What year is my number plate?

A UK registration issued since September 2001 is two letters, two numbers and three more letters. The middle two say when the number was issued; the first two say where. This reads both, from DVLA’s own leaflet INF104.

It dates the number, not the car. A registration can be moved from one vehicle to another, and the only rule is that it must not make a vehicle look newer than it is. So the year below is the year the car was registered if the plate is the original one — and if it is not, the car is at least that old and possibly older.

What the three parts are

DVLA sets out the format in section 03 of the leaflet: “The current vehicle registration format was introduced on 1 September 2001.” It consists of:

• 2 letter memory tag (these refer to the region in the country where a vehicle is first registered)
• 2 numbers (these tell you when it was issued)
• a space and 3 letters chosen at random

The last three letters carry nothing at all. They are there to make the number unique, and no amount of staring at them will tell you anything about the vehicle.

There has never been an 01 plate

The format started in September 2001. September is the second half of the registration year, and second-half codes are the first-half code plus fifty — so the first registration number ever issued under this system carried 51, and the first March code, six months later, was 02.

There is no 01. It is the obvious answer, it is what you get if you subtract 2000 from the year, and it is wrong. A plate reading AB01 CDE has never existed.

Age identifiers

57 codes, exactly as DVLA prints them.

The table stops at February 2030. The leaflet adds: “This pattern will continue until all possible variations have been used.” It states the rule and stops tabulating, so this page decodes 02 to 79 and refuses anything higher. The arithmetic past that point is not difficult. It is also not DVLA’s, and this page does not put its own answers in their mouth.

Memory tags

The first letter is the region; the second narrows it. DVLA gives 19 region letters:

A quirk worth naming, because it is the leaflet’s and not ours: the column headed “Postal area” in DVLA’s table sits over the office column. The bold region names have no heading at all. The table above keeps the same information and labels it as what it is.

Where the leaflet stops

Four things the source does not say, which this page reports rather than fills in.

Seven letters are not region letters, and only three are explained

I, J, Q, T, U, X, Z carry no memory tag. The bullets under DVLA’s table explain three of them — “We will not use I, Q or Z in local memory tags identifiers” — which covers I, Q, Z. Nothing anywhere in the leaflet mentions J, T, U, X. They are simply absent. This page can tell you they are not region letters and cannot tell you why.

One region has no name

Row K’s name cell is blank. It lists two offices — Borehamwood and Northampton — and gives no region name, where every other row does. That is reproduced above as a blank rather than filled with a plausible label.

A range is not a list

6 of the 19 regions are given as a range — BA to BY and so on — and 13 as an explicit list. It is tempting to expand the ranges using the stated rule that I, Q and Z are never used. This page does not, and here is the reason:

2 of the 13 enumerated lists have gaps the leaflet never explains. F has no FO, FU; N has no NF. If a region DVLA lists in full can have unexplained holes in it, a region given only as a range can too — so expanding BA–BY by rule would be this page inventing tags that may not be issued. Instead it says, for a ranged region, that the leaflet gives a range.

Nothing before September 2001

INF104 describes the current format and no other. It never uses the word “prefix” or the word “suffix”, and never mentions 1983 or 1963. So this page does not decode the older systems. It recognises their shapes well enough to say that is what you have typed, and then stops — the same position the boat page takes on hull numbers from before 1984 and the tyre page takes on three-digit date codes.

Why the plate can be older than the car

This is the part that makes a plate different from a serial number, and it comes straight from the leaflet. Section 01: “The registration number is given to the vehicle, not the registered keeper.” A keeper can take a number off one vehicle and put it on another. Section 04 sets the only limit: “You can't use a registration number to make your vehicle appear younger than it actually is.”

Read those together and the rule runs in one direction. A transferred number can be older than the vehicle wearing it — that is what a private plate on a new car usually is — and it can never be newer. So the age identifier sets a floor, not a date: the car is at least as old as its plate, and may be a great deal older. Nothing on the plate tells you which.

The memory tag has the same shape of limit. It is where the vehicle was first registered — not where it is now, not where the keeper lives, and not necessarily anywhere it has ever been driven.

A note on where this came from

Most of the tables on this site belong to somebody who has not been asked yet. This one does not need asking. gov.uk content carries the Open Government Licence v3.0, which permits copying and publishing the information commercially provided it is attributed — so the tables above are complete rather than summarised, and the attribution is at the foot of this page.

It is the first source this project has found that says yes in advance. Sixteen others are still waiting on a letter.