How to read a UK number plate

The current format

Introduced on 1 September 2001, and unchanged since. A registration in this format has four parts:

A new age identifier appears twice a year, on 1 March and 1 September. The March code is the last two digits of the year; the September code is those two digits plus 50. A car registered in August 2026 carries 26; from 1 September 2026 new cars will carry 76.

There is no 01 code. The system began in September 2001, and the first identifier it issued was 51.

Age identifiers — every code and its dates

The middle two numbers of a registration, and the six months in which that code was issued. Where we hold enough MOT test data for cars first registered in that period, the row links to what the official test record says about them.

The newest codes have no statistics page. A car's first MOT falls due at three years old, so cars registered on those plates have not been tested yet. A handful have — taxis and private hire cars are tested every year from new — but a few thousand licensed cabs are not a fair picture of several hundred thousand ordinary cars, so we publish nothing for those periods until the ordinary ones have been through a test.

Memory tags — the first two letters

The first letter sets the region; the second narrows it to a DVLA office within that region. This is the region the vehicle was first registered in.

A few things the table does not show. It lists the first letters that have a region attached, so a letter missing from it — J, T, U or X — simply has no region of its own; those letters can still appear as the second letter of a tag. I, Q and Z are different: they are barred from memory tags altogether, in either position, so there is no AI, BQ or CZ. Z appears only among the three random letters at the end. A registration beginning with Q is not a memory tag at all but a mark of its own kind, which DVLA still issues. Two local rules are worth knowing: HW is issued only to Isle of Wight residents, and MN and MAN are reserved for the Isle of Man.

What the memory tag does not tell you

The two letters record where the vehicle was first registered — in practice, the region of the dealer who supplied it. They do not tell you where the car is now, who has owned it, or where it has been kept. A car first registered in Glasgow and driven to Cornwall the same week keeps its Scottish tag for life.

They are also not the postcode areas used on our MOT statistics pages. Those record where a car was tested, which is a different fact about a different moment. The two must never be read together as though they described the same thing.