DVSA Texts Your Customers Before Their MOT. It Never Mentions Your Name

DVSA sends free MOT reminders by text or email 4 weeks and 2 weeks before a vehicle's MOT expires. The message tells the driver to call their garage, but never names one. Unless you have already reminded that customer and taken the booking, the free reminder sends them to a search box.

In August 2026 the DVSA account posted another push for its free MOT reminder service. Sign up, it said, and "we'll send you a text message 30 days before it's due as a prompt to call your garage."

Read that last clause again if you run an MOT bay. A message goes to your customer, funded by the state, delivered reliably, telling them to book. And the word where your business name should be is "your garage".

What the free service actually does

Worth being precise, because most garage owners I speak to have only half the picture.

The MOT reminder service is not new. It launched in beta in 2017 and DVSA reported passing 4 million sign-ups in 2022. Drivers opt in themselves, with a registration number and a mobile number or email address.

It sends two reminders, not one. DVSA's own toolkit for garages puts it plainly: "You'll receive a text message or email 4 weeks, and 2 weeks, before your MOT is due." The gov.uk page mentions only the first, which is why the "one reminder, a month out" version is so widespread.

And there is a second date that matters more than either of those. You can have the test done "up to a month (minus a day) before it runs out and keep the same renewal date". Twenty-nine days. Test earlier than that and the driver donates the difference to the calendar, which is exactly why so many of them wait, then book late, then find every slot in town gone.

So the sequence the free service creates looks like this. Day 29: the window opens. Day 28: the state texts your customer and tells them to call a garage. Day 14: it texts again. Day 0: expiry.

Nowhere in that sequence does anyone say your name.

The problem is not frequency. It is attribution.

The instinct is to compete on volume, to send more texts than DVSA does. That is the wrong read.

DVSA's reminder is genuinely good for drivers and you should be glad it exists. It reduces the number of people driving around untested. It is also, from your side of the counter, a perfectly timed advertisement for whichever garage ranks for "MOT near me" in your town, because a reminder that does not name a business is an invitation to choose one.

This is the same mechanism as the traffic cliff that hits businesses relying on Google to reintroduce them to their own customers. A customer you have already served, already satisfied, already got the details of, gets handed back to an open auction once a year. The free reminder does not take your customer away. It just declines to hand them back to you, and that turns out to be enough.

The counter is not more messages. It is being the message they act on. Which is a question of one date.

We measured this, and most garages are late

We can check what garages actually do, because we run the reminders.

We checked 38 recent automotive accounts, 13 of them MOT testing stations and the rest general repair and tyre businesses, running 46 pre-visit reminder schedules between them. For each one we took the earliest reminder in the schedule and compared it against DVSA's first text at 28 days.

Thirty-six of forty-six schedules start talking to the customer only after the state has already told them to go and find a garage. Most of those start at 14 days or fewer, which is not just after DVSA's first text, it is level with the second one or later still.

Now the part that is uncomfortable to print, because a large share of those late schedules are ours. Until this month, the pre-visit reminder we seeded for a new MOT testing station fired at 7, 3 and 1 days before the due date, and 12 of the 14 MOT station schedules in the sample are still running exactly that. It is a perfectly reasonable default for a dental check-up or a boiler service, where nothing else is reminding the customer and no 29-day rule shapes the booking. For an MOT it starts a fortnight after the state has already spoken.

So we changed it. New MOT testing station accounts now start at 35, 14 and 3 days, and the seeded message asks the customer to book a slot rather than to call about a test that cannot legally be done yet without costing them days. Accounts created before the change keep the old schedule until somebody edits it, which is deliberate: we are not going to quietly rewrite a live campaign that a business is relying on. If you have been with us a while, this is the number to go and look at.

Either way, if your first reminder is a single-digit number of days, you are not being outcompeted by DVSA. You just have not moved one field.

The calendar that actually works

Here is the schedule I would run for an MOT bay, and the reasoning for each line.

Your messages at 35 and 3 days bracket both of DVSA's, so you are first and you are last. The one at 14 sits deliberately on top of the state's second nudge: same day, same deadline, except yours says who to call. For a customer who has already booked with you, all of it reads as reassurance.

The wording trap at 35 days. At 35 days out, your customer cannot yet have the test done without losing days off next year's certificate. So the message must sell the appointment, not the test. "Your MOT is due 15 May, shall we hold you 10am on the 20th?" is right. "Your MOT is due, pop in this week" is wrong, and the customer who acts on it loses six days and blames you when they notice next year.

That single distinction, booking versus testing, is the thing generic reminder software gets wrong about MOTs, because it does not know the 29-day rule exists.

And then it repeats. This is the quiet compounding bit. Because a test inside the window keeps the anniversary date, next year's due date is knowable the day the certificate is issued. Mark the customer as recurring on a 12 month interval once and the 35 day message, the 7 day message and the review request all reschedule themselves every year with nobody typing a date. Win the timing once and you keep winning it, until the customer sells the car.

What to do this week

1. Find the earliest reminder in your current MOT schedule. If it is a number smaller than 29, that is the whole problem, and it is one field.

2. Change it to 35, and rewrite that first message so it asks for a booking rather than a visit.

3. Keep a message around 3 days out. DVSA stopped a fortnight earlier, so that one is yours alone.

4. Set your MOT customers to recur annually so this year's fix is also next year's.

None of that requires you to compete with a free government service, and you should not try. It just requires that when the state tells your customer to call their garage, "their garage" is already a booking in your diary.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the DVSA MOT reminder service mention my garage?

No. The reminder comes from DVSA, is based on the vehicle's registration, and has no connection to whoever last tested the car. It prompts the driver to contact a garage without naming one.

How many reminders does DVSA send, and when?

Two for cars, vans and motorcycles: a text or email 4 weeks before the MOT is due, and another 2 weeks before. Lorries, buses and large trailers get a reminder 2 months out.

Should I tell my customers to sign up for the free DVSA reminder?

It is a good service and there is no reason to talk anyone out of it. Just do not treat it as your reminder system. Assume every customer either is not signed up or will not remember which garage they used, and send your own message first.

Why send an MOT reminder 35 days before, when the test cannot be done yet?

Because you are asking for the booking, not the visit. The test can be done from 29 days before expiry without losing the renewal date, so a message at 35 days lets the customer reserve a slot inside that window before DVSA's reminder sends them looking.

Is it worth paying for reminders when the government sends them free?

The free ones tell your customer to book somewhere. Yours tell them to book with you. Those are different products, and only one of them fills your bays.

The bottom line

The free MOT reminder service is not competition. It is a deadline announcement with your name left out. Every garage gets the same announcement read to its customers at 28 days and 14 days, so the only variable you control is whether you spoke first.

Thirty-five days, fourteen, three, a thank-you the day after, and a recurrence so it happens again next year without you. That is the entire strategy.

Remindlo runs exactly that schedule for MOT testing stations, including the annual recurrence, on top of whatever diary you already use. If you are still comparing options, our twelve questions to ask any MOT reminder vendor covers what to check before you pay. Otherwise, start free and set the first number to 35.