Wisconsin DMV announces new ‘B’ series license plates

Changes are coming to the Wisconsin license plate this month. On Thursday, the Wisconsin Department of Transportation (WisDOT) Division of Motor Vehicles (DMV) announced it will debut a new series of license plates that begin with the letter ‘B’. The plates will be given out for newly-issued and automatically distributed replacing old plates.

According to the DMV, all combinations of plates starting with the letter ‘A’ have been exhausted. It took nearly eight years and 4.7 million letter and number combinations on license plates to do so.

“Wisconsin DMV is proud to provide Wisconsin drivers the credentials they need to safely get from point A to point B and now we’re moving from A to B,” DMV Administrator Tommy Winkler said in a statement. “Drivers can ‘B’ on the lookout for the new license plates when they begin rolling out statewide this month.”

Officials with the DMV says the first batch of ‘B’ plates will begin with BAA and they expect it to take approximately seven years to run through the millions of letter and number combinations.

Did you know that Wisconsin license plates did not always have seven characters? That happened in April 2017, when the current format of seven-character license plates beginning with the letter ‘A’ began. The DMV says the additional character added about 100 million combinations, instead of 20 million with the previous six-character license plates.

The letters ‘I,’ ‘O,’ and ‘Q’ are not included in the combinations because they resemble numbers.

Each year, Wisconsin DMV issues more than 600,000 new license plates. If you want to be one of the first to have the new “B” series license plate, you can order online at wisconsindmv.gov/Vreplace.