Licence Plate Generator

Test data for anything that reads a vehicle registration needs plates in the right shape, and the shapes differ more than people expect: Spain leaves every vowel out so a plate can never spell a word, the UK drops I and Q because they read as 1 and O, and Germany lets the keeper choose the number so the length varies. This generates plates in nine real formats and then checks each one against that format's pattern and permitted letters before showing it.

What this generator does

Builds a plate to the chosen country's pattern, drawing only from the letters that format uses, then checks the finished plate against a regular expression for that pattern and confirms every letter in it is permitted.

How to use this tool

Choose a format.
Choose how many plates you need.
Generate, and read the note on what that country's format means.
Copy them into your fixtures.

Understanding the controls

Format: Nine formats. Each has its own pattern, its own excluded letters, and a note explaining what the parts mean.
How many: One to fifty at a time. Each is drawn independently, so a repeat is possible but very unlikely in a short run.

Common use cases

Seeding test data for a parking, tolling or fleet system
Checking that a form's validation accepts the formats it claims to
Filling a mock-up or a screenshot without using a real vehicle's plate
Showing how much national plate formats differ from one another
Producing plates that deliberately exercise the excluded letters

How this generator works

Each format carries the pattern it follows, the letters it excludes and a regular expression describing an acceptable plate. Generation draws from the permitted letters only; the check afterwards is against the expression, so a plate that slipped through with an excluded letter or a wrong grouping would be caught rather than shown. The UK age identifier is drawn as a real half-year pair — a number under fifty for March, over fifty for September — rather than as two arbitrary digits.

Randomness and fairness

Letters and digits are drawn with your browser's cryptographic random source. Nothing is seeded, so a plate cannot be reproduced.

For how randomness is produced across the whole site, see how Generate Random works.

Limitations and good to know

Nine formats, and none of them covers personalised, trade, diplomatic, military or historic plates, which follow separate rules everywhere.
United States formats vary by state and change over time; the two offered are common patterns rather than a national standard.
A generated plate could coincide with a real registration by chance. It is not checked against any register — no such register is public — so do not use one to identify a vehicle.
Formats change: the UK style dates from 2001, the French from 2009 and the Irish from 2013, and any of them could change again.
The country a format belongs to is described, not endorsed by, any issuing authority.

Privacy and your data

Plates are generated in your browser from built-in patterns. You enter nothing, nothing is uploaded or stored, and analytics records only that the tool ran and how many were made.