United States
The United States is the hardest license plate market in the world. There is no national plate: every state issues its own designs, and most keep several in circulation at once — standard passenger series alongside specialty, charity, university and legacy plates. Add the District of Columbia and the territories, and a single camera feed can contain hundreds of visually distinct plate designs.
Generic OCR breaks on exactly the things that make American plates American: stacked small characters, state names and slogans that get read as plate text, vanity plates that ignore every format rule, decorative backgrounds, and dealer frames that crop the state name away. Our models are trained on this variety, return the issuing state alongside the plate text, and report an honest confidence score for every read — 97%+ accuracy at under 200ms.
Live demo
Upload a vehicle photo and watch the API return the plate text, confidence score and vehicle details in real time. Your first 150 calls each month are free — no credit card required.
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Try it with US plates
Drag and drop a vehicle photo here, or browse files
JPEG, PNG, or WebP — max 10MB, min 640×480
API response
// Upload an image to see the live response.
Coverage
Formats differ state by state: California issues plates like 7ABC123, New York uses ABC-1234, and every other state runs its own letter–digit pattern. On top of the standard series sit specialty and charity designs, veteran plates and legacy reissues — many states have dozens of active designs on the road at the same time, and vanity plates can be almost any string the DMV will approve.
The API does not force reads through a fixed format mask. It reads the characters as printed — including the stacked character pairs used on truck, trailer and motorcycle plates — classifies the issuing state from design cues even when a frame hides the state name, and flags low-confidence reads instead of guessing.
01
Standard state passenger series across all 50 states, DC and the territories.
02
Commercial, apportioned and truck plates, including stacked-character formats.
03
Smaller motorcycle plates with condensed character spacing.
04
Dealer and transporter plates seen on test drives and deliveries.
05
Federal, state and municipal government plates.
06
Personalized combinations and specialty designs that ignore standard formats.
07
Dealer-issued paper tags — printed, faded or photographed behind glass.
API response
Every response includes the plate string exactly as printed, the issuing state, a per-read confidence score, and — if you enable it — the vehicle’s brand, model, body type and color extracted from the same image.
POST /v1/detect
{
"success": true,
"data": {
"plates": [
{
"text": "7ABC123",
"confidence": 0.98,
"country": "US",
"state": "CA",
"bounding_box": {
"x": 412, "y": 388,
"width": 164, "height": 82
}
}
],
"car": {
"brand": "Ford",
"model": "F-150",
"body_type": "pickup",
"color": {
"name": "white",
"hex": "#F2F2F2"
}
}
},
"processing_time_ms": 142
}Use cases
Self-serve API access, pay-as-you-go pricing, no sales calls — built for the operators and developers who run America’s lots, gates and fleets.
Recognize resident and guest vehicles at the gate and open automatically — no clickers, cards or codes to hand out.
Match plates against permit lists and payment records, and document violations with a photo, timestamp and read confidence.
Identify returning customers the moment they pull in, and surface membership or ticket status before staff say hello.
Scan lots and streets against a target list using any camera or phone photo — no dedicated ANPR hardware required.
Re-read toll and citation camera images to verify plate reads before invoices go out.
Sign up with an email, get an API key, and send your first image — 150 free calls every month, no credit card required.
Also available
No per-country contracts or add-ons — the same endpoint reads plates from every supported market.
Every plate read can include brand, model, body type and color of the vehicle from the same image — explore the Car Recognition API