Croatia license plate: Standard 2016

Format, years and the law

Format

LL 9999-LL, for example LR 9412-NS (L is any letter, 9 any digit)

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

Years issued

2016 to today. Still issued.

Vehicle class

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

Colours

Characters #000000 Background #FFFFFF

Size

520 × 110 mm · every country's size

• 

  Standard 2016 280×200 mm

  standard · 280 × 200 mm

About this plate

THE CURRENT CROATIAN PLATE, and the file's headline finding is its START DATE. Not 2013 (accession), not 13 May 2016 (the gazette date of the amending pravilnik), but 4 JULY 2016, because NN 45/2016 čl. 10 says so in terms. The serial grammar it carries is the 1993 one, unchanged; what 2016 changed is the band on the left and, in the same instrument, the rule that used to hand the plates back on every sale. Old plates were NOT recalled, NN 45/2016 čl. 8 says the owner "nije dužan mijenjati registarske pločice izdane na obrascima koji su vrijedili do stupanja na snagu ovoga Pravilnika", so band-less plates remain legal indefinitely and the two standard series overlap in the wild by design. One further reversal is worth recording: NN 45/2016 čl. 7 ordered that a worn plate be replaced with a NEW mark, and NN 130/2017 čl. 25 st. 3 undid that, restoring the SAME mark with the band added.

How the region is encoded

THE PREFIX IS THE DECODE, AND ITS BINDING IS FROZEN AT ISSUE. Čl. 5 st. 1 NN 130/2017 registers a vehicle at a station "prema registracijskom području u kojem vlasnik vozila ima prebivalište, boravište, privremeni ili stalni boravak ili sjedište", and st. 2 lets a station OUTSIDE that area do the work while still issuing the owner's own area code. Since 2016-07-04 the mark is not surrendered on a sale (čl. 48 st. 1), so it records the area of the owner AT ISSUE and of nobody since. Čl. 25 st. 1 still re-issues on a move to another area. A parse API must report "area at issue", never "current owner's area".

How numbers are issued

NOT PUBLISHED. Čl. 18 st. 2 fixes the shape (three or four digits, one or two letters) and nothing in the pravilnik says how the space is walked, so a Croatian plate CANNOT be dated from its serial by anything in this file. The only serial-borne era signal is the WIDTH: a three-digit/one-letter mark is an early allocation in its area and a four-digit/two-letter mark a late one, which is an ordering, not a date.

Separators

Two positions, and they are different in kind. The gap after the area code holds the ŠAHOVNICA and is written as an optional emitted space. The gap between digits and letters is a printed hyphen, certain from Obrazac 3 but not spelled in čl.

Legal basis and sources

1. NN 45/2016 čl. 2 (the band added to čl. 13 st. 1) and čl. 10 ('stupa na snagu 4. srpnja 2016. godine'), the period start, dated to the day by the instrument itself https://narodne-novine.nn.hr/clanci/sluzbeni/2016_05_45_1165.html
2. NN 130/2017 čl. 18 (plate, format, colours), čl. 19 (script), čl. 20 (the oval), čl. 25 (re-issue), čl. 48 (change of owner), čl. 52 + Prilog 1 (area codes) https://narodne-novine.nn.hr/clanci/sluzbeni/2017_12_130_2993.html
3. en.wikipedia.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of_Croatia

Before and after

It replaced Standard 1993 1993 to 2016