Vanity plates

A vanity plate or personalized plate (United States); prestige plate, private number plate, cherished plate or personalised registration (United Kingdom); personalised plate (Australia, New Zealand and United Kingdom), custom plate (Australia and New Zealand) or request plate (Czech Republic) is a special type of vehicle registration plate on an automobile or other vehicle. The owner of the vehicle pays extra money to have their own choice of numbers or letters, usually portrays a recognizable phrase, slogan, or abbreviation on their plate. Sales of vanity plates are often a significant source of revenue for North American provincial and state licensing agencies. In some jurisdictions, such as the Canadian province of British Columbia, vanity plates have a different color scheme and design.

Vanity plates are issued by every state and the District of Columbia, and every province, except for Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador. Quebec was scheduled to start offering vanity plates in 2015, leaving Newfoundland and Labrador as the only North American jurisdiction with no vanity plates. However, Quebec was not able to start offering vanity plates, reportedly because of computer issues.

In 2007, the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) and Stefan Lonce, author of License to Roam: Vanity License Plates and the Stories They Tell, conducted North America's first state by state and province by province survey of vanity plates, revealing that there are 9.7 million vehicles with personalized vanity license plates. The survey ranked jurisdictions by "vanity plate penetration rate", which is the percentage of registered motor vehicles that are vanitized.

Virginia has the highest U.S. vanity plate penetration rate (16.19%), followed by New Hampshire (13.99%), Illinois (13.41%), Nevada (12.73%), Montana (9.8%), Maine (9.7%), Connecticut (8.14%), New Jersey (6.8%), North Dakota (6.5%) and Vermont (6.1%). Texas had the lowest vanity plate penetration rate (0.5%). According to the Federal Highway Administration, in 2005 there were 242,991,747 privately owned and commercial registered automobiles, trucks, and motorcycles in the U.S., and 3.83% of eligible U.S. vehicles have vanity plates.

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