South African Driving Licence OCR API

What Makes the South African driving licence Hard to Parse

The South African driving licence is issued by the Department of Transport, through driving licence testing centres. The South African credit-card driving licence prints the holder's 13-digit ID number next to the licence number, along with licence codes such as A1, A, B, EB, C1, C, EC1 and EC and the card's validity dates (cards are renewed every five years). The PDF417 barcode on the back is encrypted, so it cannot be read like a North American licence barcode; reading the printed front is the practical way to capture the data.

One API Call, Named Fields

The StructOCR Driver License OCR API returns the licence number, the holder's name, ID number (returned as personal_number), date of birth, card validity dates and licence codes. Dates are returned 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. Usage is billed per successful scan with pay-as-you-go pricing.

Where Teams Use It in South Africa

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": "ZAF",
    "region": null,
    "document_number": "1234567890AB",
    "personal_number": "9001015009087",
    "surname": "DLAMINI",
    "given_names": "THABO",
    "sex": null,
    "date_of_birth": "1990-01-01",
    "place_of_birth": null,
    "date_of_issue": "2024-02-01",
    "date_of_expiry": "2029-01-31",
    "date_of_first_issue": null,
    "issuing_authority": null,
    "address": null,
    "vehicle_class": "B, EB"
  }
}