How much do private number plates actually cost?

54% of private plates sold go for under £300. 88% sell for £500 or less.

98% sell for under £1,000.

Plates selling for more than £20,000 exist. We track them on our most expensive number plates page. There have been 105 of them, out of 1,231,835 sales, which is roughly one in every 11,732.

If you are here because you want a plate rather than because you want to read about a Lamborghini, the number you need is the first one.

Prices cluster hard at the bottom. More than half of everything on the fixed-price list goes for under £300, and the market thins out fast above it. These are fixed-price sales only, the plates most people buy.

Follow the length rule to its end and you arrive at the plates with one letter. 280 of them have been auctioned, and they average £12,859.

O is the most wanted, at £43,864. But the striking thing is the floor rather than the ceiling. Every letter of the alphabet with enough sales to measure averages over £7,849. There is no cheap letter.

Of all the dateless plate formats sold through DVLA, exactly 1 appears on the fixed-price list. Everything below is auction-only. You cannot buy these at any price DVLA publishes, because DVLA does not publish one.

Letters-first dateless plates, the ones that read ABC 123 rather than 123 ABC, are also absent from the list entirely. At auction they average £2,226 against £4,093 for numbers-first plates, which is a useful thing to know before you bid on one.

If you want a plate with your initials or a name on it, and you are not fussy about the format, you are looking at under £300 in most cases. That is what most people pay, and there is nothing second-rate about it.

If you want something short, or dateless, or a specific letter combination, you are going to the auction room, and the length rule decides the rest.

Figures come from two sources. Fixed-price data is drawn from monitoring DVLA's published stock, covering 1,204,192 plates withdrawn from sale since January 2024, which is consistent with a purchase. Auction figures come from DVLA's published timed online auction results, covering 27,643 sold lots.

Auction prices are hammer prices. Fixed prices are DVLA's list prices. Both include VAT and the assignment fee. A plate that is withdrawn and later relisted is excluded from the sales count.

Fixed-price averages reflect DVLA's own pricing tiers rather than market value. Where this page makes a claim about what a plate is worth, that claim comes from auction data, where a price is set by bidding.

Updated nightly. Free to cite with a link. Data cuts available to journalists on request.

Prices on this page are DVLA's own, taken from its published stock listings and auction results. Retailers, Yellowhite included, sell at a small margin over the list price to cover the search, the paperwork and the transfer. Every price on our site is the price you pay, with nothing added at the checkout.