VehiclesDB

South Africa license plate: ZN RA mark

Retired Documented 2000 to 2023. Standard plates for car, van, truck, bus, motorcycle, and trailer, issued by Department of Transport (national) and the MEC responsible for road traffic in each of the nine provinces. One of 20 South Africa license plates.

South Africa license plate, ZN RA mark (documented 2000 to 2023), sample NF 745330
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Format, years and the law

Format
NL 999999, for example NF 745330 (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
Documented 2000 to 2023; the format is likely older than the first year documented. No longer issued.
Vehicle class
Standard: the default series issued to private road vehicles. Issued for car, van, truck, bus, motorcycle, and trailer.
Colours
Characters #000000 Background #FFFFFF
Size
520 × 113 mm · every country's size
  • South Africa license plate, ZN RA mark 250×205 mm (documented 2000 to 2023)

    ZN RA mark 250×205 mm

    standard · 250 × 205 mm

  • South Africa license plate, ZN RA mark 250×165 mm (documented 2000 to 2023)

    ZN RA mark 250×165 mm

    standard · 250 × 165 mm

About this plate
KWAZULU-NATAL, registering-authority mark + up to six figures, CLOSED TO NEW ISSUE on 1 December 2023, when the province moved to the ZN suffix system. The end year is the government-announced phase-1 date and is the date NEW registrations stopped receiving these numbers; existing discrete numbers remain valid and on the road, and the province gave owners a 24-month voluntary-migration window from 1 March 2024.
How the region is encoded
Leading letters are the registering-authority mark and decode to the licensing town. Every KwaZulu-Natal mark located begins with N, inherited from the pre-1994 Natal allocation.

Legal basis and sources

  1. reg 27(2)(a)(i) + reg 27(3); reg 27(4) MEC may establish a new system https://disasterlaw.ifrc.org/sites/default/files/media/disaster_law/2021-06/%20ROAD%20TRAFFIC%20REGULATIONS,%202000.pdf
  2. sanews.gov.za https://www.sanews.gov.za/south-africa/new-provincial-number-plate-system-unveiled-kzn
  3. en.wikipedia.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of_South_Africa

Before and after

South Africa license plate, GP standard 2L2F2L (2023 to today) Replaced by GP standard 2L2F2L 2023 to today

This plate in your app

The series id is za-zn-ra-mark. The API returns its format, validation, colours and designs with the rest of South Africa's series:

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