Vehicle registration plates of Bulgaria

Standard Bulgarian vehicle registration plates display black glyphs (alphanumeric characters) on a white background, together with – on the left-hand side of the plate – a blue vertical "EU strip" showing the flag of Europe (or, for older-registered cars, the flag of Bulgaria) and, below it, the country code for Bulgaria: BG.

The characters displayed in the main field of the plate are:

a one- or two-letter province code

four numerals

a final two-letter code, known as the "series".

The format is thus XX NNNN YY, where XX (or X) is the province code, NNNN is the serial number, and YY is the series. Since 1992, only glyphs that are common to both the Cyrillic and the Latin alphabets have been used on Bulgarian plates.

Format

Letters

Only 12 letters are used. In Bulgarian order, these are: А, В, Е, К, М, Н, О, Р, С, Т, У, Х. One of these letters, i.e., У (which is the Bulgarian letter for the sound u) does not coincide fully with the Latin capital letter Y. However, for the purpose of registration it is accepted as being the same (the Bulgarian letter У does not originate directly from the Greek or Latin Y). All of these are used as part of the province codes (i.e., on the left). Only nine letters are used in the series (i.e., on the right), of which "А" is the only vowel. The three that are not used in the series, (all vowels) are Е, reserved exclusively for trailers and caravans (e.g., СА 1234 ЕЕ), О and У. Since 2022, the letter E is used in the series of cars in Sofia, (e.g., CB 1234 TE). In 2024, the letter E started being used as a regular last letter in the series. In Sofia, the AE series was introduced after CB 9999 XT (e.g., CB 1234 AE).