---
id: "de_vehicle_plate"
kind: "datatype"
status: "draft"
is_pii: false
categories: ["transport"]
country: ["DE"]
langs: ["common"]
quality: 100
url: "http://registry.apicrafter.io/datatype/de_vehicle_plate"
---

# German vehicle registration plate (Kfz-Kennzeichen) (`de_vehicle_plate`)

> **Draft.** Draft records have not been reviewed yet and may be incomplete or wrong; do not treat them as authoritative for legal or compliance decisions.

Registration number of a vehicle in Germany as shown on the plate. It has a distinguishing sign of one to three capital letters for the registration district (umlauts possible), such as B (Berlin) or M (München), then an identification number of one or two letters (no umlauts) and one to four digits without a leading zero, at most eight characters in all. E marks electric vehicles and H historic vehicles. The euro plates, the only ones issued since November 2000, dropped the hyphen after the district sign, but it is still common in data. Official, military, diplomatic, seasonal and red dealer plates follow other rules and are not covered.

- Personal data (PII): no
- Categories: Transportation (transport)
- Countries: Germany (DE)
- Languages: Common to most languages (common)
- Classification: identifier

## Detection

Regular expression (Python `re`):

```
^[A-ZÄÖÜ]{1,3}[- ]?[A-Z]{1,2} ?[1-9]\d{0,3}[EH]?$
```

## Examples

- `AB CD 123H` — Format example of a historic vehicle plate from German Wikipedia
- `M-XY 1234` — Synthetic plate of München written with a hyphen
- `B-AB 0123` (invalid example) — The number never starts with 0
- `M-ÄB 123` (invalid example) — The letters of the identification number have no umlauts

## Mappings

- presidio: `DE_KFZ`

## Metacrafter rules

2 rules: 1 match the field name, 1 match values.

- `devehicleplatefield` (field, `de/de_transport.yaml`)
- `devehicleplatevalue` (data, `de/de_transport.yaml`)

## Supported by tools

- `ibmknowledgecatalog`
- `metacrafter`
- `presidio`

## Translations

- de: Kfz-Kennzeichen
- ru: Номерной знак транспортного средства Германии: Регистрационный номер автомобиля в Германии - от одной до трёх букв района регистрации, одна-две буквы и от одной до четырёх цифр (не более восьми символов), E для электромобилей и H для исторических.

## Sources

- wikipedia: <https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kfz-Kennzeichen_(Deutschland)>
- wikipedia: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of_Germany>

## Quality

Score 100/100.

JSON: <http://registry.apicrafter.io/api/v1/datatypes/de_vehicle_plate.json> · Edit: <https://github.com/apicrafter/metacrafter-registry/edit/main/data/datatypes/DE/transport/de_vehicle_plate.yaml>