In the present paper, we are concerned with investigating error bounds for history-dependent variational inequalities controlled by the difference gap (for brevity, D-gap) functions. First, we recall a class of elliptic variational inequalities involving the history-dependent operators (for brevity, HDVI). Then, we introduce a new concept of gap functions to the HDVI and propose the regularized gap function for the HDVI via the optimality condition for the concerning minimization problem. Consequently, the D-gap function for the HDVI depends on these regularized gap functions is established. Finally, error bounds for the HDVI controlled by the regularized gap function and the D-gap function are derived under suitable conditions.