Requesting your car’s service history
Updated on
Whether you are missing your own history or looking at a car whose seller “still has to dig out the paperwork”: there are three routes, they yield different things, and they do not exclude each other. Here they are side by side.
Short overview
| Route | Cost | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| RDW open register | Free | APK history with failure points, odometer readings, odometer judgement |
| The garage itself | Free | Invoices: what was done, which parts, at what reading |
| Manufacturer’s digital service record | Around €15 | The services participating businesses recorded |
Route 1: the RDW
The RDW, the Dutch vehicle authority, keeps a public register of every registered vehicle in the Netherlands. On your own registration you can request, among other things: the full history of the APK — the annual roadworthiness test — including the defects it failed on, the odometer readings taken at inspections, and the RDW’s judgement on how logical that series is.
That last one is underrated. An odometer judgement (tellerstandoordeel) of “logisch” means the recorded readings rise neatly — an independent check that does not come from the seller. If it says “onlogisch”, that is a reason to ask a great many more questions.
What you will not find here: which maintenance was carried out. An APK is an inspection, not a service. A car can have sailed through ten inspections and never have had a timing belt.
See rdw.nl for the vehicle register and opendata.rdw.nl for the underlying open data.
Route 2: the garage
The most concrete source, and the cheapest after the RDW. A garage keeps its invoices for years and can look up on a registration what it did to a car. An invoice tells you what a stamp does not: which oil went in, which parts were replaced, what the mechanic noted, and at what odometer reading that was.
Just ask. This is a normal request, not a favour. If you are buying a car, ask the seller for permission to contact the garage that did the maintenance yourself — a seller with nothing to hide rarely objects.
Route 3: the manufacturer’s digital service record
Since roughly 2010, manufacturers have recorded maintenance digitally rather than in a paper book. Every brand has its own system, and participating businesses — dealers, and sometimes independent garages with access — write into it.
A request runs through a dealer or through a service that does it for consumers, and usually costs around fifteen euros. What you get back depends heavily on the brand. With one you get an itemised overview per service, with another no more than the date and the odometer reading, without the work carried out. So do not count on this answering your question.
What no route covers
The blind spot is large, and it is better to know it than to discover it when you sell:
- Maintenance you did yourself. No register knows about it.
- Work at a non-affiliated specialist. Often exactly the good work, on older cars.
- Damage repaired outside of insurance. A considerable share of all damage is repaired this way and ends up nowhere.
- Everything from before the import. For an imported car, the Dutch data begins on the day it was brought into the country.
From requesting to keeping track
Requesting is work you want to do once. The point of all that digging is that it is worth something afterwards: one place where it sits together, that cannot go missing, and that you can hand over when you sell.
In Milestamp you put the invoices and the APK history you collected into your car’s logbook. From that moment it grows by itself: you enter what you do yourself, and a participating garage writes its services straight into it — with a stamp a buyer can trust, because the owner cannot touch it.