About ProVINCheck

What the site does

• The VIN check decodes a VIN into the make, model, model year and other build details that the manufacturer reported to NHTSA.
• For a decoded vehicle, it lists the safety recalls and consumer complaints that NHTSA has published for that make, model and model year.
• The blog and the brand and country pages explain VIN numbers and what to check before you buy a used car.

You don’t need an account to use the free VIN check.

What’s free and what’s paid

Free: the VIN decode and the NHTSA recall and complaint data shown on ProVINCheck.

Paid: the vehicle history report, which can include accident, title, mileage and theft records where they are available. This report is carVertical’s product, not ours. carVertical sells and delivers it on its own website, at its own prices and under its own terms. ProVINCheck doesn’t create these reports and can’t change what they contain.

How we make money

ProVINCheck is an affiliate site. When you follow one of our links to carVertical and buy a report, carVertical pays us a commission. These commissions help pay for running the site.

• Our links to carVertical are affiliate links. They carry a code that tells carVertical the visit came from ProVINCheck and, once you’ve entered one, the VIN you checked.
• When our free lookup can’t identify a vehicle from its VIN, the VIN check sends you to carVertical automatically, through the same kind of link.
• Next to these links we show a short note saying that we may earn a commission.

The affiliate partnership is also described in our Terms of Use.

Where our data comes from, and its limits

• NHTSA. VINs are decoded with NHTSA’s public vPIC service, and recalls and complaints come from NHTSA’s public databases. NHTSA covers vehicles whose manufacturers report them to NHTSA, which mainly means vehicles built for the US market.
• Recalls and complaints are matched by model, not by your exact car. We look them up by make, model and model year, so a listed recall may not apply to your particular vehicle, or it may already have been fixed. Ask a dealer or check the VIN on NHTSA’s own recall lookup to be sure.
• Cars built for other markets. Vehicles made for Europe and other markets are often missing from NHTSA’s data, so the free decode may be incomplete or fail. In that case the VIN check sends you to carVertical, as described above.
• carVertical. What the paid report contains depends on carVertical and the records it can find for that vehicle. We can’t tell you in advance which records exist for a particular car.

No data source is complete. Before you buy a car, verify important details independently, for example with an inspection.

Reviews and ratings

We don’t publish fabricated customer reviews, testimonials or ratings of ProVINCheck, and we don’t add review or rating data about ProVINCheck to our pages for search engines. Scores in our ranking articles are our own editorial assessments, not customer reviews.

Get in touch

Questions, corrections or feedback? Send us a message through our contact form. You can also find ProVINCheck on Facebook and Instagram.

How we handle data is explained in our Privacy Policy.