Car Check Packs With a Data Guarantee: What the Extra £1.50 Buys

Look down the Car Check Packs comparison table and one row behaves differently from all the others. Every other row is a tick or a blank: the pack either contains the Safety Recall Check or it does not — and the DVSA publishes that one free at gov.uk/check-vehicle-recall anyway. The Data Guarantee row is not a tick. It says None against eight packs, Up to £10,000 against one, and Up to £30,000 against one more.

That row is the reason two packs sit at slightly odd prices. Essential Protected is £7.49 next to the Essential Pack’s £5.99, for the same six reports. Premium Protected is £24.99 next to Complete + History’s £14.99, for the same thirteen. This guide explains exactly what you are buying with that difference — and, just as importantly, what you are not.

1. The Two Pairs, Side by Side

There are only two protected packs, and each one has an unprotected twin containing an identical set of reports.

The Essential six are the Full Provenance Report, the Safety Recall Check, the Current Valuation (UKVD), the Car Tax (VED) report, Spec & Options and the Full Vehicle Identity check. Premium Protected’s thirteen add the running-cost and forecasting reports plus OE Service History and the Factory Build Sheet.

So the gap between each pair is £1.50 and £10 respectively, and in both cases you are paying it for one thing only: the provenance report inside the pack is bought with a cover level attached. As our own pack page puts it, “the report data is the same either way; the cover level is what changes.”

2. What a Data Guarantee Is — and What It Is Not

A Data Guarantee is a promise about the data. It is designed to address the situation where the provenance record you were shown turns out to have been wrong, and that error cost you money.

Three things it is not:

• It is not a more complete report. Buying a cover level does not unlock extra sections, extra databases or a deeper search. The stolen vehicle check, the outstanding finance check, the write-off and salvage check, the mileage and clocking check, the keeper and owner history and the plate and colour history are all identical in the protected and unprotected versions.
• It is not insurance on the car. It has nothing to say about a failed clutch, a bill you did not expect, or a seller who simply lied to your face about something the data never covered.
• It is not SortedCars’ guarantee. This is the part that is easiest to get wrong, and it has real consequences for how a claim works.

3. Whose Guarantee It Is

Provenance data is provided by Experian, and the Data Guarantee is Experian’s guarantee, given under Experian’s own terms. SortedCars resells the data. We are not the guarantor, we do not set the conditions, and we do not decide claims. Experian decides eligibility and Experian settles.

Our own terms narrow it further. A Data Guarantee applies only to an Experian Full Provenance Report (AutoCheck) that was bought with a cover level. It does not attach to a provenance report bought without one, and it does not attach to single provenance sections bought individually from the Paid Check builder. If the pack’s Data Guarantee row says None, then, in the wording used on the packs page, that pack “includes the full provenance report without a Data Guarantee — the report is informational only”.

Before you pay for a cover level, read Experian’s own terms at experian.co.uk/data-guarantee. That page is written for Experian’s clients rather than for a private buyer, so read it on that footing and satisfy yourself that you would be able to claim under it before the cover level is worth paying for.

4. What Experian’s Published Page Says

Experian’s published page, read on 14 September 2026, sets out six kinds of data inaccuracy the guarantee is designed to address:

• undisclosed outstanding finance;
• an undisclosed Category A or Category B write-off;
• a missing stolen marker;
• other write-offs not shown;
• missing import or export status;
• an incorrect keeper number or colour.

Where a claim succeeds, Experian’s published terms describe a payout that is the lower of the vehicle’s market value or the cover level. On an Essential Protected report the cover level is £10,000; on Premium Protected it is £30,000. Neither figure is an amount anyone is promised — it is a ceiling.

5. The Conditions, Read as Conditions

The part most worth your attention is not the headline number, it is the list of conditions. Experian’s published terms include the following:

Read that list once and the honest picture is clear: the cover level is worth something to a buyer who can genuinely evidence the checking they did, and worth much less to one who cannot. Keep the report, the advert, the receipt, photographs of the VIN plate, and a note of how you paid.

6. How to Decide

There is no universal answer, but there is a workable rule with two halves.

First, scale it to the car. The extra £1.50 between the Essential Pack at £5.99 and Essential Protected at £7.49 is a small sum against almost any car’s price. The extra £10 between Complete + History at £14.99 and Premium Protected at £24.99 makes obvious sense on a car where a hidden Category B write-off would be a five-figure loss, and much less sense on a cheap runabout where the whole car is worth less than a modest claim.

Second, scale it to your own evidence. Look back at the conditions in section 5 and ask honestly whether you will meet them: check run before you pay, VIN and MOT verified in person, paid traceably, price not far below market, records kept. A buyer who will do all of that is buying something meaningful. A buyer who intends to hand over cash at a service station after a five-minute look is not.

And if the answer is no, that is not a reason to skip the checking. The unprotected pack contains the identical reports. The data that stops you buying a bad car is doing its work either way — a cover level matters only once an error in the data has already cost you money. Our companion guides to the Full Provenance Report and to the Full Provenance Report Data Guarantee go further into the report itself and the single-report cover levels.

7. Prices and What Else Is on the Page

Every pack is a bundle of the same reports you can buy individually — priced lower than buying them one by one. Bought separately, Essential Protected’s six reports come to £21.94 against the pack’s £7.49, and Premium Protected’s thirteen come to £61.87 against the pack’s £24.99. Prices are as shown on the site at the time of writing; the page price is always the price you pay.

Final Thoughts

The Data Guarantee row is the only row in the packs table that describes something other than a report. It buys a cover level on the Experian provenance data, under Experian’s terms, subject to conditions that ask a good deal of the buyer. Scale it to the value of the car and to the quality of the evidence you will actually be able to produce — and read Experian’s terms yourself before you decide the cover level is worth the difference.

This guide provides general information and is not legal or financial advice. Provenance data is provided by Experian; the Data Guarantee is Experian’s, given under Experian’s own terms, and Experian decides eligibility and settles any claim — the commonest mistake here is assuming the cover level is a payout that is owed rather than a ceiling subject to published conditions, so read Experian’s terms at https://www.experian.co.uk/data-guarantee before relying on the guarantee. SortedCars is not a lender, credit broker, insurer or financial adviser. We receive no commission from any provider mentioned in this article.