What are Hex Number Plates and are They Legal?

Yes. Hex number plates are road legal in the UK, provided the finished plate meets the British Standard BS AU 145e and the number plate rules on GOV.UK. "Hex" describes the outline of the plate, not the registration on it, and the rules fix the material, the colours, the supplier markings, and the size and spacing of the characters, rather than the shape of the plate itself. That is why a hex plate carrying a private registration is judged by exactly the same rules as a standard oblong one.

What is a hex number plate?

A hex plate is cut with angled, hexagonal ends instead of square corners, and sized to your registration rather than taken from a stock blank, so the plate finishes close to the characters on every side. Because the plate is cut around the registration, a seven-character plate and a four-character plate come out at different widths. The registration itself is laid out in Charles Wright characters at the prescribed size and spacing, exactly as on a standard plate. You can see the finished article on our hex number plates page.

What the rules say about the shape of a plate

Nothing, is the short answer. The mandatory specification for plates fitted from 1 September 2021 is set out in Schedule 2 of the Road Vehicles (Display of Registration Marks) Regulations 2001. It covers the retroreflective material and the British Standard it has to meet, the background colours, the supplier markings below the registration, and what a border may look like. It does not prescribe an outline for the plate. Neither does DVLA's leaflet INF104, which sets out the character sizes and margins and never mentions the plate's shape. The one place the regulations use the word "rectangular" is in the optional specification for pre-1973 vehicles displaying traditional black and silver plates, which is a separate case.

What the rules do fix is everything else, and GOV.UK lists it: a plate must be made from a reflective material, display black characters on a white background at the front and a yellow background at the rear, carry no background pattern, be marked to show who supplied it, and be marked with the British Standard number. The characters must not be removable or reflective, and on plates fitted since 1 September 2021 they must be a single shade of black. A hex plate from a registered supplier meets all of that from the start.

The measurements a hex plate still has to hit

The dimensions are where a plate actually passes or fails, and they are the same on a hex plate as on any other. DVLA's INF104 gives them for a standard car plate: characters 79mm tall and, apart from the number 1 and the letter I, 50mm wide; a character stroke of 14mm; 11mm between characters; 33mm between the age identifier and the three random letters; and margins of 11mm at the top, bottom and sides. Because a hex plate is cut around the registration, the margin is the number that matters most, and ours are cut to leave more than the 11mm minimum on every edge.

What would make a hex plate illegal

Not the shape. What catches people out is the registration being rearranged or misrepresented, spacing closed up to make the characters read as a word, a tint over the plate, a patterned background, or a non-standard font. GOV.UK is blunt about the consequence: you could be fined up to £1,000 and your vehicle will fail its MOT test if you drive with incorrectly displayed number plates. We do not make show plates, tinted plates or plates with non-standard spacing, so a hex plate from us carries the registration exactly as it appears on your V5C. There is more in our guide to number plates and the law.

Which letter styles you can have on a hex plate

Any of ours: printed, 3D gel, 4D 3mm, 4D 5mm, 4D with gel, Outline, Hover, Shadow or Retro. GOV.UK expressly allows raised characters, and a raised character on a hex plate is judged the same way as on a standard plate. Our 4D number plates page compares the range, and our guide to whether 3D and 4D plates are road legal goes through the standard in detail.

Ordering and fitting a hex plate

Pick your letter style in the plate builder and choose the hex shape as the size. Each hex plate is a reflective BS AU 145e plate made in County Durham by a DVLA-registered number plate supplier, and it carries our supplier name, postcode and the BS AU 145e mark, which is what the regulations require. One practical point on fitting: because the ends are angled, the existing screw holes on your car can fall outside the plate. If they do, fit it with sticky pads instead.