Canadian Driver's Licence OCR API

What Makes the Canadian driver's licence Hard to Parse

The Canadian driver's licence is issued by the provinces and territories (for example ServiceOntario, ICBC in British Columbia, SAAQ in Quebec and Alberta registry agents). Canadian licences are issued province by province. They follow the North American (AAMVA) card layout with numbered fields, but each province uses its own licence number format; Ontario's, for example, is a letter followed by 14 digits printed in groups. Quebec cards are printed in French, and licence classes differ by province (G, G1 and G2 in Ontario; Class 5 and 7 in British Columbia and Alberta).

One API Call, Named Fields

The StructOCR Driver License OCR API returns the licence number (field 4d), name (fields 1 and 2), date of birth (field 3), issue and expiry dates (fields 4a and 4b), address (field 8) and licence class (field 9). Dates are returned as YYYY-MM-DD whatever order the card prints them in. 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 Canada

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": "CAN",
    "region": "ON",
    "document_number": "A1234-56789-01234",
    "personal_number": null,
    "surname": "TREMBLAY",
    "given_names": "MARIE",
    "sex": null,
    "date_of_birth": "1988-11-03",
    "place_of_birth": null,
    "date_of_issue": "2023-11-03",
    "date_of_expiry": "2028-11-03",
    "date_of_first_issue": null,
    "issuing_authority": null,
    "address": "100 SAMPLE AVE, TORONTO ON M5V 1A1",
    "vehicle_class": "G"
  }
}