A Guide to Vehicle Registration Years in the UK

Figuring out how old a number plate is in the UK can be a head-scratcher, especially if you have no experience with them.

Besides some using a vague letter to signify the year, there are 3 different formats of registration plates to decipher: Current Style, Prefix and Suffix. Each with their own unique age identifiers.

In this article, we’ll guide you through each number plate style’s registration year, so you can know exactly just how old a registration is.

Table of Contents
New Style Number Plates: 2001 to Present
Prefix Number Plates: 1983–2001
Suffix Number plates: 1963–1983

How Old Is My Registration?

Below you will find a full list of car registration years, split by number plate format.

New Style Number Plates: 2001 to Present

The current registration system we have in Great Britain started on the 1st of September, 2001. This new registration index is made up of seven characters.

It’s the 3rd and 4th number here that is our “age identifier” AKA the year it was issued. This two-digit age identifier changes twice a year at the beginning of March and again at the beginning of September.

If issued between March and August, the age identifier will be the last two digits of that year (e.g. “02” = March 2002 - August 2002). For registrations issued between September and February the following year, the 3rd number changes to a “5” and the 4th will be the last digit of the year it was first issued (e.g. “52” = September 2002 - February 2003).

^*Last year identifier from previous system (Prefix)

Prefix Number Plates: 1983–2001

By 1982, Britain had gone through the alphabet it was using for its age identifier on Suffix style plates (see Suffix section below). So, starting in 1983, they decided to move this letter to the beginning of the registration – giving us the Prefix plates we old-timers know all too well.

You might be thinking “Where are letters I, O, Q, U and Z?” These letters have never been issued as year identifiers down to the fact that they all look too similar to other numbers and letters. ‘I’ looks like the number ‘1’, ‘O’ and ‘Q’ look like ‘0’ (zero) and poor ‘Z’ looks a bit like a ‘2’. And ‘U’ got the boot as it looked too much like the letter ‘V’.

Suffix Number plates: 1963–1983

Suffix plates were first introduced in 1963 to alleviate the problem of the British public running out of registrations. It took the previous scheme that ran from 1932 (a three-letter combination followed by a sequence number from 1 to 999) and added a letter suffix, which became the age identifier (see example below). This final letter – why it’s called a suffix - changed on the 1st of January each year, with the first letter being A for 1963.

If you’re interested in finding out more about the rules and regulations of number plates, then check out our Guide to UK Number Plate Spacing.

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