Cars taxed on engine capacity

Before 1 July 2008 an Irish private car was taxed on the size of its engine, and a car first registered before that date still is. The Schedule calls these “other vehicles to which this paragraph applies” — the residual case, once the two CO₂ paragraphs have taken everything they cover.

The bands run in 100 cc steps from the bottom of the range to 3,000 cc, and then one open-ended band above that. Twenty-two of them.

The two bands that carry the same figure

Look at “exceeding 1,400 but not exceeding 1,500” and “exceeding 1,500 but not exceeding 1,600”. Both are €413. That is what the Schedule says, and it is not a transcription error on this page.

It is worth saying out loud because it looks exactly like one — every other step in the table increases, so a flat pair reads as a copy-paste slip. It matters to this site beyond the cosmetic: the build-time check that validates these tables asserts that duty is non-decreasing down the bands rather than strictly increasing, precisely because asserting the stricter rule would fail on correct data. A gate that fails on correct data gets deleted, and then it is not checking anything.

What an ordinary car pays

The spread is the reason so many pre-2008 cars were sold on when the CO₂ system arrived. A large-engined car on this table pays several times what a modern car with real-world similar consumption pays on the CO₂ table, because engine capacity is a poor proxy for emissions and the 2008 change is what replaced it.

It also runs the other way at the bottom. A small pre-2008 engine is taxed lightly on this table — €199 at not more than 1,000 cc — which is why elderly small cars survive in the fleet.

The electric row

An electrically propelled vehicle has its own line in this paragraph, at €120. It is the same figure as the 0 g/km band on the CO₂ tables (€120), and this site transcribes it from its own row rather than assuming the two are equal — they arrive by different routes in the legislation and either could move without the other.

Which table is yours

This one, if the car was first registered before 1 July 2008. Otherwise it is one of the two CO₂ tables, and which one depends on the registration window and on whether the car was imported: the main motor tax page has that decision table.

A note on scope: the Schedule’s Part I covers far more than private cars — motorcycles by cylinder capacity, dumpers, forklifts, buses by seating capacity, hearses, general haulage tractors, recovery vehicles. This site carries the private-car paragraphs only, and says so rather than presenting a partial transcription as the whole Schedule.