New York · sequential passenger map
New York license-plate format
New York passenger plates use three letters, a hyphen, and four digits — the same skeleton as Texas. 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
- AAA-9999
- Classes
- 3 letters + 4 digits
- Alphabet size
- 26
- Skipped letters
- none modelled
- Combination count
- 175,760,000
- Model year
- 2010
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 175,760,000 — the size of the sequential space taught here. Hyphens, spaces and dots in AAA-9999 are display only.
New York’s Empire State plates standardised on ABC-1234 for sequential passenger issues in the 2010s after gold-and-blue experiments. Vanity plates remain a separate, heavily used channel.
Before this map, New York used ABC-1234 Empire Gold and earlier ABC 123. Optional graphics (universities, military, environmental) can look nothing like the sequential passenger die and are not counted in the 175,760,000 figure.
SPR-9932 is in-class. This atlas never treats that as a DMV registration lookup.
Generated versus issued
A string that fits AAA-9999 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.