'What number plate can I have?'

FAQs » plates » What number plate can I have?

There are several different styles of number plate out there. Everybody except the Queen herself must have a number plate on the vehicles. Most people will be aware of the 'normal' styles of number plates on our roads.

AB51 CDE

Since 2001 the style has been to have 7 characters as 2 letters, 2 numbers, a space and then 3 letters as follows:- AB51 CDE. The first 2 letters (AB in our example) are an area code, identifying the area in which the car was registered. A car showing 'NA' for example was most likely registered in Newcastle.

The 2 numbers (51 in our example) is the 'age identifier'. In our example the '5' represents the fact that this plate was issued in the second half of the year. The '1' indicates that the year in question is 2001. Thus a plate with 51 on it was issued between September 2001 and February 2002. The plate which follows on from 51 was 02. This would be appropriate for a plate issued in the 6 months between March and August 2002. In September 2002 the '52' plate came in and so on. The final 3 letters (CDE in our example) are random letters generated by the DVLA computer.

A 123 BCD

Prior to the current style, between 1983 and 2001, plates followed the following format. A letter, a space, a number between 1 and 3 characters long, another space and three letters. In this example 'A' is the age identifier, being the letter used between September 1983 and August 1984. The numbers were random and could be virtually any number between 1 and 999. The sequence of three letters at the end used to include the area code. A plate with ANL was most likely registered in Newcastle.

Limitations

The registration cannot make the car look younger that it actually is. For example you could not place BE57 MAN on a car that was registered in 2006.

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