SERMI Explained: Who Can Legally Access Your Car's Data

SERMI comes up whenever people talk about the “right to repair”, and it is almost always half-explained. The short version: SERMI is about letting trusted independent garages work on the security systems of modern cars. It is not a way to see a car’s service history — yours or anyone else’s. That distinction matters, because the confusion sends people down the wrong path when they’re trying to trace a maintenance record.

What SERMI is

SERMI stands for the Security-Related Repair and Maintenance Information scheme. It began as a European framework and now operates in the UK too. It lets accredited independent operators reach the security-related data a car needs for certain jobs — programming a new key, working with the immobiliser, or accessing protected control-unit functions — through the manufacturer’s own portal. Access is gated: an operator is vetted, granted a credential, and can then request that specific class of data.

The point is balance. Modern cars hold anti-theft systems that you would not want exposed to anyone. But independents still need to fix them, and competition law says they should be able to. SERMI is the compromise: sensitive data, but only for operators who have been checked.

What SERMI is not

Here is the part that trips people up. SERMI does not give a garage — or you — access to a car’s service history. The two things live in completely different places:

• Security data (keys, immobiliser): governed by SERMI-style access, available to vetted operators for specific jobs.
• Service history (the record of what work was done, when and by whom): held in the manufacturer’s dealer management system, keyed to the VIN, and generally readable only by the franchised network and the owner’s own account.

So an independent garage can legitimately cut you a new key without ever being able to see whether the car’s cambelt was changed. The right-to-repair rules that underpin SERMI are about the technical repair and maintenance information a garage needs to do the work — not the individual car’s maintenance ledger.

Where the UK stands

This changed recently, and a lot of what is written about it online is now out of date. SERMI went live in the UK on 1 April 2026, making the UK the first country outside the EU to operate the scheme. It is run here by RMI Standards and Certification, a subsidiary of the Independent Garage Association, which secured full UK approval in January 2026 after a programme of work running back some seventeen years.

One real difference remains. In the EU, SERMI is mandated in law; in the UK it arrived on a voluntary footing. In practice that distinction is narrowing, because manufacturers are retiring the older bespoke security portals and moving to the SERMI digital certificate — a garage without one increasingly cannot get in at all. Nineteen brands signed up within days of the UK go-live.

Underneath the scheme, the principle is unchanged: independents in the UK retain the right to the technical information needed to service and repair vehicles, under the Motor Vehicle Block Exemption Order 2023, which replaced the retained EU regulation on 1 June 2023 and runs to 31 May 2029. The government guidance sets out what it covers.

For a car owner, the practical effect is the same on both sides of the Channel: the framework decides who can touch your security systems, not who can read your service history. Treat any claim that “SERMI lets a garage pull your full history” as a red flag — it doesn’t work that way.

So who can actually see your service history?

Strip away the confusion and the list is short:

• You, through the manufacturer’s owner portal — if the car has one, and if the history it exposes goes beyond reminders. Our manufacturer pages note which portals show real history and which only show what’s due next.
• A franchised dealer, who can retrieve the record by VIN. Whether they will do so for a non-owner, and whether they charge, is covered in our guide to what dealers charge to print records.
• An aggregated report, which pulls the franchised-network data together against the VIN — useful when you don’t own the car or don’t want a dealer visit.

Independent garages, for all their legitimate access to repair data, are generally not on that list. That is the single most useful thing to understand about SERMI: it is a repairer’s tool, not a records service.

Read next

For the primary sources, the UK scheme site (sermi.co.uk) covers accreditation for British garages, and the European scheme site (sermi.eu) sets out the framework it derives from. To see how a specific brand handles owner and independent access, open its page in the manufacturer index, or brush up on the vocabulary in the glossary.