How to read a VIN: what each of the 17 characters means

Every car, SUV and light truck sold in the U.S. carries its VIN in at least two places, and the same 17 characters follow it onto its paperwork.

• Dashboard, driver’s side. On passenger cars, multipurpose passenger vehicles, low-speed vehicles and trucks up to 10,000 lb gross vehicle weight rating, the rule puts the VIN inside the passenger compartment, readable through the glass from outside next to the left windshield pillar, in characters at least 4 mm tall.
• Door-jamb label. The federal certification label beside the driver’s seat repeats the VIN with the manufacturer’s name, the month and year of manufacture, the gross vehicle weight rating and the type the vehicle was certified as.
• Paperwork. NHTSA tells owners the VIN may also be on the registration and insurance documents.
• Motorcycles. Only the certification label is required, placed near where the steering post meets the handlebars.

The VIN format is set by NHTSA regulation, 49 CFR Part 565, whose stated purpose is to simplify vehicle identification and to make recall campaigns more accurate and efficient.

A federal safety standard that took effect on 1 January 1969 required passenger cars to carry a VIN visible through the windshield and not repeated within 10 years. The fixed 17-character format came later, from a rule NHTSA published on 17 August 1978 and required from the 1981 model year. In 2008, on a petition from SAE International’s VIN committee, NHTSA revised the rule so the system would last at least another 30 years: VINs of vehicles subject to the federal safety standards must not repeat within a 60-year period beginning with the 1980 model year, and from the 2010 model year cars, multipurpose passenger vehicles and trucks up to 10,000 lb must carry a letter in position 7.

The rule fixes the alphabet as well as the length. A VIN uses the digits 0 to 9 and every capital letter except I, O and Q, printed in a sans-serif typeface, and all 17 positions must be filled. The rule groups the characters into four sections, the last of which holds three separate items:

From 49 CFR 565.15 (2010 and later model years); earlier vehicles follow 565.25.

Positions 1–3: who made it. The rule calls this the manufacturer identifier; the international name, from standard ISO 3780, is world manufacturer identifier (WMI). NHTSA contracts with SAE International to coordinate identifiers for manufacturers in the United States, at no charge, and SAE issues them so they also meet the international standard, under which this section indicates the country where the vehicle was made. A manufacturer building 1,000 or more vehicles of a type a year gets a three-character identifier. One building fewer puts a 9 in position 3, and its identifier is six characters long: positions 1–3 plus 12–14, which leaves only positions 15–17 for its production number.

Positions 4–8: what it is. The rule lists what this section must make decipherable for each type of vehicle:

• Passenger car: make, line, series, body type, engine type, and all restraint devices and their location.
• Multipurpose passenger vehicle: make, line, series, body type, engine type and gross vehicle weight rating, plus restraint devices and their location up to 10,000 lb.
• Truck: make, model or line, series, chassis, cab type, engine type, brake system and gross vehicle weight rating, plus restraint devices and their location up to 10,000 lb.
• Motorcycle: make, type of motorcycle, line, engine type and net brake horsepower.

The rule does not say which character means what. Each manufacturer designs its own code and must send NHTSA the information needed to decipher it at least 60 days before the first vehicle using it is offered for sale, so that state motor vehicle agencies have it before owners start registering. NHTSA’s decoder shows what the manufacturer reported, including the plant behind the code in position 11 and its country.

The check digit exists to catch transcription errors: a character misread off a windshield plate or mistyped into a form. The manufacturer computes it after the other 16 characters are set, in four steps the rule spells out:

1. Give each character a number. Digits keep their value; letters take the value in the rule’s table: A–H are 1–8, J–N are 1–5, P is 7, R is 9, and S–Z are 2–9.
2. Multiply each number by its position’s weight: 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 and 10 for positions 1–8, 0 for position 9, then 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3 and 2 for positions 10–17.
3. Add the 17 products and divide the total by 11.
4. The remainder is the check digit. A remainder of 10 is written as X.

Here is the arithmetic for 1EXAMPLE5TW123456, a VIN made up for this guide: EXAMPLE spelled into positions 2–8, T for the 2026 model year, a letter in position 7 and digits in the last five places, as the rule requires of a car.

Values and weights from 49 CFR 565.15(c), Tables III and IV. Position 9 has weight 0, so the check digit does not affect its own sum.

The products add up to 335. 335 ÷ 11 is 30 with a remainder of 5, so the check digit is 5 and the finished VIN is 1EXAMPLE5TW123456. The regulation’s own worked example follows the same steps: its sample adds up to 411, which leaves a remainder of 4.

Miscopy one character and the check usually fails. Read the 2 in position 13 as a 3 and the total rises by 6, that position’s weight, to 341: remainder 0, which does not match the 5 in position 9. The test is not perfect. Several characters share a value (A, J and 1 are all worth 1), so a swap between them passes. And because the formula is public, a correct check digit shows only that a VIN is consistent with itself, not that it belongs to a real vehicle.

Position 10 is not a year; it is one of 30 codes. The letters run from A for 1980 to Y for 2000, the digits 1 to 9 cover 2001 to 2009, and the cycle starts again at A for 2010. Besides I, O and Q, which appear nowhere in a VIN, the year codes also skip U, Z and the digit 0.

Because the codes repeat, a B could mean 1981 or 2011. For cars, multipurpose passenger vehicles and trucks up to 10,000 lb, the rule settles it with position 7: a digit there means the year code refers to 1980–2009, a letter means 2010–2039. Other vehicles, such as heavier trucks, buses, trailers and motorcycles, may use either in position 7, so for them the cycle has to be read from the decoder or the documents.

Generated from the rule’s 30-code cycle and checked against the year tables printed in 49 CFR 565.15 (Table VII) and 565.25 (Table XIII).

The model year is not the build date either. The rule defines model year as the year a manufacturer uses to designate a model, whatever calendar year the vehicle was built in, provided the production period does not exceed 24 months. The month and year the vehicle was actually manufactured are on the door-jamb label.

• Trim, options and color. The nearest the VIN comes to a trim level is series, which the rule defines as a subdivision of a model line by price, size or weight, used for marketing. Optional equipment, packages, paint and interior are not among the attributes the rule requires, so a decode cannot be relied on to show them.
• History. Titles, registrations, insurance records and police files are keyed to the VIN, which is why it is the number to search. The history lives in those records, not in the 17 characters.
• Recall status. A decode identifies the model. It cannot tell you whether this particular vehicle falls inside a recall’s build range, or whether the repair has been done. NHTSA’s lookup at nhtsa.gov/recalls checks a VIN, or a license plate, for open safety recalls.

The campaigns themselves are public: this site has 3,661 on file for the model years it covers, and the latest are listed here.

1. Copy it from the vehicle.
   Read the dashboard plate or the door-jamb label, not only the paperwork. A character that looks like an O is a zero; one that looks like an I is a one.
2. Read the year.
   Find position 10 in the table above; on a light vehicle, position 7 tells you which column to use.
3. Test the check digit.
   Do the arithmetic above, or let a decoder do it. A mismatch means a character is wrong somewhere.
4. Decode it with NHTSA’s data.
   NHTSA’s vPIC decoder is open to the public and shows what the manufacturer reported for that VIN: make, model, body, engine, plant and more. It accepts partial VINs and does not decode model years before 1981. This site’s VIN decoder uses the same NHTSA database and then opens the matching model-year page, one of 3,816 model-year pages here across 62 makes.
5. Check recalls by VIN.
   Enter the full VIN at nhtsa.gov/recalls. A decode says what the vehicle is; the recall lookup says what is still open on it.

• 49 CFR Part 565 — Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) Requirements
• Federal Register, 30 April 2008 — Vehicle Identification Number Requirements, final rule
• 49 CFR 567.4 — Certification label: requirements for manufacturers of motor vehicles
• NHTSA Office of Vehicle Safety Compliance — The Vehicle Identification Number (VIN)
• NHTSA — VIN Decoder (vPIC)
• NHTSA — VIN Decoder: what the decoder shows and where it comes from
• NHTSA — Vehicle Safety Recalls Week: where to find your VIN and how to check it
• NHTSA — Check for recalls by VIN or license plate