Switzerland license plate: Standard

Format, years and the law

Format

LL 999999, for example ZH 738216 (L is any letter, 9 any digit)

The two letters are the canton, ZH Zürich, BE Bern, and the number belongs to the keeper, not the car, moving with them from vehicle to vehicle. That is why low numbers sell: ZH 24 went for 299,000 francs at auction in 2024.

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

Years issued

Documented since 1977; the format is likely older than the first year documented. Still issued.

Vehicle class

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

Colours

Characters #000000 Background #FFFFFF

Size

300 × 80 mm · every country's size

• 

  Standard 300×160 mm

  standard · 300 × 160 mm

• 

  Standard 500×110 mm

  standard · 500 × 110 mm

About this plate

What the consolidated ordinance does date is the surrounding regime: Art. 83 Abs. 1-2 and Art. 85 Abs. 2's long-format layout sentence take their present wording from the amendment of 15 April 1987, in force 1 May 1987 (AS 1987 628), and the same amendment INSERTED Art. 87a (cantons must make retroreflective plates available) and restated Art. 151 Abs. 5 ("Kontrollschilder früherer Formate sind zu ersetzen, wenn die zuständige Behörde den Fahrzeughalter dazu auffordert"). So 1 May 1987 is a real design boundary, before it there was no reflective-plate duty at all, but the pre-1987 TEXT was not retrievable (fedlex publishes no machine- readable consolidation before 2000 and the AS 1987 628 scan was unreachable), so no pre-1987 design is described here and no separate pre-1987 series is invented. FORMAT STABILITY, stated plainly: unlike NL sidecodes or the Spanish 2000 cutover, the Swiss STRING has not changed shape since at least 1977, so a Swiss plate carries no era signal at all.

How the region is encoded

The two letters are the canton of the keeper's Standort, "der Ort, wo das Fahrzeug nach Gebrauch in der Regel für die Nacht abgestellt wird" (VZV Art. 77 Abs. 1), with the keeper's domicile deemed the Standort in the three cases of Art. 77 Abs. 2. Closed 26-row table, primary, in Art. 84 Abs. 1 itself. Because the plate binds to the keeper, the code decodes the KEEPER's canton and not the vehicle's location or origin.

How numbers are issued

Art. 84 Abs. 2: numbering starts at 1 per canton, per background colour, per special marking, and separately for the motorcar/single-axle/trailer family. Consequence for era inference: a Swiss plate encodes NO date whatsoever, only the keeper's canton, and a low number means an early allocation only within one canton's one colour, never nationally.

Separators

Printed as "ein Punkt auf halber Höhe" (Art. 85 Abs. 1) on the front and long-format plates, and as a LINE BREAK on the Hochformat rear plate. See structural fact 6.

Legal basis and sources

1. VZV Art. 82 Abs. 1 lit. a (white ground, black script, for Motorwagen etc.); Art. 83 Abs. 1-3 (metal, 1.5 mm embossing, the four formats, 10 mm corner radius); Art. 84 Abs. 1-2 (the 26 canton codes; numbering per... https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/1976/2423_2423_2423/de
2. VTS Art. 96 (front and rear on Motorwagen); Art. 45 Abs. 2 (placement geometry) https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/1995/4425_4425_4425/de