Alabama · sequential passenger map
Alabama license-plate format
Alabama’s current passenger serial is a leading county-class digit, two letters and four digits. In this atlas the pattern string uses A for a letter slot and 9 for a digit slot. Other characters are separators that appear on the metal but do not enlarge the combination space.
- Pattern
- 9AA9999
- Classes
- 2 letters + 5 digits
- Alphabet size
- 26
- Skipped letters
- none modelled
- Combination count
- 67,600,000
- Model year
- 2013
How the map works
Each A slot independently takes one glyph from ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ. Each 9 slot takes 0–9. The product of those bases is 67,600,000 — the size of the sequential space taught here. Hyphens, spaces and dots in 9AA9999 are display only.
Alabama spent decades on county-coded plates. The 2013 “Heart of Dixie” passenger serial settled on a seven-character string that still encodes a class digit up front. Specialty and Heart of Dixie variants keep the same character budget even when the graphic changes.
Before this map, Alabama used 00A1A11 county-coded serials. Optional graphics (universities, military, environmental) can look nothing like the sequential passenger die and are not counted in the 67,600,000 figure.
The leading digit is not a check digit; it is a series marker. I and O appear less often on older dies but are not banned in this atlas.
Generated versus issued
A string that fits 9AA9999 is in-class. It is not automatically an issued plate. Series can skip blocks, retire numbers, or reserve low digits. This essay never queries a motor-vehicle file. See also generated vs issued.