A Guide to UK Number Plates

New number plates are released twice a year, on the 1^st of March and the 1^st of September. For example, the 22 plate was released on March 1^st 2022 and will apply to any new vehicle that is produced and registered right up until 31^st of August 2022. After this date, it becomes the 72 plate.
 
If you’re confused where the 72 comes from, don’t worry – let us explain.
 

It is important to know the age of a vehicle before purchasing it 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 made between March 1^st 2022 and August 31^st 2022 will be registered with ‘22’ 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 have ‘72’ from 1^st September 2022. 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 anybody is able to quickly work out the age of a vehicle.
   

Year of Car Registration	Plate from March-August	Plate from September onwards
2016	16	66
2017	17	67
2018	18	68
2019	19	69
2020	20	70
2021	21	71
2022	22	72
2023	23	73
2024	24	74
2025	25	75

 

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:
 

DVLA Memory Tag Identifier	Region
AA-Ay	Anglia
BA-BY	Birmingham
CA-CY	Cymru
DA-DY	Deeside to Shrewsbury
EA-EY	Essex
FA-FY	Forest & Fens
GA-GY	Garden of England
HA-HY exc HW	Hampshire & Dorset
HW	Isle of Whight
KA-KY	Borehamwood to Northampton
LA-LY	London
MA-MY exc MN & MAN	Manchester & Merseyside
MN & MAN	Isle of Man
NA-NY	North
OA-OY	Oxford
PA-PY	Preston
RA-RY	Reading
SA-SY	Scotland
VA-VY	Severn Valley
WA-WY	West of England
YA-YY	Yorkshire

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.