Driving licence exchange

Where can I exchange my licence?

Choose where your current licence was issued. We’ll show the mapped destinations that accept it and whether their official list still requires a theory or practical test.

Before you exchange

Residence comes first

You normally need to live in the destination and to have been resident where the licence was issued.

The original is replaced

Exchange gives you one local licence; it is not an extra document to stack.

Some lists check your passport, not your licence

United Arab Emirates — Dubai (RTA) gate listed origins on the holder’s nationality, so a listed licence is not on its own an answer there. Where no nationality rule is shown, none was published — that is silence, not permission.

How the rules work

Exchange almost always requires that you were normally resident in the issuing country when (and often while) you held the licence, and that you are resident in the destination when you exchange. EU law defines normal residence as living in a place for at least 185 days in each calendar year (Directive 2006/126/EC Art. 12). Several national authorities (e.g. Netherlands RDW) restate the same 185-day rule for non-EU licences. A licence obtained without meeting that condition is often void in the destination.

Lawful exchange conditions only. This is not a guide to licence tourism, and the one-licence rule means there is no stacking to be done: you end up holding exactly one, from where you reside.

Coverage notes · 45 destinations

45 destinations and 909 origin rows: the fourteen seeded lists plus four regional research batches (Americas, Europe, Asia, Gulf). THIRTEEN DESTINATIONS ARE SUB-NATIONAL and carry no ISO at all — Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario, and the US states of Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Oregon, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin. There is no Canadian or US federal driving licence and no federal exchange list, so there is NO Canada row and NO United States row, and neither federation is painted as a destination: read the province or the state, not the flag. The same problem arrives on the origin side under the Swiss bilaterals, where the counterparty ITSELF is sub-national in eight cases — seven Canadian provinces and the US state of Louisiana — and those rows are listed in the table but are DELIBERATELY NOT PAINTED on the map, because Canada and the United States have no Swiss licence treaty at federal level. Japan is the sharpest case of a list that means less than it looks: its published 29-country list waives only the ADMINISTRATIVE knowledge and skills confirmations, while 施行令 art. 34-4(2) already waives the statutory tests for any foreign Class 1 licence — so Japan exchanges from everywhere, and that list is not the list of countries it exchanges from. Dubai is EMIRATE-LEVEL, not federal, and is the one list carrying a per-origin NATIONALITY GATE: 35 of its 60 origins accept the licence only from that country's own nationals. Türkiye's six months is the opposite clock from everyone else's — a grace period from the date of entry after which exchange becomes compulsory, not a deadline after which the right lapses. Where no nationality rule, no test requirement and no window is recorded, none was published: NULL MEANS NOT RECORDED, never "not required" and never "open to all". EU/EEA mutual recognition is not expanded as third-country annex rows anywhere in this corpus.

Research notes

Mapped destinations

Each annex is destination-led: what that country accepts from foreign issuers. Enable JavaScript for the interactive origin → destination lookup above.

Where can I exchange my licence?

My licence was issued in…

Mapped destinations