Which drivers buy private number plates?

Everyone assumes a private plate is a prestige thing, something you see on a Bentley outside a hotel. The data tells a sharper story. When you divide each car's share of plate purchases by its share of the cars actually on the road, what rises to the top is not a price bracket. It is a body shape.

These figures come from every registration DVLA sold in 2025 that we could match to a specific vehicle. They are recalculated every night, so the tables below are live, not a snapshot from a report.

Both years are matched to roughly the same share of cars, so they compare directly. Over the year, the supercar tier pulled away from the field. The brands that already personalised the most did so even more, while the mainstream stayed put.

The stable middle makes the movement legible. Land Rover barely shifted, 2.27x to 2.30x, and BMW barely shifted, 1.97x to 1.99x. Against that flat baseline, the climbers stand out.

Line the sales up by how old the car was when the plate went on, and the picture is lopsided. 34,664 plates went on cars in their first year, just over double the number that went on one-year-old cars, and the single biggest group by some margin. If a plate is going to happen, it tends to happen early, often as part of taking delivery.

There is a small dip at one and two years before volume climbs again through the middle of a car's life, which is roughly when cars change hands. A new owner is another moment to make the car feel like theirs.

Plates on new and nearly-new cars cost the most too, a little over £504 on average, and the figure falls steadily as the car ages. The plate and the newness of the car move together.

Split by fuel, the differences are smaller than by car type but they are real. Electric and diesel drivers personalise slightly above the national average, while petrol and hybrid sit a fraction below. The bars show each fuel relative to the average line at 1.0x.

Figures cover 382,198 private plate sales in 2025 where we could match the registration to a vehicle, which is 73% of all sales that year. The remainder are plates held on retention certificates and never assigned to a car, which is normal and discussed on our prices page.

Likelihood multipliers divide a make or model's share of plate purchases by its share of vehicles licensed on UK roads, using DfT vehicle licensing statistics. A figure above 1x means drivers of that vehicle buy plates at a higher rate than the UK average. Multipliers are calculated from raw vehicle counts rather than rounded percentages, and makes or models with fewer than 50 plates or 5,000 licensed vehicles are excluded as too small to measure reliably.

An earlier version of this research, published in March 2026, calculated multipliers from parc shares rounded to two decimal places. That understated several small manufacturers and excluded some entirely. The figures on this page supersede it.

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