Vehicle registration plates of Bulgaria

Standard Bulgarian vehicle registration plates display black glyphs (alphanumeric characters) on a white background, together with – on the left-hand side of the plate – a blue vertical "EU strip" showing the flag of Europe (or, for older-registered cars, the flag of Bulgaria) and, below it, the country code for Bulgaria: BG.

In Bulgarian order, these are: А, В, Е, К, М, Н, О, Р, С, Т, У, Х.

However for the purpose of registration it is accepted as being the same (the Bulgarian letter У does not originate directly from the Greek or Latin Y).

The three that are not used in the series, (all vowels) are Е, reserved exclusively for trailers and caravans (e.g. СА 1234 ЕЕ), О and У.

[2] Number plates with a single letter in the series, i.e. "X(X) NNNN Y", appear mainly on mopeds and motorcycles, but can rarely be seen on some older vehicles that have failed to undergo the obligatory re-registration.

This total ran out in Sofia ("С") in late 2005, and was replaced by "СА" in early 2006; In 2014, "CB" began to be used.

[3] In the early 80's, after all the combinations with the letter "C" were exhausted in Sofia, a new format was introduced in the capital beginning with "A", namely AYY-NNNN.

"E" was designated as the series letter for trailers, and "Ч" for private freight and private mass transport vehicles (Ч: частен, private) Since 1992, the letter license plate code used letters common to both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, irrespective of whether they have the same phonetic value or not: А, В, Е, К, М, Н, О, Р, С, Т, У, Х, the same as today; a similar system is used in Greece, Russia, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Ukraine.

Between 2000 and 2008, the left-hand blue band Bulgaria flag was phased in, eventually becoming a legal requirement on 1 July 2006.

These plates all began with the series "AA",[4] thereby repeating some combinations that had already existed before, albeit without the blue strip.

Diplomatic and consular car number plates are similar to ordinary ones, but are recognizably different in their color: white symbols on a red background.

Additionally, the first two digits of the numeric group represent the country of the diplomatic or consular mission to which the vehicle belongs.