International Driving Permit (IDP) Check: Do you need an International Driving Permit? Check first.

I rented a car in Italy and found out at the counter that I needed an International Driving Permit. Not a suggestion — a €400 fine if the Carabinieri stop you. I'd checked three websites beforehand and all three were vague. The problem isn't that the information is secret. It's that it's per country, it contradicts itself, and every page ranking for it is an affiliate site that wants to sell you a permit. Italy requires one. The UK doesn't. Japan requires a specific 1949 Geneva permit and will reject the 1968 version. Nobody tells you that in one place. So IDP Check does one thing: pick your destinations, get a verdict for each. 196 destinations, each with its own rule — not a blanket answer Four verdicts, not two: required, recommended, not required, or a special local permit Footnotes for the traps — the 1949-vs-1968 treaty split, police registration, translation requirements, time limits A whole trip at once. Eight one-click presets (Western Europe, Mediterranean, Japan & Korea…) or build your own, then share the result as a URL On sourcing, because you should ask: the cards show three different states, not one. 20 rules are checked against a named primary source with the date — GOV.UK, Spain's DGT, service-public.gouv.fr, Tokyo Metropolitan Police, the U.S. embassy in that country. That 20 is deliberately the high-traffic set: Italy, Spain, France, Japan, Greece, Thailand, Ireland, Germany, the UK. 136 are compiled from AAA and State Department guidance and say "Not individually verified" on the card. 40 say "Unverified" outright — and those are all small states like Bhutan, Comoros and Tuvalu, where a primary source is genuinely hard to find. Where I haven't verified, the page says so instead of quietly implying I have. No signup, no cookies, no affiliate links, nothing to sell. Vercel Analytics is cookieless, which is why there's no consent banner. Happy to answer anything about the rules or how it's built.