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HomeFleet VIN check
Free tool · fleets, dealers and government

Check a list of VINs for recalls

Paste up to a thousand VINs and see which vehicles sit on a model year with an open NHTSA recall campaign, which carry a park-outside or do-not-drive advisory, and how each one scores on its recall record. Free, no sign-up, run it as often as you like — and the list never leaves your browser.

Holding these vehicles for a while?

This checks the list once. Recall Watch keeps checking it every night and emails you the morning a new campaign lands on one of them — and keeps the dated record that shows you looked. Free for ten vehicles.

How Recall Watch works →

What this does, and what it does not

Each VIN is decoded against NHTSA's public vPIC database to get its year, make and model, then matched to that model year's record here: every recall campaign NHTSA has on file, its severity, and whether any of them carries a park-outside or do-not-drive advisory.

That is a model-year answer, not a per-vehicle one. A recall covers a build range, so a vehicle on an affected model year may sit outside it — and a vehicle inside it may already have been repaired. Use this to find the handful of vehicles in a fleet worth looking at, then confirm each one by VIN at nhtsa.gov/recalls, which is the only source that knows whether a specific vehicle's repair has been done.

Nothing is uploaded. The decoding request goes from your browser straight to NHTSA, and the matching happens against a data file this page already loaded — the same way the single-VIN decoder works.

Common questions

Source: EPA, NHTSA and manufacturer press kits

Is there really no sign-up?

No account, no email, no limit on how often you run it. The list is decoded in your own browser against NHTSA's public database, which means it never reaches WhichTrim at all — there is nothing for us to store even if we wanted to.

Does this tell me which of my vehicles need a repair?

No, and it is important to be clear about that. This tells you which of your vehicles are on a model year that has a recall campaign against it, which is the triage step. Whether a specific vehicle is inside a campaign's build range, and whether its repair has already been done, is a per-VIN question only the manufacturer and NHTSA can answer — nhtsa.gov/recalls does it one VIN at a time, free.

What is the Safety Signal grade?

Our own score, 0–100, from the open NHTSA recall record: every model year starts at 100 and loses points per campaign weighted by severity, with the heaviest penalty for fire risk and park-outside or do-not-drive advisories. It is a recall-record measure, not a crash-safety one. The methodology page shows the arithmetic.

How many VINs can I check at once?

A thousand per run, because the decoding goes to NHTSA fifty at a time and we would rather not hammer a public service on your behalf. Run it again for the next thousand — there is no daily cap.

Can I get the results as a file?

Yes, a CSV download appears with the results. It is generated in your browser from what is already on screen.