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Massachusetts license plate: Standard spirit

Issued today 1993 to today. Standard plates for car and van, issued by Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles (RMV), a division of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation. One of 6 Massachusetts license plates.

Massachusetts (United States) license plate, Standard spirit (1993 to today), sample 7KTH 78
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Format, years and the law

Format
9LLL 99, for example 7KTH 78 (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
1993 to today. Still issued.
Vehicle class
Standard: the default series issued to private road vehicles. Issued for car and van.
Colours
Characters #C8102E Background #FFFFFF
Size
12 × 6 in (305 × 152 mm) · every country's size
About this plate
MASSACHUSETTS STANDARD ISSUE, "Spirit of America" base. PERIOD: 1993 is the reported year this base became the standard PASSENGER base; the base itself was first issued in 1987 for vanity and some non-passenger types, so 1987 and 1993 are both true of different things and the file says which. Both dates are secondary. Those are not given series of their own because they are the SAME design and the SAME period differing only by month-block, the month rule makes them one system, not several, and because no primary bounds them.
How numbers are issued
The final digit is the MONTH CODE, not a counter, so the sequence advances within a month-block. Reported blocks as of 25 May 2026 run from 1AAA 11 to at least 6ZZL 51 (January), 1AAA 12 to at least 6NZT 22 (February), and so on per expiry month.

Legal basis and sources

  1. M.G.L. c.90 §2: the statutory reflectorization duty delegated to the registrar; the SIX-character cap and no-duplication rule on distinctive initial (vanity) plates; the Cape and Islands statutory design. https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleXIV/Chapter90/Section2
  2. §6: display, the sixty-foot rear illumination rule https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleXIV/Chapter90/Section6
  3. en.wikipedia.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of_Massachusetts
  4. RMV Passenger Plates Booklet, July 2014, the RMV's OWN catalogue; used here for the plate-type inventory, not for serial grammar https://web.archive.org/web/20140704083521/http://www.massrmv.com/Portals/30/docs/manuals/passenger_plates_manual_pub...

Before and after

Massachusetts (United States) license plate, Standard green (1977 to 1993) It replaced Standard green 1977 to 1993

This plate in your app

The series id is us-ma-standard-spirit. The API returns its format, validation, colours and designs with the rest of Massachusetts's series:

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