About apply for licence

apply for licence is an independent guide to UK licensing, built to make a genuinely confusing part of running a business or taking a job easier to understand.
We're run by Domain Farm Ltd (company number 13544286, VAT GB435224124), a private UK company, not a government body or agency.

What is apply for licence?

apply for licence is a plain-English guide, and increasingly a set of free tools, that helps people find, understand and apply for UK licences.

We map licences that are genuinely confusing to get right, not necessarily expensive ones, starting with SIA security licences and the HGV operator's licence, and explain who issues them, what they cost, and what the process actually involves.

What's our mission?

Our mission is to make UK licensing navigable, by telling people the truth about cost and process before they ask.

GOV.UK and local council portals hold the official process, and it's usually free or fixed-fee, but it's spread across dozens of different bodies and forms, and it's easy to get the wrong form, miss a document, or misunderstand what a licence class actually covers.

We exist to sit alongside that official process, in plain English, and to point people to it directly rather than standing in front of it.

Why are we independent, and why does that matter?

We are not GOV.UK, the SIA, the DVSA, a local council, or any other government or regulatory body, and we never present ourselves as one.

That distinction matters because the UK has seen well-publicised prosecutions of websites that mimicked official government services to charge people for things that were free, or to hide fees until checkout; we've deliberately built the opposite of that model.

Our brand avoids any government styling: no crests, no crowns, no GOV.UK colours or typefaces, and no wording that implies official status.

Wherever a licence can be applied for directly and for free, we say so and link to it, on the same page as anything we might charge for, not buried in a footnote; you can read the full detail on our independence statement.

What are our editorial and fact-checking standards?

Every fact we publish is checked against a primary source, such as GOV.UK, the SIA, the DVSA or the relevant local council, and dated on the page.

Standard	What it means in practice
Sourced and dated figures	Every fee, timescale or statistic is checked against the issuing body's own published guidance, and the page shows when it was last verified.
Named authorship	Every guide carries a named author, so you know who wrote it.
AI-assistance disclosure	Where AI tools helped draft a page, that's disclosed alongside the human fact-check, on the page itself.
Cite or refuse	If we can't confirm a figure against a current primary source, we say so on the page rather than repeat an unverified number from elsewhere.
Not advice	Our guides are general information, not legal, financial or professional advice; for anything specific to your situation, we point you to the issuing body or a qualified professional.

Our SIA licence guide is a good example of this in practice: where we couldn't confirm an "up to 12 weeks" figure that's repeated elsewhere against the SIA's own current guidance, we said so, and used the SIA's dated, sourced figures instead.

How do we make money?

Where we charge for anything, it's a clearly itemised service fee, shown alongside the statutory fee you'd pay the issuing authority anyway, before you commit to anything.

We may also point you to training providers where a licence requires a course, or to licensing consultants and solicitors for complex or contested applications we're not authorised to handle ourselves; these are always optional and clearly marked, never a default recommendation.

Full detail on how our pricing and fee-transparency model works is on our how it works page.

apply for licence is an independent guide and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to GOV.UK, the SIA, the DVSA, any local council or any government body. This page is general information, not legal or professional advice.