The two digits in the middle of a UK plate say when the car was first registered. Pick a code below to see what the MOT record says about the cars that carry it — how many still pass, what fails, and how far they have run.
Since September 2001 every new UK registration has carried a two-digit age identifier. A car registered between March and August takes the year itself: Mar 2002–Aug 2002 is code 02. One registered between September and the following February takes the year plus fifty, so Sept 2002–Feb 2003 is code 52. A new code appears twice a year, on 1 March and 1 September.
The grid above is in number order, which is deliberately not date order. 51 is the oldest cohort here — Sept 2001–Feb 2002, the first plates ever issued under this format — and it sits after 02 rather than before it, because the September codes all carry the higher number. Read a plate by its period, not by whether the number looks big.
The codes above are the ones with a statistics page. A cohort only gets one once its cars are old enough to have taken a normal first MOT, which falls due at three years — so the newest plates on the road are not here yet. That is not an omission: the handful of very new cars that do get tested are mostly taxis and private hire, and they describe licensing rules rather than cars.
Every page counts cars by when they were first registered, not by the plate they happen to be wearing today. A car from the 51 period running a private registration is still counted here; an import first registered in Great Britain years later is not. That distinction matters more than it sounds, because a private plate hides a car's age from the eye but not from its record.
Looking for the rules rather than the statistics — what makes a plate legal, what the flags and memory tags mean, or what to do if yours has been cloned? That is on how to read a number plate. For the same 43 cohorts as a single sortable table, with the DVLA lookup tables alongside, use the number plate statistics hub.