7 Number Plate Mistakes We See Every Single Week

Plate Legality · 5 August 2026 · 7 min read

After thousands of orders, the same handful of mistakes keep coming up. Here's what they are and how to avoid wasting money on plates you can't legally use.

The Same Mistakes, Over and Over

We make a lot of plates. And after a while you start noticing patterns — the same handful of misunderstandings coming up week after week, usually costing somebody either money or an MOT pass. None of them are stupid mistakes. Most of them come from bad information floating around online.

So here they are, in roughly the order we see them.

1. Spacing the Registration "How It Looks Best"

This is the big one. Somebody has AB12 CDE and decides it reads nicer as AB 12CDE, or squeezes the gap to make a word out of it.

The spacing on a UK plate isn't a style choice. It's fixed:

• 11mm between characters within a group
• 33mm between the two groups
• No other gaps, anywhere

Misrepresenting your registration by respacing it is an offence. You're looking at a £1,000 fine, an automatic MOT failure, and the DVLA can withdraw a personalised registration entirely. We've seen people lose plates they paid four figures for over a 20mm gap.

Our builder handles this for you on road legal plates — you type your reg, we space it correctly. Full detail in our spacing rules guide.

2. Assuming Tinted Plates Are "Probably Fine"

They're not, and it doesn't matter how many you see on the road. Characters must be solid black on a reflective white front and yellow rear. Smoked, carbon-effect, coloured or shaded characters are all illegal on a road-going vehicle.

The confusion comes from the fact that they're perfectly legal to sell and perfectly legal to display — at a show, on a stand, on a car that never touches a public road. That's what show plates are for. Put them on your daily driver and you're the one taking the risk.

More on this in are tinted number plates legal.

3. Buying Plates Nobody Asked Documents For

If you bought "road legal" plates online and nobody asked for a V5C or a driving licence, you did not buy road legal plates. You bought show plates with a legal-looking font.

Every DVLA-registered supplier has to verify identity and entitlement. There's no clever workaround, no premium tier that skips it, no "we trust you". We ask because we're required to, same as everyone else who's registered.

4. Ordering a Short Plate Without Measuring the Recess

Short plates look brilliant. They also don't fit everything. The two things worth checking before you order:

• Width — measure your recess or bumper mount, don't guess from photos
• Height — short plates and hex plates are usually shorter than 109mm, which means standard plastic plate clips won't fit unless we make them to 109mm tall

That second point catches people out constantly. If you're using clips rather than pads or screws, tell us and we'll size accordingly.

5. Drilling Screw Holes Through 3D Gel or 4D Characters

Please don't. Drilling through a raised gel or acrylic character will crack it, and there's no fixing it afterwards — it's a remake.

If you need screws, they go through the flat printed area of the plate, well clear of any raised character. If your car's mounting points fall where characters sit, use adhesive pads instead. Our fitting guide covers both methods properly.

6. Pressure Washing Gel Plates

A pressure washer held six inches from a gel character will eventually lift it. Same goes for aggressive polishes, solvent-based wheel cleaners and anything abrasive.

Warm soapy water and a microfibre cloth. That's genuinely it. Ten seconds per plate, and they'll still look right in three years. See how to clean number plates.

7. Typing the Wrong Email at Checkout

Unglamorous, but it's the single most common cause of delayed orders. On a road legal order, the document request goes to the email you gave us. Wrong email, no request, no verification, no plates — and you're sat there assuming we're just slow.

If you've ordered and haven't seen anything from us within an hour, check your spam folder, then get in touch.

Quick Reference

The Honest Summary

None of this is complicated once you know it. The rules are tighter than most people assume, but they're also completely fixed and completely public — which means there's no grey area to get lost in.

Get the spacing right, keep the characters black for road use, send your documents, and you'll never think about any of it again. Start building your plates whenever you're ready.