Australian Driver Licence OCR API

What Makes the Australian driver licence Hard to Parse

The Australian driver licence is issued by each state and territory road authority (for example Transport for NSW, VicRoads in Victoria and the Department of Transport and Main Roads in Queensland). Australia has no single national driver licence. Each state and territory issues its own card, so the layout, the position of the licence number and even the licence classes on the card differ between New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and the rest. Most cards also carry a separate card number next to the licence number; the Document Verification Service (DVS) asks for both when you verify a licence, so onboarding flows often have to capture two similar-looking identifiers from one photo.

One API Call, Named Fields

The StructOCR Driver License OCR API returns the licence number, the holder's name, date of birth, residential address, expiry date and licence class (for example C, LR, MR, HR, HC or MC). Australian cards print dates as DD/MM/YYYY; the API returns them as YYYY-MM-DD. Send a JPG, PNG, WebP or PDF as Base64 JSON or as a multipart upload; there is no SDK to embed in your app, although official Python and Node.js SDKs are available. Step-by-step code is in the Python guide and Node.js guide. Usage is billed per successful scan with pay-as-you-go pricing.

Where Teams Use It in Australia

Integration & AI Prompts

Install the official SDK and pass a photo of the licence. Full request and response details are in the driver license API reference.

# pip install structocr
import os
from structocr import StructOCR

client = StructOCR(api_key=os.environ["STRUCTOCR_API_KEY"])
result = client.scan_driver_license("licence.jpg")

if result.get("success"):
    data = result["data"]
    print(data["document_number"], data["surname"], data["date_of_expiry"])

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "type": "drivers_license",
    "country_code": "AUS",
    "region": "NSW",
    "document_number": "12345678",
    "personal_number": null,
    "surname": "CITIZEN",
    "given_names": "JANE MARIE",
    "sex": null,
    "date_of_birth": "1990-04-12",
    "place_of_birth": null,
    "date_of_issue": null,
    "date_of_expiry": "2029-04-12",
    "date_of_first_issue": null,
    "issuing_authority": null,
    "address": "1 SAMPLE STREET, SYDNEY NSW 2000",
    "vehicle_class": "C"
  }
}