Car verification in Pakistan: check any vehicle before you buy

Car verification means confirming a vehicle’s registration and ownership are genuine before you buy or transfer it. Each province runs an online Excise system — for example MTMIS Punjab for Lahore and the rest of Punjab, and the Islamabad Excise portal for ICT — where you can check a vehicle by its registration number for free.

Use the official MTMIS Punjab portal: enter the registration number in the format shown, solve the CAPTCHA and search to see registration, ownership and token-tax status — free. You can also send the registration number by SMS to 8785. For Islamabad-registered cars, use the Islamabad Excise portal or SMS 8521.

No. The portal confirms the registration record, but it doesn’t reliably reveal an open bank loan or lease, or whether the documents are tampered and the engine and chassis match the actual car. Before paying lakhs, get the documents verified and the car inspected — CarOK does both in Lahore and Islamabad.

CarOK provides paid document verification for Punjab-registered vehicles — Lahore, Rawalpindi, Faisalabad, Multan, Gujranwala, Sialkot, Sargodha and Bahawalpur — and doorstep 70+ point inspections in Lahore. Islamabad (ICT) document verification is not available yet. Auction-sheet verification for imported cars is online and free nationwide.

One portal covers the whole province. Lahore, Rawalpindi, Faisalabad, Multan, Gujranwala, Sialkot, Sargodha, Bahawalpur and every other Punjab-registered vehicle sit on the same MTMIS Punjab database, so the process and the SMS shortcode (8785) are identical wherever in Punjab the car was registered.

They are two separate registries. A Punjab-registered car is held by Punjab Excise and checked on MTMIS Punjab or by SMS to 8785. An Islamabad car sits with ICT Excise, uses the Islamabad Excise portal and SMS 8521. The plate tells you which — an Islamabad car carries an ICT series. Checking the wrong registry returns no record even when the car is perfectly genuine.

Enter the registration number exactly as printed on the plate into your province’s Excise portal, or SMS it to the provincial shortcode — 8785 for Punjab, 8521 for Islamabad. You get make, model, year, engine and chassis, the registered owner’s name and token-tax status. It is free and takes about two minutes.

Yes to both. MTMIS Punjab and the Islamabad Excise portal are run by the Excise departments themselves and neither charges for a registration lookup. The SMS service costs only your standard message rate. Any site charging you to “check a number plate” is reselling a free government service.

Stop, and treat it as a red flag until it is explained. The common mismatches are an owner name different from the person selling, token tax outstanding for years, or engine and chassis numbers that do not match the car in front of you. Any of these can mean an incomplete transfer, an open lien or a tampered file — all cheaper to discover now than after payment.

Yes, as long as you use the registry that issued it. The vehicle’s registration city decides which portal holds the record — not where you or the car currently are. A Multan-registered car being sold in Lahore is still an MTMIS Punjab record. CarOK’s paid document verification follows the same rule: it goes by the registering authority, so any Punjab-registered car qualifies wherever the buyer lives.