A Cat S car must be re-registered with the DVLA once it has been repaired, so a new V5C is issued and the DVLA record carries a salvage marker. The logbook you are handed does not spell that out in plain English, and a Cat N car needs no re-registration at all. A clean looking V5C is not evidence that a car has never been written off.
The V5C exists to record who is responsible for a vehicle and what that vehicle is. It shows:
Two points are worth being precise about. The registered keeper is the person responsible for the car, which is not the same as the legal owner. A car on hire purchase is owned by the finance company while the keeper drives it. And the V5C carries no claim history, no service record, no finance information and no damage record. It was never designed to. Our guide to what a V5C can and cannot confirm works through the document field by field.
What the insurer does with the paperwork depends on the category the vehicle is placed in. The four current categories were introduced in October 2017, replacing Cat C and Cat D.
Cat A means the entire vehicle is crushed. Cat B means the body shell is destroyed, although salvageable parts can be reused. Neither may return to the road under any circumstances, and the DVLA record is closed. If a car is being offered for sale carrying one of these markers, something is badly wrong with the identity of the vehicle in front of you.
Cat S means structural damage that can be repaired. The insurer notifies the DVLA, the V5C is surrendered, and the vehicle cannot be used on the road until it has been re-registered. Once that is done the DVLA issues a new V5C. The car normally keeps its original registration number, so nothing about the plate hints at the history. Our Cat S page covers the repair and inspection side of it.
Cat N means the damage was not structural. It was uneconomic to repair against the value of the car, which is a very different thing from being lightly damaged. There is no re-registration requirement, so the existing logbook stays valid and nothing on it changes. This is the case that catches buyers out most often, and there is more detail on our Cat N page.
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A write-off is created by an insurer settling a claim. The insurer records the loss and the category on a shared industry register, and that entry is the original, dated fact. The DVLA record follows from a notification, and it exists to control whether the vehicle can legally be used, not to inform buyers.
That difference matters when you are standing on a driveway. The free GOV.UK vehicle enquiry service confirms tax status, MOT status, colour, engine size and whether the car is marked as exported. It does not show write-off categories. Neither does the logbook. A commercial check reaches the insurance data, which is why a write-off check can return a category and a loss date when the paperwork in your hand shows nothing at all.
One honest limitation. If damage was repaired privately and no claim was ever made, no marker exists anywhere. That is not a gap in the check, it is a gap in the whole recording system, and it is the reason a physical inspection still matters. For the full picture on the categories themselves, read Cat A, B, S and N explained.
The logbook is still worth ten minutes of your time. It just answers different questions from the ones buyers usually ask of it.
None of that finds a write-off. All of it finds the other problem, which is a car that is not the car the document describes.
Hidden finance and write-offs won't show up on a test drive.
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