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Sales of personalised number plates have more than doubled over the past decade, figures obtained by the BBC suggest. More than 1.2 million transactions took place in 2024, up from about 500,000 in 2014, according to data from the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA).
The value of private number plates depends on the popularity of the combination of numbers and letters. The DVLA raised £276m for the government from personalised registrations in the last financial year.
Rob Nicholls from Exeter has a number plate featuring his initials on his BMW, and recently bought another two plates he did not use, instead selling them on for a profit. “They do seem to be increasingly popular,” he told BBC Radio 4’s You and Yours programme.
Another growth area is among young people, thinks Noor Dar. The 17-year-old from Manchester enjoys deciphering the messages behind plates – phrases like YOU 105T are popular – and peruses Facebook groups where different combinations are shared. “It’s all about image,” he says.
Personalised number plates that have never been used before can be bought directly from the DVLA via its website or online auctions. The number of plates being put on a car for the first time has nearly doubled since 2014 to just under 450,000, according to the figures obtained by the BBC via a Freedom of Information request.
Mark Reynolds, sales manager at Plate Hunter, one of several private dealers, says he sold the number plate KS1 just before Christmas for £285,000 to an anonymous buyer with the same initials. “I think once upon a time there was an element of pretentiousness to number plates, which I think is gone, because you can pick up a number plate as cheap as £25 right up to hundreds of thousands,” he says.
Neal Bircher, who describes himself as a “number plates nerd”, has been collecting them his entire adult life and is in the process of writing a book on the subject. As well as a current collection of about 220, most of which are for sale, Neal has plates representing his first and second names, as well GL05 for Gloucestershire, the county where he was born.
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