Islamabad vehicle verification

Enter a registration number issued in Islamabad Capital Territory to check it against Excise & Taxation Department, Islamabad Capital Territory records. It is free and takes a few seconds.

How Islamabad Capital Territory vehicle records work

Vehicles registered in Islamabad are held by the Excise & Taxation Department of the Islamabad Capital Territory, separately from every provincial registry. An Islamabad plate will not appear in the Punjab, Sindh or Khyber Pakhtunkhwa systems. The official lookup asks for two things: the registration number and the registration date. Get the date wrong and it returns nothing at all, which looks exactly the same as a vehicle that does not exist. Here the number alone is enough. We work the date out from the pattern of registrations either side of it, then ask the same public form anyone else can.

Islamabad at a glance

Registering authority: Excise & Taxation Department, ICT
Cost to check: Free
Sign-up required: No
What the official portal needs: Registration number and registration date. There is no captcha.
What you need here: The registration number. We work the date out.
Covers: Cars, motorcycles and commercial vehicles registered in ICT
Fields returned: Make, model, year, colour, body type, engine and chassis numbers, engine size, registration and purchase dates, assessed value, and token tax status

Three things an Islamabad plate check answers

The record we return is the excise department's own, and three of its fields answer the questions people most often search for.

When was the vehicle registered?: The record gives the registration date, and the purchase date where the register holds one. You do not need the date to look it up: Islamabad's own portal asks for it, and we work it out. How to find a registration date.
Is the token tax paid?: The tax paid upto field shows how far the token tax has been paid. An old date is a reason to check with the department, not proof of default: see the caveat further down this page.
Is it on bank finance?: An HPA status means a Hire Purchase Agreement: the vehicle is under bank finance, and the bank has to endorse any transfer. What HPA means before you buy.

Is there an MTMIS for Islamabad (ISB)?

No. MTMIS is the name of Punjab's system. Islamabad's vehicle records are held by the Excise & Taxation Department of the Islamabad Capital Territory, and its official lookup asks for the registration date as well as the number.

Sites that call themselves “MTMIS Islamabad” are not the department. An official Pakistani government address ends in .gov.pk; check it before you type anything into a page that looks official. Why those sites outrank the department is the next question.

Why Google does not show Islamabad Excise's own website

Because the department tells it not to. The robots.txt file on islamabadexcise.gov.pk disallows every crawler; we read it on 8 October 2026. Google can still list the address, but against it says only “No information is available for this page”, and the first page of results for Islamabad vehicle verification fills up with copies: sites calling themselves MTMIS Islamabad, unofficial apps, and AI summaries built from those sites.

Two consequences. The department's own guidance, fee schedules and forms sit on a site search engines cannot read, so type the address yourself. And a summary at the top of a search is only as good as the copies it was built from: the ones we saw on 8 October 2026 described Islamabad's Rs 20,000 token tax on a small car as an annual charge, when the Finance Act 2026 makes it a once-for-life amount, and recommended an SMS service on 8521 that appears on none of the Islamabad Excise pages we have read.

The lookup on this page asks the department's own form for each record, and the figures below were checked against the enacted law rather than a summary of it.

What the City Islamabad verification page checks

Those same summaries name icta.nitb.gov.pk/verify-vehicle, a page titled Vehicle Registration Verification and run by the National Information Technology Board, as the official portal for Islamabad vehicle verification. It is official, but it checks something else.

The page's own code, read on 8 October 2026, sends the registration number you type back to the same site and renders what returns: a registration number, the owner's name and, where the record holds it, CNIC, a category, a status such as approved, pending or rejected, an approval date and a QR code, under the line “This vehicle registration is valid and approved”. It returns no make, model, engine or chassis number, no registration date and no token tax: none of the excise record. The page does not say which registration it is verifying.

If what you need is the excise record, that is the department's own lookup, or the box at the top of this page.

What the fields in your record mean

Three of them are asked about far more than the rest, and one of them is routinely misread in a way that costs money.

HPA — Hire Purchase Agreement: The vehicle is under bank finance. In practice this means the financier has to endorse the transfer form before ownership can move, so a private sale cannot complete without involving the bank. The release is recorded as HPT, and it costs nothing.
Vehicle value: The department’s assessed value. Since 1 July 2026 this matters more than it used to: for a private car above 1000cc, token tax is calculated as a percentage of invoice value rather than a flat amount.
Tax paid upto: How far the token tax is paid. Read the caveat below before you draw any conclusion from an old date here.
Anything else: We print status values exactly as the register returns them. Beyond HPA and HPT we have no departmental legend for these, and we would rather show you the raw value than invent a meaning for it.

An old “tax paid upto” date is not proof of default. The department itself warns that token tax paid at a post office may not reach its computer record, and that you have to go in to have the record updated.

This is worth knowing because the field has teeth. In March 2026 the department announced it would suspend the registration of any vehicle whose motor vehicle tax was last paid on or before 30 June 2015, and cancel it fifteen days later. It has since published a list of more than 65,000 cancelled registrations. Its own title for that list is vehicles cancelled due to incomplete information and tax default — so an entry on it is not by itself proof of unpaid tax. Treat a stale date as a reason to go in and check, not as a verdict.

Islamabad token tax, from 1 July 2026

The Finance Act 2026 replaced the ICT token tax tables. For a private motor vehicle:

Up to 1000cc: Rs 20,000, once, for the life of the vehicle
1001cc to 2000cc: 0.25% of invoice value, a year
Above 2000cc: 0.35% of invoice value, a year
Motorcycles: Unchanged: Rs 1,000, Rs 2,000 or Rs 5,000 for life
Electric vehicles: No token tax

Those value-based rates are for private cars only. Taxis, public service vehicles and goods vehicles had their tables substituted too, but stayed on flat yearly amounts — so if your record shows a commercial body type, none of the percentages above apply to you.

Payment is due before 31 July, 31 October, 31 January and 30 April, and the licence expires on 30 June. The statutory penalty for non-payment is up to twice the tax, and unpaid amounts are recoverable as arrears of land revenue. That is a ceiling rather than a fixed multiplier, and the “5% a month” figure that circulates online is not in the law.

If you saw Rs 10,000 on an official page, this is why. Islamabad Excise still shows the superseded table on its vehicle registration page — Rs 10,000 for life up to 1000cc, and no band at all for 1301cc to 1500cc. Its fee schedule page carries the current rates. Two pages on the same site disagree, and the older one ranks well.

Transferring ownership in Islamabad

You have 30 days, and it is the buyer’s job: The law puts the duty to report a transfer of ownership on the transferee, not the seller. Until it is done the register still names the seller, which means the seller still appears responsible for the vehicle.
Both parties, in person, plus the vehicle: A transfer needs biometric verification of buyer and seller, and a physical inspection of the vehicle.
If the seller has died or is abroad: The department publishes what it will accept instead: the heirs’ documents and biometrics, or consent attested by the consulate. This is one of the better-documented parts of the process and it is worth asking for by name.
Non-filers pay triple: Advance tax on transfer is three times the filer rate for a non-filer.

We are not printing the advance tax amounts. The department's own transfer page shows figures lower than the current ones, and both of its tables are stamped 2019. Use the department's own calculators and confirm the total before you budget for it.

Fines worth knowing about

Registering late: Expensive, and it scales with both engine size and delay: from Rs 60,000 for a small car more than 60 days late, up to Rs 1,825,000 for a large one more than 180 days late.
Non-standard number plates: Rs 5,000 to Rs 20,000 by engine size, Rs 1,000 for a motorcycle, and the fine is multiplied by five for a repeat offence by the same owner.

What we could not establish

The new token tax regime is recent enough that several obvious questions have no published answer. We would rather list them than guess, because a wrong answer to any of these costs real money.

Whether an owner who already paid the old Rs 10,000 lifetime token tax on a small car now owes the new Rs 20,000. No transitional provision, notification or clarification exists.
How “invoice value” is fixed for an imported, auctioned or older vehicle, and whether depreciation applies. This is probably the most-asked question about the new regime.
Whether the value-based annual rates can still be paid in quarterly instalments. The Act frames the levy as quarterly; the substituted table says per annum.
Whether capital value tax bites at exactly 1300cc. Three official sources disagree, two saying above and one saying at or above.

Two things this page will not tell you

Whether the vehicle is stolen: The Islamabad excise record has no field for theft, so this lookup cannot answer it. What actually works is a police check, and it is cheaper than most people expect.
Who owns what: We do not offer a search by name or CNIC, and will not build one.

One correction to other guides, since it wastes people's time: icta.nitb.gov.pk/verify-vehicle is not the Islamabad vehicle register. It verifies cards and applications, and it returns no record even for the plates the excise department prints on its own form as examples. Several guides recommend it anyway.

Where this comes from

The record itself comes from the Excise & Taxation Department of the Islamabad Capital Territory, which is the authoritative source and the only one that can certify a record for a legal purpose. The department asks that its own site and app be treated as the authoritative channel for its information, and we agree: this page exists to explain the record and get you to the department, not to stand in for it.

Everything above is dated, sourced from the department's own publications and the enacted text of the Finance Act, and written to say so when two official sources disagree.

Islamabad questions

How do I check a vehicle registration number in Islamabad?

Enter the registration number in the box on this page. VehicleCheckPK checks it against Excise & Taxation Department, Islamabad Capital Territory records and returns the vehicle details, free of charge and without an account.

Which department holds Islamabad Capital Territory vehicle records?

Excise & Taxation Department, Islamabad Capital Territory, through its Islamabad Excise & Taxation system. That department is the authoritative source and the only one that can certify a record.

Why does islamabadexcise.gov.pk not show up on Google?

Because the department's website tells search engines not to index it: its robots.txt disallows every crawler (we read it on 8 October 2026). Google can list the address but shows 'No information is available for this page' against it, so searches fill up with copies that call themselves MTMIS Islamabad. The real address is islamabadexcise.gov.pk; type it yourself.

Is the City Islamabad vehicle verification page the official excise lookup?

No. The page at icta.nitb.gov.pk, run by the National Information Technology Board, verifies a registration held in the City Islamabad system: its code returns a registration number, the owner's name and CNIC, a category, a status such as approved, pending or rejected, and an approval date with a QR code. It returns none of the excise vehicle record: no make, model, engine or chassis number, no registration date and no token tax. Google's AI summaries present it as the vehicle verification portal; it checks something else.

What if a Islamabad plate returns no record?

It can mean the vehicle is registered in a different region, since registration in Pakistan is regional and a plate issued elsewhere will not appear in the Islamabad Capital Territory register. It can also mean the register genuinely holds no entry under that number.

Is VehicleCheckPK an official Islamabad government service?

No. This is an independent service and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Excise & Taxation Department, Islamabad Capital Territory. For any legal purpose, confirm the record with the excise office directly.

Can a plate lookup tell me whether a vehicle is stolen?

Not in a way you can rely on. Excise registers are tax and title records; theft sits with the police, in systems only officers can query. A clean excise record is not evidence a vehicle is not stolen.