Every vehicle on British roads has a unique number plate, but what exactly do they mean?
A standard UK number plate can tell you both the age of the car and where it was originally registered. To celebrate the upcoming release of the new number plates, read on to find out how to correctly read UK car plates.
When do the new number plates come out?
New number plates are released twice a year, on the 1st of March and the 1st of September. For example, the 25 plate was released on March 1st 2025 and will apply to any new vehicle that is produced and registered right up until 31st of August 2025. After this date, it will become the 75 plate.
If you’re confused where the 75 comes from, don’t worry, let us explain.
What do the numbers mean?
It is important to know the age of a vehicle before buying to understand how much insurance will cost, and to assess the quality of the car. The third and fourth digits, the only numbers on the plate, signify the year that the vehicle was made. This is called the ‘age identifier’.
For example, a vehicle that was produced between March 1st 2025 and August 31st 2025 will be registered with ‘25’ as the age identifier on the plate.
When the plate change happens in September, you simply add 50 to this number, which is why the plates will have ‘75’ from 1st September 2025.
To see this again in practice, look back to the 2019 plate going from ‘19’ to ‘69’ in September 2015, and the 2009 plate going from ‘09’ to ‘59’ in September of 2009. This has been the number plate standard across all vehicles registered since 2001, so people are quickly able to work out the age of a vehicle.
You can see how old a car is by the numbers in the registration plate:
What about the letters?
The first two letters of the number plate that appear before the age identifier also have meaning. The DVLA refers to these two letters as ‘memory tags’, and they represent the region where the car was registered. The first letter is the overall region, and the second letter tells us the postal area in the region.
Here is a table of the memory tags and what region they are referring to:
The remaining three letters at the end of the number plate are purely random, and are just used to help identify individual cars. Every number plate is unique to a specific vehicle, and even cars with personalised and customised number plates are still originally registered with a number plate that uses this system.
This current system will remain in place until February 2051, when the final plates will end on 00 before a new system will be designed.
Looking to get behind the wheel of a 75 plate car? Speak to our sales team today to take a step in the right direction to driving your dream vehicle.
