Vehicle registration plates of Singapore

Vehicle registration plates in Singapore are administered by the Land Transport Authority.

In general, every motor vehicle in Singapore has a vehicle registration number. Two colour schemes are in use: the black-on-white (front of the vehicle) and black-on-yellow (rear) scheme, or the popular albeit older white-on-black scheme. The number plate has to be made of a reflective plastic or metallic with textured characters which are black (for white-yellow), or white or silver (for black ones). Although no standardised typeface is used, all typefaces are based on the Charles Wright number plate typeface that was and is still used in the UK. Thinner-looking variants are commonly used by SBS Transit buses, taxis and goods vehicles. Rarely, the FE-Schrift font used in Germany can be seen – though the use of this font is prohibited by the Land Transport Authority (LTA).

A typical vehicle registration number comes in the format "SBA 1234 A":

Private car licence plate numbers began in the early 1900s when Singapore was one of the four Straits Settlements, with a single prefix S for denoting Singapore, then adding a suffix letter S 'B' to S 'Y' for cars, but skipping a few like S 'A' (reserved for motorcycles), S 'H' and S 'Z' (reserved for taxis and buses), S 'D' (reserved for municipal vehicles), and S 'G' for goods vehicles large and small. No changes were made when Singapore became independent in 1965. There was no checksum letter, for example, SS1234, similar to vehicle registration plates of Malaysia. When the checksum letter was implemented, these plate numbers were given checksum letters as well, for example SS1234 became SS1234K.

When 'S' was exhausted at SY, in January 1972, private cars started with E and Land Transport Authority begin to create separate vehicle categories according type of vehicles which previously all vehicles in Singapore must bear prefix S due to previous standardization with Peninsular Malaysia according to geographical location (A is for Perak, B is for Selangor, S is for Singapore/Sabah), motorbikes with A and goods vehicles under 3 tonnes with Y. E was followed by EA, EB with the letters EC in 1973 up to EZ. E was chosen then as letters A-D were already in used by other states in Malaysia. From 1984, the "S" series of number plates was launched again after EZ, but now with two serial suffix letters, starting from SBA. The current prefix being issued is SLP.

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