Brazil license plate: Mercosur standard

Format, years and the law

Format

LLL9L99, for example BRA2E19 (L is any letter, 9 any digit)

Since December 2018 the seven characters say nothing at all: allocation is national and the plate shows no geography, a deliberate break after three decades of state-coded letters. The one fixed rule of the grammar: the last character must be a numeral.

The format above follows the issuing rules: a registration that fits it is one this series could have issued.

Years issued

2018 to today. Still issued.

Vehicle class

Standard: the default series issued to private road vehicles. Issued for car, van, truck, bus, trailer, and semitrailer.

Colours

Characters #000000 Background #FFFFFF

Size

400 × 130 mm · every country's size

About this plate

729/2018 art. 8 § 3 ("até 1º de setembro de 2018"), and the year the first states issued it: the per-state cronograma of Res. 748/2018 art. 2 gave Rio de Janeiro until 3 December 2018 and every other state until 31 December 2018, which is the primary evidence for the widely repeated "Rio de Janeiro first, 2018" claim. The deadline then moved twice (30 June 2019 by Res. 770/2018; 31 January 2020 by Res. THE ARRANGEMENT LLLNLNN WAS FIRST SPELLED BY RES. CONTRAN 741/2018 (17 September 2018), Anexo III item 1, verbatim: "A placa MERCOSUL terá a seguinte disposição: LLLNLNN, onde L é letra e N é número", with item 2 naming the old shape in the same breath, "os demais DETRANs continuarão a emplacar no padrão pré-Mercosul, ou seja, LLLNNNN". (PASS-2 CORRECTION: an earlier draft of this file credited Res. 780/2019 with the first appearance of LLLNLNN. It is 741/2018, ten months earlier, and the difference matters because 741/2018 also carries the A-J rule, see the file header, fact 2.) Before September 2018 the instruments were genuinely looser: Res. 510/2014 required only seven characters and Res. 729/2018 art. 1 § 3 III added only "com o último caractere obrigatoriamente numeral", which is why the 2014-2018 pre-production samples in circulation show other shapes and why no series in this file claims a pre-2018 Mercosul format for Brazil.

How numbers are issued

"combinação aleatória, distribuída e controlada pelo órgão máximo executivo de trânsito da União" (Anexo I 1.2). There is no published allocation order and no geographic block: a Brazilian PIV combination carries no state, city or date information of its own. The only inference the combination supports is the fifth-character one.

Legal basis and sources

1. Anexo I 1.1, 1.2 (LLLNLNN), 2.1 Tabela I (400x130), 2.3 (white ground, Pantone 286 band), 2.4 (FE Engschrift 65 mm), 3.1-3.5 (security elements) https://www.gov.br/transportes/pt-br/assuntos/transito/conteudo-contran/resolucoes/resolucao9692022anexos.pdf
2. arts. 2 (front+rear, rear-only categories), 3 (QR Code replaces the lacre), 56 (when the PIV is required) https://www.in.gov.br/en/web/dou/-/resolucao-contran-n-969-de-20-de-junho-de-2022-410033795
3. in.gov.br https://www.in.gov.br/en/web/dou/-/resolucao-n-729-de-6-de-marco-de-2018-5755402
4. Res. CONTRAN 741/2018 of 17-09-2018, Anexo III item 1, the FIRST instrument to spell LLLNLNN (pass-2 correction; an earlier draft credited Res. 780/2019) https://www.gov.br/transportes/pt-br/assuntos/transito/conteudo-contran/resolucoes/resolucao7412018.pdf
5. Res. 780/2019 Anexo I 1.2, which re-enacts LLLNLNN unchanged; art. 21 (31 January 2020 deadline) https://www.in.gov.br/en/web/dou/-/resolucao-n-780-de-26-de-junho-de-2019-179414765