17-character VINs · 1981 and newer
Free VIN decoder
Paste a 17-digit VIN to reveal the year, make, model, and more — pulled live from public NHTSA data.
Hover a block to see what those characters are telling you.
Position by position
All seventeen, in order.
The character column follows the VIN above. Positions 4–8 are manufacturer-defined, so their meaning shifts by make.
Position 10
The model-year letter.
One character carries the model year, and the alphabet skips I, O, Q, U and Z to avoid misreads. Tap a code to swap it into the VIN above.
Positions 1–3
Who built it, and where
Where decoding stops
A decode is the factory spec, not the life story.
Keep reading
VIN shorter than 17 characters?
That usually means the car was built before 1981
The 17-character standard arrived with the 1981 model year. Earlier cars carry shorter numbers written to each manufacturer’s own rules, which is why this decoder cannot read them. Our Classic VIN search can, for 21 makes with model years going back to 1946.
Open the Classic VIN search →Real result from the Classic VIN search for 136375K123456.
60 makes
Decode a VIN by make
Each make has its own page explaining what its manufacturer codes mean and where its cars were built.