Recently we had a lot of joking about the name of the license plate registration stickers and what they are called regionally, Decal, Sticker, Tab, Tag, etc…
Well, North Carolina has decided to not only do away with the license plate stickers, they are not going to be issuing physical registration cards either… And that all becomes effective on October 1st…
They say the NC police all have electronic systems that allow them to immediately verify a vehicle’s registration status in real time…
And the law does not require the vehicle owner to remove the old stickers after Oct 1st.
Well, what could go wrong with this?
I imagine that the first time a NC driver travels out of state and attracts the attention of the local police, they probably will be pulled over for questioning… Why do you have an “expired registration sticker” on your license plate, or better yet, “Why don’t you have any registration sticker on your license plate?”
Oh, the North Carolina DMV will let you print a PDF copy of your vehicle registration over the internet or they will sell you printed copy for an extra fee…
The DMV claims it will reduce opportunities for fraud and counterfeit registrations stickers…
I think they are only fooling themselves as most of those counterfeit registrations stickers were not fooling anyone. But now, with no registrations stickers displayed, the police would have to actually run the plate number to check the validity of the registration…
That will take all the fun out of it. Every year i remove the old before putting the new ones on, straight. You can tell a lot about a person by their stickers.
People have been known to steal registration decals. If the stolen decal is used only to satisfy a landlord, they did fool someone. Do you examine decals to see if it is on the correct license plate?
Local police have been doing that for 30 years. The color of the decal correlates with the year, but the month is difficult to read @ 70 mph and it is impossible to read the registration number on the decal without getting out of the car. Police check registration status of vehicles via the DMV database while driving. Can you imagine stolen vehicles being overlooked based on the registration decal?
There are license plate readers all over town to track the movement of stolen vehicles and stolen license plates but, are there any police available to investigate auto theft?
TN tag stickers are always white no matter the date on them, don’t remember them being any other color (for years anyway), they also have the plate number on them so “stealing” someone else’s sticker doesn’t do much good if you take a second to look to see if they match… So I don’t see how it would fool a cop, landlord maybe, but not LEO’s… imho
During the relatively brief period when NJ used registration stickers on license plates, it was possible to do a “quick & dirty” estimate of the vehicle owner’s intelligence/awareness of reality. NJ uses a front plate in addition to the rear plate, so when you renewed your registration, you would receive two stickers. It wasn’t unusual to see cars whose rear plate had both of the new stickers, while (obviously) there was no sticker on the front plate.
The most bizarre case that I saw was on an Explorer, whose owner had decided that the correct place for those stickers was on the outside of the windshield, adjacent to the inspection sticker. When I saw it, the wipers had already obliterated a significant portion of those stickers.
Here in Virginia, not all police vehicle have license plate readers, and in some really rural areas, the police still use a “rolodex…”
I am not sure you are asking a rhetorical question, or you are asking me if I inspect license plates… When a new registration comes in the mail, I am very careful to make sure the decals are put on the correct vehicle…
Virginia recently had some legislative changes to the color of the State Inspection Sticker, the License Plate Year Sticker and the License plate Month Sticker…
Now, the color of the State Inspection Sticker and the License Plate Year Sticker expiring in 2026 are Green. Inspection stickers expiring in 2027 will be blue. For 2028 the stickers will be red and in 2029, the stickers will be yellow.
And the License Plate Month Sticker will all be Black lettering on a White Background…
However, Right now, my truck’s registration expires in Nov 2026 and the License plate Month Sticker is Yellow with Black lettering. My Toyota’s registration in May 2027 and the License plate Month Sticker is is White with Black lettering. And my Honda’s registration expires in Oct 2026 and the License plate Month Sticker is Yellow with Green lettering.
The old method was more like a “Spin the Wheel” for color selection as the Inspection month used to change every month did not even match the Registration month’s color…
Police can’t read the plate number on the decal while driving in traffic, they would need to inquire the data base to know if the registration is expired before performing a traffic stop. An up-to-date decal has the appearance of non-expired registration, but someone must verify.
With regards to “not fooling anyone”; of the license plates that you see while driving in traffic, is everyone honest? No one has ever been fooled by the misuse of a registration decal?
People place their registration decals on the wrong vehicles, sometimes inadvertently, sometimes intentionally (failed emission inspection).
My current stickers. Are gold for 2027. They alternate colors blue, red, white, green, maybe more. Some i dont like. The stckers have a bar code on them registered to the title when you grt them. Pretty small so youd have to be close to scan them. I dunno. Dont really care. Ive been stopped once or twice and they never scanned my plate up close to scan the sticker.
Michigan’s tab/sticker includes or omits the letter “P” on them whether or not the registered owner included the annual state parks pass with their registration. So if they eliminate the sticker they would have to issue a separate something to show the state park gate attendants.
I think what @bing is getting at is the haphazard way that some put the sticker on crooked, or on top of thirteen old stickers, or here in Michigan some people bizarrely place the new sticker somewhere on the plate that hasn’t had a sticker put there already.
In Virginia, the number on the License Plate Month Sticker and the Year Sticker has no association with the license plate number or the VIN number of the vehicle, it is only an internal control number used by the DMV. If the police run a plate number, those numbers are not provided…
Fun Fact: In 2025, the Virginia House passed a bill to eliminate the License Plate Month and year Stickers (the bill failed in the Senate…) but ran into opposition from the DMV claiming they would face significant administrative and operational transition costs to completely redesign license plates and retool their system. I guess they are not as smart as the NC DMV that just decided to let the old plates age out…
And the police objected claiming they do not have sufficient License Plate Readers in their patrol vehicles. As I mentioned earlier, I think we still have patrol vehicles with a “Rolodex in the Front seat…”
I dunno, i was just a kid but before the month stickers, everyone had to get their new plates for january. Monthly stickers evened out the wiorkload and waiting lines.
