Portugal license plate: National 2020

Format, years and the law

Format

LL 99 LL, for example JY 11 DL (L is any letter, 9 any digit)

AA-00-AA says nothing about where, no Portuguese car number ever has, but plenty about when: each era moved the letters, so AA-00-00 is pre-1992, 00-00-AA is 1992-2005, 00-AA-00 is 2005-2020, and letters at both ends can only be 2020 onward.

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

Years issued

2020 to today. Still issued.

Vehicle class

Standard: the default series issued to private road vehicles. Issued for car, van, truck, bus, motorcycle, moped, tricycle, and quadricycle.

Colours

Characters #000000 Background #FFFFFF

Size

520 × 110 mm · every country's size

• 

  National 2020 340×220 mm

  standard · 340 × 220 mm

About this plate

THE CURRENT PORTUGUESE SERIES. Two independent secondaries agree on March 2020, Wikipedia gives 3 March 2020 with the first number AA-01-AA, and the Portuguese motoring press on 15-01-2020 expected exhaustion at the end of February. Old plates stay on the road: DL 2/2020's own preamble provides that existing plates "podem manter-se em uso, sem necessidade de substituição", optionally replaceable at the owner's choice, and Regulamento art. 5.º n.º 12 says the same in enacting terms.

How numbers are issued

Nationally sequential and non-geographic, like every Portuguese series since 1937.

Separators

THE DASHES ARE GONE, and the deletion is legible in two independent places in the same instrument. (1) TEXT: DL 54/2005's art. 3.º n.º 1 and n.º 3 both ended "sendo os grupos separados entre si por traços"; when DL 2/2020 rewrote n.º 3 as the new n.º 4 it reproduced the composition and DROPPED that clause. (2) DRAWING: the Anexo V Modelo I dimension chain prescribes only spacing, 10 mm between characters inside a group and 20 mm between groups, and draws no separator glyph, where the Anexo IV Modelo I drawing it replaces plainly draws one. SETTLED 2026-08-03: it did. Commons "2020 Portugal license plate example.jpg" (CC BY-SA 4.0) photographs issued AE 36 EM, no separator glyph anywhere, tight intra-group spacing, a small clear gap between the pairs whose measured proportion (~0.19 of the character em) matches the Anexo V 20 mm chain. Independently reported by the project owner from plates in the wild the same day. The statutory reading holds; the printed form is the GAP, full stop. Evidence: statutory + photographic-observed.

Legal basis and sources

1. THE ENABLING INSTRUMENT: Regulamento art. 3.º n.º 3 as originally enacted, 'dois grupos de duas letras e um grupo central de dois algarismos', triggered by exhaustion of the 00-AA-00 series. DL 54/2005, DR I-A n.º 44,... https://files.diariodarepublica.pt/1s/2005/03/044a00/18921897.pdf
2. DL 2/2020 (DR 1.ª série n.º 9, 14-01-2020): art. 3.º renumbers that rule as art. 3.º n.º 4 and drops the 'traços' clause; art. 4.º adds ANEXO V (the models drawn for this format); art. 5.º n.º 1 d) maps this window to... https://files.diariodarepublica.pt/1s/2020/01/00900/0000400012.pdf
3. en.wikipedia.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of_Portugal
4. contemporaneous Portuguese motoring press, 15-01-2020: reports the preceding series as due to run out 'at the end of next February', i.e. a March 2020 start, independent of Wikipedia and consistent with it https://www.motojornal.pt/diploma-que-regula-as-matriculas-foi-publicado/

Before and after

It replaced National 2005 2005 to 2020