Carrier registration number is not in a valid format
DEFRA checks the carrier's registration number against the patterns for England, SEPA, NRW and Northern Ireland. The number on your receipt matched none of them, so the service refused the whole receipt.
The message DEFRA sends
"carrier.registrationNumber" must be in a valid England, SEPA, NRW or NI format
The usual cause
- A full stop, a space or another character the pattern does not allow (the Northern Ireland pattern does allow spaces and hyphens after ROC and UT or LT).
- A letter typed where a digit belongs, or the reverse.
- A number that is not a carrier registration number, such as a site permit number or a company number.
How to fix it
- Copy the number from the carrier's registration on the public register, character for character.
- Remove any space and any trailing character the spreadsheet added.
Fix the value in your software or spreadsheet, then send the receipt again.
The patterns the validator accepts
- England and NRW: CBDL or CBDU followed by three or more digits, for example CBDU123456.
- SEPA: WCR/R/ and seven digits, or SCO, SEA, SNO, SWE or WCR then / and six digits, or PCT, a hyphen, a letter, a hyphen and three to seven digits.
- Northern Ireland: ROC, then UT or LT, then up to five digits.
Sources
- DEFRA waste-movement-utils on GitHub: the shared validator code that DEFRA's receipt services pin, published under the Open Government Licence
- DEFRA waste-tracking-service on GitHub: the Receipt API specification
The message wording and the formats listed come from DEFRA's validator code, version 1.18.0, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The causes and fixes are our reading of its rules.
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Start on the free plan
CarrierNote is on the GOV.UK software provider list, connected to DEFRA's Digital Waste Tracking service. Receiving sites are in scope from October 2026 and carriers from October 2027, and you can be recording to DEFRA's standard from your first load, whenever you start.