Does every driver's license have an MRZ?

No, and this is one of the more common misconceptions in the identity verification space. Most driver's licenses, especially in the United States and Canada, don't carry an ICAO-format MRZ at all.

Instead, they typically include a PDF417 barcode on the back that follows the AAMVA (American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators) standard, encoding similar core data, name, date of birth, license number, address, expiry date, but in a barcode format rather than the OCR-B text strip used on passports.

Some countries outside North America do issue driver's licenses with an MRZ-style zone, particularly where the license format is more closely aligned with a national ID card. But there's no single global standard for driver's licenses the way there is for passports under ICAO 9303.

Each country, and in North America each issuing state or province, makes its own format decisions.

This creates a real practical challenge for any document scanning system that wants to support driver's licenses broadly. It needs to read AAMVA barcodes for U.

S. and Canadian licenses, handle whatever MRZ or other formats apply for licenses from other countries, and fall back to plain visual zone OCR for the many licenses that have neither.

A scanning engine built only around MRZ extraction would essentially be unable to process the majority of U. S.

driver's licenses, since barcode decoding and OCR are what's actually needed there.

This is part of why mature identity document scanning products list barcode reading as a core capability right alongside MRZ and OCR, rather than treating it as a minor add-on. It's not an edge case.

Driver's licenses are among the most commonly scanned documents in retail, hospitality, and age-verification use cases, and most of them rely on barcodes rather than MRZ.

ScanDoc's document scanning solution reads AAMVA barcodes on driver's licenses alongside its MRZ and OCR capabilities, and detects automatically which data sources a given license actually includes, so a business doesn't need to configure separate rules for passports, MRZ-equipped ID cards, and barcode-based driver's licenses. The software adapts to whatever the specific document in front of the camera supports.