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Vehicle registration plates

The format of identifiers on vehicle registration plates (number plates in British English, license plates in American English) will differ across countries.

In the United States and United Kingdom, identifiers are normally no longer than 7 characters.

I've come across databases in the past that make the assumption that the identifiers are up to 7 characters long. There's also the assumption that all characters will be in the range of A-Z or 0-9. I wanted to see how wrong this assumption was outside the United States and the United Kingdom.

A lot of the information on this page comes from Wikipedia. Do not treat the content on this page as verified! Do your own research!

United States

  • In New York, identifiers for personalized plates can be up to 8 characters long.
  • In North Carolina, identifiers for personal vehicles and private trailers can be up to 8 characters long.

It should be noted that personalized license plates in some states can have special characters printed on the plates.

  • California allows half and full space characters, and for "kids" plates: ❤️ ⭐️ ✋ ➕
  • New Hampshire allows: &+-
  • New York allows: @ (as the state image) and space
  • North Carolina allows the characters: &#?$/=*+@!:.-,'" and space
  • Virginia allows the characters: &- and space

But according to autotrader.com, these special characters are not included as part of the identifier. So a plate reading A&3@C would just be A3C in the system.

Europe

There are several countries in Europe where identifiers can be longer than 7 characters and characters that are not A-Z, 0-9.

  • Denmark allows ÆØÅ on personalized plates.
  • Finland allows ÅÄÖ.

  • Germany has identifiers that are 8 characters long and allows ÖÜÄ. The umlauts have resulted in some confusion between two districts. According to Wikipedia:

    For a long time, German codes kept to the rule that a code with an umlaut would prohibit another code with the respective blank vowel, e.g. there could not be a district code FU as the code FÜ was already in use for Fürth. This rule was disregarded in 1996, when BÖ was introduced for Bördekreis in spite of BO existing for Bochum, although Bördekreis got BK in 2007 since there were confusions internationally for e.g. fines.

  • Ireland has can have identifiers that are as long as 11 characters. But from my research the longest one that I could find was 10 characters long.

  • Montenegro allows ČĆŠĐŽ on personalized plates.
  • North Macedonia has identifiers that are 8 characters long.
  • Serbia allowed ČĆŠĐŽ up until the year 2017.
  • Sweden allows ÅÄÖ.
  • Switzerland has identifiers that are up to 8 characters long.
  • Ukraine has identifiers that are 8 characters long. Personalized plates allow cyrillic characters.
  • Turkey has identifiers that are up to 8 characters long.
  • Russia has identifiers that are up to 9 characters long.

Africa

  • Burkina Faso has identifiers that are 10 characters long.
  • South Africa has identifiers that are 8 characters long.

Asia

  • Afghanistan uses the persian alphabet, but latin equivalents are shown on the plates as well.
  • Bangladesh uses Bengali letters and numerals.
  • China uses the pinyin alphabet for the first letter of the identifier.
  • India has identifiers that are 10 characters long.
  • Indonesia has identifiers that are up to 10 characters long.
  • Iran uses the persian alphabet and are up to 8 characters long. Latin equivalents exist, but are not shown on the plates.
  • Iraq has identifiers that are up to 8 characters long.
  • Israel has identifiers that are up to 8 characters long.
  • Japan has identifiers that are up to 9 characters long, and have kanji and hiragana characters.
  • North Korea uses hangul syllables for the first two characters of the identifier.
  • South Korea uses a hangul character for the third character of the identifier.
  • Pakistan has identifiers that are up to 9 characters long.
  • Saudi Arabia uses both Arabic letters and numerals, but a latin equivalents are also shown on the plates.
  • Singapore has identifiers that are up to 8 characters long.
  • Thailand uses Thai script for the first two characters of the identifier. The Thai characters can be mapped to latin characters, but this is only used for international plates when the vehicle is traveling outside of Thailand. It is illegal to use these international plates in Thailand.
  • Vietnam has identifiers that are up to 8 characters long.