United States license plate designs and serial formats

Several states, particularly those with higher populations, use seven-character formats of three letters and four digits, including 1ABC234 in California, 1234ABC in Kansas and ABC-1234 (with or without a space or dash) in Georgia, Michigan, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin.

Several less-populous states—Alaska, Hawaii, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, and Vermont—use a three-letter, three-number format, namely ABC-123 or 123-ABC.

The same applies to the first number or letter on West Virginia plates (1 to 9 for January through September, and O, N, and D for October, November, and December expirations, respectively).

Texas places the county name only on the windshield registration sticker, where the car's license plate number is also printed.

Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Ohio, and Tennessee place the full name of the county of registration explicitly on their standard-issue plates, although not as part of the serial.

For various reasons related to visibility and readability, some states and territories exclude certain letters from use in their license plate serial formats.

Other states, such as Colorado, Georgia, and South Carolina have gradually adopted one or more of these letters over a course of years after previously skipping them in order to accommodate the demands of population growth and depletion of available serial combinations.

The most common argument behind skipping I, O, and Q is that they can be too easily confused with 0, 1, and other characters, particularly when there isn't adequate spacing or divider between numbers and letters[citation needed].

Iowa is a unique example in the use of this character, which began using the slashed zero beginning in 2012 on all standard passenger plates as opposed to the traditional symbol for zero to differentiate it from the letter "O" which is also used.

The following tables give information on license plates currently being issued, with 2014 or later expiration dates, for private (non-commercial) use on passenger vehicles by the governments of the fifty U.S. states, the District of Columbia, the five inhabited U.S. territories, and Native American tribes.

Older designs and serial formats previously issued may still be valid for continued usage in certain jurisdictions; these are noted in a separate table below.

[41][42][43][44] From 1984 until August 28, 2007, all plates issued followed the pattern of a letter identifying the status of the owner, followed by the two-letter country code, followed by a random three or four-digit number (S AB 1234).

The location of the status codes, either as the first or last character, allows the city of assignment to be easily identified because representatives of certain countries are limited to travel in a certain radius from their base.

Visualization of the number of characters in license plate serial formats in the United States, based on current serial formats for passenger plates as of May 2021. The arrangement of the characters may vary.
Random coding : Plates issued based on available numbers in non-sequential order.
Coded issuance : Plates coded by month of expiration
Coded issuance : Plates coded by county of issuance
Sequential issuance : 6-character plate (1 letter, 5 digits)
Sequential issuance : 6-character plate (2 letters, 4 digits)
Sequential issuance : 6-character plate (3 letters, 3 digits)
Sequential issuance : 6-character plate (4 letters, 2 digits)
Sequential issuance : 6-character plate (based on blocks of alphanumeric combinations)
Sequential issuance : 7-character plate (7 digits)
Sequential issuance : 7-character plate (2 letters, 5 digits)
Sequential issuance : 7-character plate (3 letters, 4 digits)
Notes:
  • Only the current passenger standard-issue serial format is depicted. Previous serial formats and optional issues are not depicted.
  • Florida uses six-character serial numbers, but the combinations vary. The most common issue consists of four letters and two digits, but alternate standard issues contain four digits and two letters.
  • Nebraska uses sequential-issuance three-letter, three-number plates for its most populous counties and county-coded plates for the rest of the counties consisting of 1 or 2 letters and up to 5 numbers.
  • Nevada issues three letter and three number plates vehicles sold through dealers that require a new plate.
  • Tennessee issues three number and four letter plates for the "In God We Trust" plate.
  • Indiana plates are randomly issued with combinations of 3 numbers and either 1, 2, or 3 letters, while all "In God We Trust" plates have 3 letters and 3 numbers.