How this site is built

An independent search layer over one public file. Not affiliated with the Department of Motor Vehicles or the State of New York.

One facility, several licences — and why that shapes everything

The Department’s file has one row per licence, not per business: 54,515 rows over 24,368 facility numbers. Treating the facility number as the key would have merged three different permissions into one record; treating the row as the answer would have hidden two of them. The key here is the pair (facility, licence code), and the search groups every pair sharing a facility number.

11,758 facilities hold more than one current licence — 48.3% of them. The combinations.

Scope: expired licences are searchable, not on pages

All 54,515 licences are loaded; the 40,514 current ones carry the county, type and expiry pages. Searching a facility whose licence lapsed returns expired and the date, because « nothing found » would read as reassurance.

The Department states its own limit: facilities expired less than six years are included. Beyond that they are gone, so absence here is not evidence that a shop was never licensed.

⚠️ The limit that matters most

This file is published annually. Our copy is dated 2026-08-21. A licence shown as current was current when the Department published; it may have lapsed since, and one shown as expired may have been renewed. If a decision turns on it, use the Department’s live facility lookup. We say this on every result rather than in the small print.

⚠️ What we deliberately keep off pages

The owner’s name. It is in the file, and it is a natural person’s name attached to a business. Pages name the facility; the owner appears only on the individual result, which is drawn in your browser from the part of the URL after the # and cannot be indexed.

The business address is published, because a garage’s address is the point of it.

How the codes were resolved

The Department publishes the meaning of every three-letter code in the field definition of its own dataset, and that is where every label on this site comes from — word for word, not inferred. Where a code was not in that list, the site would show the raw code rather than guess; none were.

County codes are four letters, and the Department says they are the first four characters of the county name. We resolved them against the 62 counties of New York State and checked that no two share a prefix, so the mapping is unambiguous. One code is not a county: facilities recorded outside the state.

How the pages are chosen

A county gets a page at 100 current licences (61 of 63 qualify, covering 99.9%); a licence type at 30; a county-and-type page at 100. Every licence sits in exactly one county and one type, so the crossed pages divide their parent rather than overlapping it — checked before the generator was written.

Source

Facilities Licensed by the Department of Motor Vehicles, the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles on data.ny.gov, first posted 2013-05-14, published under the OPEN-NY Terms of Use.