Personalised number plate sales have doubled in 10 years
Fri, 07 Feb 2025
Personalised number plate sales have doubled in a decade, new figures from the DVLA have revealed.
The BBC research showed that 1.2 million number plate transactions took place in 2024 alone.
That’s up from around 500,000 in 2014. This saw the DVLA raise £276 million for the government in the last financial year.
Experts say personalised number plates are increasingly being bought as an investment. Sometimes they are never even used on a car.
The DVLA says it has a bank of more than 60 million registrations.
It admits it has a team that analyses market trends “to identify lucrative registrations that it can release to make the most money”.
Personalised number plates are also sold by third-party dealers, traded at auctions, and even sold on Facebook or eBay.
It is the market for previously-used plates that has seen the biggest increase, with transactions tripling in a decade to around 800,000.
The BBC spoke to Neal Bircher, a self-confessed “number plates nerd”. He has been a collector for decades and currently has a collection of around 220 number plates, most of which are for sale.
He observes the DVLA has gone from seeing personalised plates as an inconvenience to, in the 1990s, choosing to engage with the trade and make its vast pool of unused registrations available to the public.
He adds that it’s not as easy as some think to make money from number plates. “I’ve seen many examples of people thinking ‘gosh, this is easy’ and then by a hoard of plates… maybe they’re not all saleable.”
Bircher is now writing a book on the subject.
