Car registrations: How they work

The following is a brief explanation of the UK car registrations system.

The best comprehensive explanation of which we are aware is at this number plates article, but what appears below is a quick guide.

In the UK, vehicle registration plates have usually contained three pieces of information:

the year of registration
the area or region of registration
the unique identity of the vehicle

The first of these, the year, used to be shown as a year-letter code which appeared as a suffix or, later, a prefix to a registration. For example ABC 123A is an example of a year suffixed number plate, while A123 ABC is a year prefixed number.

The second item, the region or area, is coded in the letters that appear together in a group. Each local issuing authority has its own letter code.

The final piece of information is a combination of all the characters on the plate. For any one year and locality, the unique identifying number sequence will occur only once. Thus the exact registration ABC 123A can only appear once. Any other vehicle bearing the numbers 123 in that order must have a different year and/or area code.

The current style of vehicle number plates still gives all the information, but the format has been changed so that plates now follow this form: KG51 FCV. The area code is now the first two letters, the year code is a two number code that immediately follows the area (in the same group of characters) and finally, the unique ID sequence for that vehicle takes the form of a separate group of three letters.

Regulations which set out the rules for displaying number plates and car registrations (fonts, emblems etc) and in strict force, and are explained in this document from the issuing authority.