Can you rent / drive a car in the USA with just the paper counterpart of the UK driver's license?
- By
- Aparna Patel
- |
- 4 Aug, 2023
- |
In 2015, the UK abolished the paper counterpart to the driving licence; now only the photo card is used and the paper part should be destroyed.
As a consequence, the Avis web site now states:
After 8 June 2015, the UK driving licence will only have 1 part – a plastic, credit card-sized photo card licence. You must bring this the original valid photo card driving licence with you if it is a new style UK licence. Failure to bring a valid photo card driving licence may result in the rental being refused; we may require customers to consent to their licence records being accessed as needed*. Expired photo card licences will not be accepted and rental will be refused. All UK customers will need to hold a full and valid licence free from any endorsements excluded in our terms & conditions.
It depends on who you’re hiring from. If you’re hiring from a small, local US hire car company, you might well be out of luck. If you’re hiring from somewhere big, they should be able to help
Avis UK have a handy page on hiring a car without all of your UK driving licence, which covers what you can do depending on where in the world you are. They say that for Avis US locations:
Renting from Avis in the USA
When renting in the USA, you can rent a car with your photo card licence only, or with your paper counterpart licence and your passport. If you have neither part you cannot hire a car from an Avis office in the USA
Hopefully other larger companies will be able to do the same. Somewhere small is most likely to only be used to photocard driving licences, so may well not be able to satisfy themselves and their insurers with only the paper part and a passport.
In the UK, you can (normally for an extra fee) have the hire car company phone up the DVLA, and get confirmation from the DVLA that you hold a valid licence without too many points. That only works when the DVLA are open, and requires that the hire car company know about how to check with the DVLA. Maybe you could find a US hire car office that knew about how to do it, but it’s not that likely, and you’d struggle with the time overlap of when the hire car place is open and when the DVLA call centre is open. You could always speak to the head office of the hire car place to see if they can set this up in advance though, you might get lucky but don’t count on it!
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