VehicleCheckPK

Where our data comes from

Last updated

VehicleCheckPK does not hold its own vehicle register and does not create records. Every result comes from a government excise department. This page lists exactly which ones, what we do with what they return, and where the limits are.

The sources

  • Islamabad Capital Territory, Excise & Taxation Department, Islamabad Capital Territory, via its Islamabad Excise & Taxation system. Official portal. Live now.
  • Punjab, Excise, Taxation & Narcotics Control Department, Punjab, via its Punjab MTMIS system. Official portal. Not live yet.
  • Sindh, Excise, Taxation & Narcotics Control Department, Sindh, via its Excise Sindh system. Official portal. Not live yet.
  • Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Excise, Taxation & Narcotics Control Department, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, via its KP Excise system. Official portal. Not live yet.

Fuel prices

Fuel prices come from the regulator, OGRA, and from Pakistan State Oil's own published figures. Each is checked before it is shown:

  • Petrol and diesel, from OGRA's daily Price Publications. A price is shown only when every formula printed in its build-up agrees with the values printed beside it. Checked every 30 minutes.
  • Hi-octane, kerosene and light diesel oil, from PSO's price board, used only when the same board's petrol and diesel prices equal OGRA's for that day. Checked every two hours.
  • Prices at each pump, from PSO's filings on OGRA's district and pump-wise price page. A pump is shown only when its price agrees with OGRA's for the same day, and a filing is set aside entirely if more than 2% of its pumps do not. Checked every three hours.
  • LPG, from OGRA's monthly LPG notifications. These are scanned documents, so the figures are transcribed by hand and checked against the notice's own arithmetic. When OGRA publishes a month we have not transcribed yet, the LPG page says so.

How a lookup works

When you enter a registration number we query every region we cover at the same time, rather than guessing which one the plate belongs to from its letters. Pakistani registration series overlap and change over time, so guessing would be wrong often enough to look broken.

Each portal gets three and a half seconds to answer. That limit exists because these portals do not fail quickly, an unavailable one typically hangs for around fifteen seconds rather than returning an error. Waiting on all of them would make every lookup slower than using the government site directly.

Keeping results available

The value of this service is that it still answers when a government portal does not. When a portal is unreachable, we can show the most recent details we have for that number, with the date they were last confirmed, instead of an error page.

Results are not linked to the person who searched: there are no accounts, and we do not ask who you are. We keep a short technical log of each attempt (which portal, how long it took, whether it answered) so we can tell when a portal has gone down, and to prevent abuse.

We do not offer lookup by CNIC. Some excise portals expose an endpoint that returns every vehicle a person owns from their national ID number. We have deliberately not built it. The friction of a slow government portal incidentally protects people from being looked up by strangers, and a fast, well-indexed version of that search would remove it. A plate lookup answers the questions people actually have about a vehicle (is the tax paid, is it under finance, does the seller really own it) without that cost. It does not tell you whether a vehicle is stolen: an excise record is a tax and title record, and we will not imply otherwise.

When a portal is unavailable

You will still get an answer. We show the most recent details we have, say plainly when they were last confirmed, and name the portal that did not respond.

We will never tell you a vehicle is unregistered because we could not reach the register. If a source did not answer, we say we could not confirm, not that no record exists. Those are different statements and only one of them is honest.

Limits you should know about

  • Records can lag behind the official register, particularly after a recent transfer or a recent tax payment.
  • The details shown may have changed since they were last confirmed. The date shown alongside them tells you how recent they are.
  • Coverage is by region. A vehicle registered in a region we do not yet cover will return no record here even though it is properly registered.
  • For any legal purpose (a sale, a transfer, a dispute) confirm the record with the relevant excise office. They hold the authoritative version; we do not.

Corrections

We cannot change a government record. If a record shown here is wrong, it needs correcting at the excise department that issued it. If we are displaying something incorrectly, or you believe a record should not be shown, write to hello@vehiclecheckpk.com and we will look into it.