Dateless private plates explained
No year code at all, so a dateless registration mark fits a vehicle of any age. The oldest style, and usually the dearest.
What a dateless registration mark is made of
- Letters
- One, two or three of them. On this example, ABC.
- Numbers
- One to four, but never enough to take the whole registration mark past six characters. On this example, 12.
- The six character limit
- Three letters leaves room for three digits, so ABC 123 is the longest of that shape. One or two letters leaves room for four, so A 1234 and AB 1234 are the longest of theirs. There is no such thing as a dateless ABC 1234.
- No year code
- Nothing in the registration mark says when it was issued, which is what makes it fit any vehicle.
Will it fit my vehicle?
A dateless registration mark can be displayed on a vehicle of any age. There is nothing to check.
Which way round does a dateless registration read?
Both orders are dateless: letters then numbers, as in ABC 12, and numbers then letters, as in 12 ABC. The same six character limit applies whichever way round it reads.
Where did short dateless registrations come from?
Registration became compulsory on 1 Jan. 1904 under the Motor Car Act 1903, and it was the county and borough councils that issued the registration marks. Codes were handed out in descending order of population from the 1901 census, so the single letters went to the largest authorities: A to London, B to Lancashire, C to the West Riding of Yorkshire. The run carried on through the two letter codes down to FP, which went to Rutland.
Where do the six characters come from?
When the codes began to run out in 1932, a serial letter was put in front of an existing two letter code and the numbers on those ran only to 999. Staffordshire issued the first, ARF 1, in July 1932. That is the whole of the rule: three letters were only ever paired with three digits, so a dateless ABC 1234 is not rare, it is not a thing.
Why are some of them scarce?
A council only reached a high number if it registered a lot of vehicles. A small authority might issue a few hundred registration marks in a decade and never get near the top of its series. Bute is the example the trade uses: its code was SJ, the island had very few cars, and the plain SJ series ran from Jan. 1904 to Dec. 1963 without ever being worked through.
Why are the reversed ones different?
Numbers first came in 1953, and only where an authority had exhausted its forward run. Staffordshire was first with 1000 E in the April, and Middlesex issued the first reversed three letter registration mark, 1 AHX, that Sept. Whether a code has reversed registration marks depends entirely on how busy that authority was: Bute reached the reversed three letter series, so 638 GSJ exists, but it never exhausted the plain SJ run and so never reversed it. There is no such thing as a period 1 SJ. Combinations that could be misread as registration marks already on the road, the ones mixing 1 with I or 0 with O, were held back as well.
Why do they cost more?
Every other style carries its date of issue, so it can only go on a vehicle first registered then or later. A dateless registration mark has no such limit, and there are no more of them being made.
How must the characters be spaced?
Every number plate we make complies with British Standard BS AU 145e. On a standard modern car number plate, characters are 79mm tall and 50mm wide, with prescribed spacing of 11mm between characters and 33mm between the two groups. The registration must not be rearranged or deliberately respaced to make it read as something else. An illegally displayed registration can fail an MOT and lead to a fine of up to £1,000.00.
Black & silver number plates
Black number plates with white, silver or grey characters may only be displayed on qualifying historic vehicles manufactured before 1 Jan. 1980 and registered in DVLA’s historic tax class. The age of the registration mark itself does not qualify the vehicle, so an old Northern Irish registration transferred to a modern car must still be displayed on modern legal number plates.
What makes a number plate legal sets out the measurements in full, and private plate styles shows every style side by side.
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