Since 20 May 2018 the MOT test has sorted every defect into four boxes. Dangerous and major are fails. Minor is a pass with a note that the fault must be fixed soon. Advisory sits underneath all three. It is the tester's judgement that a component is wearing, deteriorating or close to a limit, but is not yet bad enough to be a defect under the DVSA inspection manual.
That is the whole of it. The official wording on the certificate is "monitor and repair if necessary", and that is exactly how much weight it carries. The car passed. Nothing is legally required of you. The advisory exists so that you are not surprised in twelve months.
The reason advisories matter to a buyer is different. Every one is recorded in the DVSA database against the registration, forever, and anyone can read them for free. So a used car's advisories are a history of what the previous owners chose not to fix, written by independent testers who had no reason to be kind. Our guide on dangerous, major, minor and advisory explains the four categories in full. This guide is about what to do with the advisory lines once you have them.
These are the advisories that appear most often on ordinary cars, with the rough cost of putting them right. The ranges come from the 2026 repair cost guides published by Bumper and Checkatrade, which pool quotes from UK garages. Your car, your postcode and whether you go to a main dealer or an independent will move the number, so treat them as a scale, not a quote.
| Advisory wording you will see | What it means | Rough cost to clear (2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Tyre worn close to legal limit | Tread is near 1.6mm across the central three quarters. Legal today, not for long. | £45 to £250 per tyre depending on size and brand |
| Brake pads wearing thin | Friction material is low. Pads are a consumable. | £120 to £300 per axle, parts and labour |
| Brake discs worn, pitted or scored | Discs are past their best. Usually replaced with the pads. | £130 to £375 per axle |
| Slight oil leak, not excessive | A weep from a seal or gasket. Only a fail if it drips on the ground. | Nil to watch it, £100 to several hundred if a seal is replaced |
| Slight play in a ball joint, track rod end or wheel bearing | Normal wear on steering and suspension. | £80 to £250 per item |
| Corroded but not seriously weakened (sill, subframe, brake pipe) | Rust has started on something structural or safety critical. | Brake pipes £100 to £300. Structural welding £300 upwards, and it can exceed the value of an older car. |
| Windscreen chip or damage outside the driver's view | Cosmetic unless it spreads into the swept area. | Often free on comprehensive insurance for a repair, £150 to £500 for a screen |
If a car you are looking at has a fail on its record rather than an advisory, the costs are set out in what actually fails an MOT and what it costs to put right. This guide stays on the advisories.
Sort the advisories on the record into three groups. It takes about two minutes.
Consumables. Tyres, pads, discs, wiper blades, bulbs. These wear on every car on the road. A single advisory for a tyre or a set of pads tells you nothing about the car except that the previous owner had a test coming and did not want to spend money the week before it. Price it into your offer and move on.
Structure and safety. Corrosion on sills, subframes, suspension mounts, chassis legs or brake pipes. Anything with the word "corroded" next to a part that holds the car together or stops it. This is the group that costs real money and, more to the point, gets worse every winter. A corrosion advisory on a five year old car is unusual and worth asking about. On a fifteen year old car it is expected, but you still want to know whether it has been treated or just noted again each year.
Things that leak or move. Oil leaks, coolant leaks, play in joints and bearings. On their own these are wear. What you are looking for is escalation. "Slight oil leak" in 2023, "oil leak" in 2024, then a fail for "oil leak excessive" in 2025 is a car nobody has looked after. The same three lines, still slight, over three years is a car with a weepy seal that the owner sensibly left alone.
The buyer's rule is simple. One advisory is information. The same advisory three years running is a decision the previous owner made, and you are about to inherit it.
Plenty of what appears in the advisory box is padding. Some garages record a great deal, partly because an advisory is a polite way of quoting for work.
You do not need to do anything about any of these before you buy. You also do not need to pay anyone to interpret them. The same free record that shows you the advisory shows you whether it came back the next year, which is the only interpretation that counts.
The most useful thing an MOT record does is line up the advisories year by year. Here is what the common patterns mean.
| Pattern in the record | What it usually means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Advisory one year, gone the next | Fixed. The owner acted on it. | Nothing. This is what a cared for car looks like. |
| Same advisory three years running | Ignored. The owner did the minimum. | Budget to clear it and ask what else was skipped. |
| Advisory, then a fail on the same item, then a pass | Left until it broke, then fixed under pressure. | Normal for a cheap car. Check the fix was done properly. |
| No advisories at all, ever, on a car over eight years old | Either a very good car, a very lenient tester, or a record that is shorter than it should be. | Check for gaps between test dates. A missing year hides more than an advisory would. |
| A cluster of new advisories after a change of garage | A new tester recording what the old one let go. | Read the cluster as the true state of the car. |
The last row is worth dwelling on. Testers vary. One garage will pass a car with nothing said, another will write down six advisories on the same car the same week. That is why a single test is weak evidence and a run of five tests is strong evidence. A car with low miles and heavy wear advisories has a story, and our guide on how to spot a clocked car covers reading the mileage line by line.
If you want the pattern read for you, the free buy scorecard takes the registration and scores the advisory history, the mileage consistency and the failure record against the car's age, from the same DVSA data and without charging for it.
Advisories give you specific questions instead of vague ones. "Has it had any work done" gets a shrug. "The last two tests both advised corrosion on the rear subframe, has that been treated" gets an answer or a silence, and both are useful.
Three questions that come straight off the record:
A dealer who says it will be sorted before collection should put that on the invoice.
The honest answer is that most advisories do not need anything doing today. Tyres and pads need doing before they reach the limit, and you will save money by booking them yourself in a quiet month rather than having them done as an MOT retest under time pressure. Corrosion is the exception. Rust treated in the summer for a hundred pounds is rust that is not welded in the winter for five hundred.
You do not need a paid report or an inspection for a car you already own. Put the plate into the checker and read the last three tests together.
An advisory is a free, independent note that something is wearing. It is not a fail, it carries no penalty, and one on its own tells you almost nothing about a car. What tells you a great deal is whether the same advisory comes back year after year, whether it escalated into a fail, and whether it sits on a consumable or on the structure. That pattern is on the free DVSA record for every car, van, motorcycle and lorry in the country, and reading it takes less time than the drive to view the car. Read it first. If you are choosing between two cars, compare them side by side and let the advisories settle it.
Repair cost ranges are taken from the 2026 UK price guides published by Bumper (brake pads £120 to £300, brake discs £130 to £375, tyres £45 to £250) and Checkatrade, checked September 2026. Defect categories and the 1.6mm tread limit are from the DVSA MOT inspection manual for cars and passenger vehicles on GOV.UK.
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