About Plate Atlas

Plate Atlas is a reference for vehicle registration plates around the world: what the letters and numbers mean, where a plate is from, and how plate systems have changed over time.

How search works

Every country's plate formats are stored as patterns. When you type a plate, your browser compares it with all known patterns and lists every country whose format fits. Formats often overlap, so you get ranked candidates with an explanation rather than a single answer. Specific, current car formats rank above special, historic or very broad ones.

Privacy

The search runs entirely in your browser. Plate numbers you type are never sent to a server and never stored. We do not offer owner or vehicle-history lookups. The only personal data we hold is what you choose to send with the “Report a problem” form (an optional email address).

Your settings (theme, language, map layers, quiz setup, plate maker country), your plate spotter list and your daily quiz streak are saved only in this browser, in its local storage. They are never sent anywhere. Until you pick a language, pages open in your browser’s language when we have it.

We use no cookies, ads or tracking.

Reset saved preferences

Coverage and data quality

The site lists 245 countries and territories, and 44 of them have plate formats so far. Each country page shows one of these statuses:

Verified40 countries

Checked against at least two independent sources.

Draft4 countries

Plate formats added from at least one source, not yet cross-checked.

Coming soon201 countries

Basic facts only. Plate formats have not been added yet.

Sources and licences

Country names, ISO codes and map positions come from mledoze/countries (Open Database License). International vehicle codes come from Wikidata (CC0). Plate formats and history are researched from the sources listed on each country page, including Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).

Languages

The site is available in English and Polish. Plate facts are the same in every language. Country names in Polish come from the Unicode CLDR data built into your browser and our build tools.

Territories and names

Countries and territories are listed by their ISO 3166 codes, plus Kosovo under its widely used code XK. Where control of a territory is disputed, country pages say so.