+ group fails a bit less than 15 to 19. That's likely because the old cars still being tested are the ones that have been looked after. Many of the rest have been scrapped by then.

The full table, including 2024 and every area, is free to download from our MOT results dataset.

Part 2: do advisories turn into fails?

An advisory is a note from the tester. It's not a fail, and the car can still pass. Buyers often ask whether a car with a long list of advisories is a bad bet.

So we followed the same cars from one MOT to the next. We took each car's first MOT in 2024 and matched it to its next MOT 300 to 430 days later. That gave us 26,929,009 cars with both tests. For most, the gap was about a year.

Any advisory at all

Car age at the 2024 MOT	Had any advisory: failed next MOT	No advisories: failed next MOT
All ages	35.8% of 13,620,845 cars	21.9% of 13,308,164 cars
3 years	17.6% of 448,803	12.1% of 970,257
6-7 years	27.2% of 1,950,960	18.7% of 2,393,403
8-10 years	35.1% of 3,204,659	24.7% of 3,036,606
11-14 years	43.4% of 3,269,036	31.8% of 2,118,407
15-19 years	47.8% of 2,182,756	34.5% of 1,097,394

Cars with advisories failed more often the following year at every age. But plenty of cars with no advisories failed too. A clean last MOT isn't a promise.

Advisory in an area, then a fail in that same area

This is the more useful one for a buyer. If the last MOT flagged the brakes, how likely is a brake fail next time?

Area flagged as an advisory	Failed in that area next MOT (with the advisory)	Failed in that area next MOT (without one)
Suspension	19.1% of 4,329,497 cars	7.8% of 22,599,512
Steering	14.8% of 422,195	1.9% of 26,506,814
Body, chassis and structure	12.5% of 980,273	3.1% of 25,948,736
Brakes	11.8% of 5,632,530	5.0% of 21,296,479
Tyres	9.6% of 6,885,040	5.3% of 20,043,969
Noise, emissions and leaks	8.0% of 1,236,244	3.0% of 25,692,765

All ages together. The download splits each area by age.

Two things are true at once here.

An advisory does raise the odds. A steering advisory went with a steering fail next time nearly 8 times as often as no advisory. For suspension, brakes and rust it was 2 to 4 times as often.

Most advisories still didn't become a fail in that area. About 8 in 10 suspension advisories and almost 9 in 10 brake advisories weren't followed by a fail in the same area. Some of those will have been fixed in between, and we can't see that in the data.

Tyre advisories are the weakest signal. That makes sense: tyres get swapped all the time between MOTs.

What this means if you're buying

Look up the car's MOT history before you go. It's free on GOV.UK and shows every advisory.
Treat steering, suspension and rust advisories as the ones to ask about. Ask the seller if the work was done, and ask for the invoice.
Don't walk away just because there are advisories. On an older car, most have some. What matters is which ones, and whether they keep coming back.
If the same advisory shows up on two or three MOTs in a row, it hasn't been fixed. Factor that into what you offer.
Not sure what an advisory means? Paste it into our free MOT advisory decoder, or look it up in our MOT defect library.

How we did it

Source: DVSA's anonymised MOT test result and test item extracts for 2024 and 2025, published June 2026.
Tests counted: class 4 (cars and light passenger vehicles), normal tests with a result of Pass, Fail or PRS. Retests are left out.
Part 1: 2025 tests, 1 January to 30 December 2025. Age is whole years from first use to the test date.
Part 2: each car's first 2024 MOT, matched on DVSA's anonymised vehicle ID to its next MOT 300 to 430 days later. Cars with no MOT in that window (scrapped, off the road, sold abroad or tested late) aren't in it.
Areas: each item is grouped under its top section in DVSA's item list. Two small sections with very few items are left out.
Small numbers: every group shown has at least 1,000 cars and every count is 10 or more.

Limits

This is about groups of cars, not any one car.
Testers write advisories differently. An advisory rate shows what was noted, not the exact state of the car.
We can't see repairs done between MOTs, so this doesn't tell you how fast a fault gets worse.
Cars with advisories may simply be in worse shape overall. The link between an advisory and a later fail isn't proof one caused the other.
There are no make, model or area figures here, on purpose.

Downloads and credit

Our CSVs are free to reuse under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Please credit CarCheckHQ.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Source: Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA), MOT Anonymised Data. Analysis by CarCheckHQ. Not endorsed by DVSA. CarCheckHQ is independent and isn't affiliated with DVSA.