How much does a certificate of conformity cost?

The full price list, brand by brand

Prices incl. VAT, confirmed once the chassis number has been checked. The list is public: for most brands the price is settled before you give us any details at all. A few makes we handle on quotation — there we publish no price until the manufacturer’s fee is confirmed, and you pay nothing before you have that firm figure.

Where the spread comes from

A certificate of conformity is not a product anyone manufactures. It is a service the manufacturer charges for: access to its type-approval records, and the re-issue of a document whose content and layout are fixed across Europe by Annex IX to Regulation (EU) 2018/858. The price we show therefore mostly reflects the price the manufacturer asks.

Three things explain the dispersion.

• The processing route. A brand that handles every European request through one central department spreads its fixed costs over a large volume — Opel, for instance, through Opel Automobile GmbH in Rüsselsheim. A brand that routes the request through a national importer, as Suzuki does, adds a link to the chain, and that link’s margin. That single difference accounts for most of the gap in the table above.
• The volume. Manufacturers with the largest European sales receive the most requests and have industrialised issuing, often through an online portal. Brands with small volumes work through weekly batches, and price accordingly.
• The brand’s pricing policy. Some manufacturers treat access to their homologation data as a service in its own right, and price it as one.

What does not explain the gap: the value of the vehicle. The certificate for a small city car can cost more than the one for a large saloon, if the city car belongs to a brand with a longer route.

The format does not change the price

Whether you receive the digital copy by e-mail or the paper original by post makes no difference to the price of the certificate. The question comes up often, because other industries charge more for paper. Here the cost sits in the access to the data, not in the medium. Charged on top — and always shown before payment — is only the tracked shipping of the paper original, whose cost depends on the delivery country.

What the format does change is the delivery time: a few days less by e-mail. That is the only time saving an intermediary can genuinely offer. The brand-by-brand detail is in our article on certificate of conformity delivery times.

What the price includes

• The preliminary check of the chassis number: origin of the vehicle, date of manufacture, availability at the manufacturer. It happens before the quote, and it is free.
• The request to the right department of the manufacturer, and the follow-up on it.
• The control of the data received before it is passed on.
• The delivery of the digital copy — and, if you want it, the paper original by tracked mail.

No file fee is added to the price shown, and nothing is ordered before you agree. Two options exist beyond that, never pre-ticked: a sworn translation of the certificate, useful only if your registration office demands one, and registration support. If the manufacturer cannot issue the certificate at all, the order is refunded in full.

When a CoC is free, and when it is not

A certificate of conformity is free exactly once: at the first sale of a new vehicle, when the manufacturer hands it over with the car. For a duplicate, the manufacturer always charges for its work. Article 36 of Regulation (EU) 2018/858 obliges it to issue one for ten years after the vehicle was manufactured — the text obliges it to issue, not to issue free of charge.

Past those ten years the obligation lapses, and with it any predictability: many manufacturers still answer, some refuse outright, and those that answer often take longer. We put the question during the VIN check, before quoting a price. What happens on a vehicle over ten years old is set out in the help centre.

The cheapest certificate is the one you do not need

Before paying anything, it is worth checking whether the registration office will ask for the document at all. On a vehicle coming from another EU country, the certificate is generally not requested when the foreign registration document already carries:

• field K: the EU type-approval number, of the form e1*2007/46*0123*05;
• field D.2: type, variant and version of the vehicle, in full.

Those two letters are harmonised codes from Directive 1999/37/EC, which is why they mean the same thing on a German Zulassungsbescheinigung, a Dutch kentekenbewijs and a French carte grise. If both fields are complete, the file often goes through without a CoC — in France in particular. If field K is empty, truncated or shows a national approval without the “e” prefix, or if field D.2 stops at the type, the certificate is what the office will want. We run that check before invoicing: we would rather tell you than sell you a document you do not need.

Be wary of unusually low prices

The manufacturer’s fee is a floor nobody can go under. A price well below the market for a brand known to be expensive can therefore only be explained in three ways: fees added along the way, a request that leads nowhere, or a document that does not come from the manufacturer.

The third is the serious one: a certificate produced anywhere other than at the manufacturer is a forgery, with the criminal consequences that go with it — for whoever produces it and for whoever uses it. So put the same question to every provider you compare: what happens if the manufacturer does not deliver, and is the money refunded?