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Malta license plate: Standard 2004

Issued today 2004 to today. Standard plates for car, van, truck, and motorcycle, issued by Transport Malta / Authority for Transport in Malta. One of 13 Malta license plates.

Malta license plate, Standard 2004 (2004 to today), sample WIQ 397
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Format, years and the law

Format
LLL 999, for example WIQ 397 (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
2004 to today. Still issued.
Vehicle class
Standard: the default series issued to private road vehicles. Issued for car, van, truck, and motorcycle.
Colours
Characters #000000 Background #FFFFFF
Typeface
not named by any instrument; Malta is widely said to mandate FE-Schrift. Unlike Cyprus, which at least publishes drawn specimens, Malta publishes neither a name nor a dimensioned drawing. The letterforms are therefore, on the face of the law, unconstrained. · license plate fonts
About this plate
THE CURRENT MALTESE SERIES. PERIOD START 9 MARCH 2004, the commencement of L.N. 114 of 2004, which is the first instrument ever to prescribe a plate FORMAT in Malta. NOTHING IN THE STRING DATES A MALTESE PLATE: allocation is expressly random.
Region code notes
NONE IN AN ORDINARY MARK, a sourced negative.
How numbers are issued
RANDOM, and the instrument says so in the format's own name, "Standard Alphanumeric Format (RANDOM)". There is no sequential progression to infer an era from, which makes a Maltese standard mark undatable from the string alone.
Separators
No separator glyph is prescribed. The First Schedule's own example is written "XXX 111" with a gap and the Second Schedule requires "a watermark in the space between the letters and the numbers", so the gap is a real, specified feature of the plate that is occupied by a security watermark, not merely typographic whitespace. The emitted SPACE is the correct encoding, and it is the same situation as the Italian marchio and the German Plaketten: something sits IN the gap, and it is not part of the serial.

Legal basis and sources

  1. S.L. 368.02, consolidated to 23-01-2026 (PDF: https://legislation.mt/getpdf/6980741263aaee247463a137): reg. 30 + First Schedule (the Standard Alphanumeric Format and the renewal-month rule); reg. 31 (letter blocks);... https://legislation.mt/eli/sl/368.2/eng
  2. L.N. 114 of 2004, Vehicles Identification Plates Regulations, THE PERIOD START: 'These regulations shall come into force on the 9th March 2004', and the First Schedule's first published statement of the... https://legislation.mt/eli/ln/2004/114/eng
  3. L.N. 476 of 2004, in force 1-5-2004: introduced the EU band in its Second Schedule and revoked L.N. 114 of 2004; reg. 52 also deleted the plate rules from the 1994 Motor Vehicles Regulations https://legislation.mt/eli/ln/2004/476/eng
  4. L.N. 198 of 2009: 'deemed to have come into force on the 1st January, 2009 save for sub-regulation (3) of regulation 6 which shall come into force on the 1st August, 2009'; reg. 45 revoked L.N. 476 of 2004. Carried... https://legislation.mt/eli/ln/2009/198/eng
  5. Cap. 368, Motor Vehicles Registration and Licensing Act (Act X of 1994, in force 1-1-1994): art. 20 the regulation-making power https://legislation.mt/eli/cap/368/eng
  6. en.wikipedia.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of_Malta

Before and after

Malta license plate, Standard 1995 (1995 to 2004) It replaced Standard 1995 1995 to 2004

This plate in your app

The series id is mt-standard-2004. The API returns its format, validation, colours and designs with the rest of Malta's series:

curl -s https://vehiclesdb.com/api/v1/plates/mt \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VEHICLESDB_API_KEY" \
  | jq '.series[] | select(.id == "mt-standard-2004")'
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