ON THE ROAD: The Many License Plates of Montana

Most state have license plates to support their state universities, but Montana takes it a step further and has license plates you can buy to support some local high schools as well. (Image courtesy of Montana Department of Justice)

If you have ever spent a significant amount of time driving through the great State of Montana, you probably have noticed that Montana has a lot of different license plate designs. If you haven't, I am going to do my best to change that!

First, I feel the best way to introduce this topic is by explaining my inspiration for writing this article in the first place. As part of my job I take many road trips, and I typically go to Montana a few times a year. During one trip a couple years ago, while my co-workers and I were waiting at a busy intersection in Billings, we noticed that out of 12 Montana license plates we could see on cars, we saw eight different designs. After that we started paying more attention to the license plates on Montana cars the rest of the trip, and I still notice the seemingly endless variety of designs on every road trip I have taken to Montana since then. 

How Many Varieties of Montana License Plates Are There?

According to the Missoulian, as of 2016 there were over 230 different official license plate designs for the State of Montana! It is no wonder that it sometimes feels like no two license plates are the same while you're driving around in Montana.

Why So Many?

There are three reasons why there are so many Montana License plate designs. This article from autotrader.com goes into more depth than I'm going to here, but the three main reasons for the abundance of license plate designs are as follows:

First: When you register for a "basic" license plate, there are five options. There is the current standard plate, but without any kind of additional fee you can also pick to have one of the last four standard plates issued by Montana. 

Second: In addition to the five "standard" plates, you can also use antique license plates for your classic car. In other words, if you have a classic car from, say, 1938, and you happen to find some license plates that were originally issued around 1938, you can put them on your car and have the number on those old plates registered to your car. 

Third: This is by far the main reason for all the different license plates from Montana. Basically, Montana allows non-profit organizations to create their own license plate designs and Montana will issue them for an extra $40 dollars, giving the non-profit a $20 donation. If the person wants to keep their specialty plate on their car, they have to keep giving the non-profit an additional $20 every year.  As you can imagine, this is can be a significant source of revenue for some smaller non-profits in the state. You can check out some of the designs for the non-profit plates here.

As you can see, with all these different options for getting a license plate in Montana, it is no wonder you see so many around while going on a road trip there!

But How Many Are Too Many?

While researching this article, it was kind of surprising to me how hard it is to pin down an exact number of different available license plates there are in Montana. In my research before writing this article, I was getting figures varying from 230 to 289, depending on who wrote the article or when it was written. This seems to me to be a bit excessive, and apparently the Montana state legislature agreed with me, and legislation was passed in 2019 that tightened up the requirements of which organizations could have license plates, and also implemented a minimum number of plates a non-profit had to sell each year to stay in the program. 

 

How Many Plates Are There Now?

This is a good question, as it will be interesting to see how many plate designs will be eliminated as a result of this new legislation. During my research I failed to find any articles that listed numbers regarding how many specialty license plates there are in Montana since this legislation was passed. As far as I can tell, from looking at the list of specialty license plates that are currently being issued by Montana, there are *only* 153 specialty plates available as of the end of June 2021. 

Even with the selection being so limited, it still leaves Montana with literally about 140 more license plate selections than any other state I know of. If I'm wrong on this, please let me know in the comments, because frankly I'm too lazy to actually research this myself! This still leaves a lot of plates to pick from, and I was thinking about doing a personal top ten list of Montana license plate designs in a future post here at Everything Road Trip!