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Form E: What Value Do You Put on a Car, Trade or Private Sale?

Published 22 September 2026 · 6 min read

Form E asks what your car is worth. It does not tell you what kind of worth it means, and the same car can be worth thousands more or less depending on which answer you pick. That silence is deliberate, and it is why so many disclosures end up being argued over.

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What Form E actually asks for

Cars appear in one place on the form. Section 2.8 asks for "Details of personal belongings individually worth more than £500", and the instruction underneath lists what to include: "Cars (gross value)", alongside collections, pictures, jewellery and house contents. The only money column on that section is headed "Total current value of your interest".

Two things in that wording are worth pausing on. The first is gross. If there is finance outstanding on the car, you do not net it off here. The gross figure goes in section 2.8 and the outstanding finance goes in the liabilities section of the form, where debts belong. Deducting it in both places is a common mistake and it understates your own position rather than protecting it.

The second is what the wording does not say. "Total current value" does not tell you whether that means what a dealer would give you tomorrow, what a private buyer would pay next month, or what the same car sits on a forecourt at. Those are three different numbers for one car.

Why the form does not tell you which basis to use

It would be easy to assume this is just a drafting gap, and that the answer is buried in the guidance somewhere. It is not. HMCTS publishes a separate Form E Notes for guidance document, and it is genuinely detailed: it walks through sixteen individual sections of the form, box by box, explaining what each one wants.

Section 2.8 is not one of them. The notes cover sections 1.6, 1.11, 1.13, 1.15, 2.1, 2.3, 2.10, 2.13, 2.14, 2.20, 2.21, 3.1, 3.2, 4.2, 4.3 and 4.6, and skip straight past the only section in which cars appear.

The contrast with the house makes the intent clearer. For section 2.1, the notes say you need to tell the court "how much you think it is currently worth". That is an explicit invitation to give your own opinion of value. And in the entire document, the only point at which the notes tell you to go and obtain a valuation from someone else concerns pensions, where you are told to attach a scheme valuation, request form BR20 for additional state pension, or get a figure from the Pension Protection Fund.

The three bases, and why the gap between them matters

When people say "the value of the car", they are usually reaching for one of three things without naming it:

These are not small distinctions. The major valuation guides routinely publish trade and private figures for the same vehicle side by side precisely because they are answering different questions, and on an ordinary family car the distance between the bottom and the top of that range can be a meaningful share of the car's worth. On a car that represents a real slice of the assets being divided, choosing the lowest basis without saying so shifts the overall picture in one party's favour.

This is where disclosure arguments usually start. One person reports the trade figure because it is the one they happened to look up. The other sees a number well below what they know the car is worth and reads it as an attempt to hide value. Often neither is acting in bad faith. They are quoting different bases and neither has labelled which.

So which figure should you use?

Nobody can honestly tell you that one basis is the officially correct one, because no official source says so. What we can say is what tends to survive scrutiny.

The form asks for current value, and in most cases the figure that best reflects what the asset is actually worth to the person keeping it is what it would realise in a normal sale, rather than the discounted price a trader would offer for a quick disposal or the marked-up price a dealer would ask. But the basis you pick matters far less than whether you say which one it is.

An unlabelled number invites suspicion. A number that comes with its basis stated, and a reason for it, can be discussed. If the car was valued on a private sale basis using comparable examples of similar age, mileage and specification, say so. If there is something particular about the car that moves it away from the general figure, high mileage, a modification, an import, a documented history, say that too. The other side may still disagree with your conclusion, but they are then disagreeing with reasoning rather than accusing you of concealment.

What to do if the other side's figure looks too low

You cannot compel someone to revise their own Form E entry. What you can do is put a documented figure alongside it, so that the court has two positions and a visible reason to prefer one.

The usual first instinct is to print off adverts for similar cars. That is better than nothing and it is genuinely useful context, but it has real limits worth understanding before you rely on it. Adverts show asking prices, not achieved ones. They take no account of the mileage, condition, specification or history of the specific car in question. And a selection of adverts chosen by an interested party is open to the obvious objection that a different selection would have produced a different answer.

A written valuation addresses those objections directly, because it does not just assert a number. It identifies the comparable vehicles it relied on, states the adjustments made for the specific car and why, and arrives at a figure whose working can be checked by anyone reading it. That is the difference between a figure a judge has to take on trust and one they can follow.

If you are in Scotland, the date matters as well as the basis

Everything above concerns England and Wales. Scotland works differently, and the difference is not a technicality.

Under the Family Law (Scotland) Act 1985, matrimonial property is valued at what the Act calls the "relevant date", which is the earlier of the date the couple stopped living together and the date the divorce summons was served. In England and Wales you are generally reporting what the car is worth now. In Scotland you may be reporting what it was worth at a fixed point in the past, potentially some time ago.

That turns the exercise into a retrospective valuation, which is a harder question than a current one. You cannot simply look up today's figure, because vehicle values move, sometimes sharply. It has to be reconstructed from what comparable vehicles were actually selling for around that date.

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