---
title: "VIN Year Chart: What the 10th Digit of a VIN Means"
description: "The 10th character of a VIN is the model year, written as a code that repeats every 30 years. The full chart, the position-7 rule that tells 1986 from 2016, and why it is never 0."
url: "https://baronauto1.com/vehicle-history/vin-year-chart/"
type: "article"
published: "2026-08-20"
modified: "2026-08-20"
site: "Baron Auto"
disclaimer: "This site is under new ownership and is not affiliated with Baron Auto Emporium dealership."
---

# VIN Year Chart: What the 10th Digit of a VIN Means

> The 10th character of a VIN is the model year, written as a code that repeats every 30 years. The full chart, the position-7 rule that tells 1986 from 2016, and why it is never 0.

*VIN & Vehicle History · 14 min read · 3,154 words*

## The short version

- The 10th character of a 17-character VIN is the model year. It is a code, not a number — 2016 is written **G**.
- The code repeats every 30 years, so **G** means 1986 *or* 2016. The 7th character breaks the tie: a letter there means 2010 or later, a digit means 2009 or earlier.
- It is never 0, I, O, Q, U or Z. If you are reading a 0 in position 10, you are reading the wrong character or the wrong kind of number.
- Model year is not build date. A car with a T in position 10 is a 2026 model and may well have been assembled in 2025.
- Position 9 is a check digit that mathematically tests the other sixteen. It is the single fastest way to catch a mistyped or invented VIN, and almost nobody uses it.
- This only works on 1981-and-later vehicles. Before that there was no standard, and position 10 means nothing.

You are looking at a windscreen, a door jamb sticker or a registration document, counting characters, and you want one thing from all seventeen of them: what year is this car. Position 10 answers that, and it answers it in a code that looks like a typing error the first time you see it.

Here is the whole system — the table that decodes it, the rule that stops you being thirty years wrong, and what the other sixteen characters are doing while position 10 gets all the attention.

**Figure: Anatomy of the VIN WBA8E9G59GNT84880**

The 17 characters of VIN WBA8E9G59GNT84880, split into world manufacturer identifier, vehicle descriptor section, check digit, model year code, plant code and serial number, decoded as a 2016 BMW 328i.

Positions 4 to 8 are where trim, body style and engine live. Decoded free through NHTSA’s public VIN decoder, retrieved 2026-08-19.

## What the 10th digit of the VIN tells you

Position 10 encodes the **model year**. Since 1981 every road vehicle sold in the United States has carried a 17-character VIN under federal rule, and the tenth character of that string is reserved for the year the manufacturer assigned to the model — not the date it rolled off the line, and not the date it was first registered.

The alphabet is deliberately restricted. Three letters are excluded from every position in a VIN because they are too easy to confuse with digits: **I**, **O** and **Q**. Position 10 drops three more — **U**, **Z** and the digit **0**. What is left is exactly thirty usable characters, twenty-one letters and nine digits, which is why the cycle is thirty years long.

**Is the 10th digit always 0?** No — 0 is one of the characters that can never appear there. If you are looking at a string with a 0 in the tenth position, it is not a post-1981 VIN. It may be an engine number, a chassis number on a pre-1981 car, or a mis-transcription of a capital letter.

## VIN year chart: every code from 1980 to 2039

Read down the code column, then across to whichever cycle applies. If you are unsure which cycle you are in, the next section settles it in one character.

**Model-year codes for position 10 of a 17-character VIN.**

| Code | First cycle | Second cycle |
| --- | --- | --- |
| A | 1980 | 2010 |
| B | 1981 | 2011 |
| C | 1982 | 2012 |
| D | 1983 | 2013 |
| E | 1984 | 2014 |
| F | 1985 | 2015 |
| G | 1986 | 2016 |
| H | 1987 | 2017 |
| J | 1988 | 2018 |
| K | 1989 | 2019 |
| L | 1990 | 2020 |
| M | 1991 | 2021 |
| N | 1992 | 2022 |
| P | 1993 | 2023 |
| R | 1994 | 2024 |
| S | 1995 | 2025 |
| T | 1996 | 2026 |
| V | 1997 | 2027 |
| W | 1998 | 2028 |
| X | 1999 | 2029 |
| Y | 2000 | 2030 |
| 1 | 2001 | 2031 |
| 2 | 2002 | 2032 |
| 3 | 2003 | 2033 |
| 4 | 2004 | 2034 |
| 5 | 2005 | 2035 |
| 6 | 2006 | 2036 |
| 7 | 2007 | 2037 |
| 8 | 2008 | 2038 |
| 9 | 2009 | 2039 |

Note what is missing: there is no row for I, O, Q, U, Z or 0. Six characters that a careless eye will produce and the standard never will.

## What year is G — 1986 or 2016?

This is the question the code creates and it has a clean answer. **Look at position 7.**

- Position 7 is a **letter** → the car is from the **2010–2039** cycle.
- Position 7 is a **digit** → the car is from the **1980–2009** cycle.

Manufacturers adopted this convention precisely so the thirty-year wraparound would not be ambiguous. It is the difference between a car that qualifies for classic insurance and one that is still inside a normal finance term.

Worked through on four sample VINs, each decoded through the federal VIN decoder:

**Four VINs decoded through NHTSA’s public decoder, showing the position-7 rule at work.**

| VIN | Position 7 | Position 10 | Model year |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| WBA8E9G59**G**NT84880 | G — letter | G | 2016 BMW 328i |
| 4T1B11HK4**J**U123456 | H — letter | J | 2018 Toyota Camry |
| 1FTFW1ET5**D**FA12345 | E — letter | D | 2013 Ford F-150 |
| SALGS2VF4**F**A123456 | V — letter | F | 2015 Land Rover Range Rover |

All four carry a letter in position 7, and all four resolve to the second cycle. Had the BMW read a digit there, the same G would have meant 1986.

## What the other sixteen characters are doing

Position 10 is the character people come looking for, but it sits inside a structure where every position is spoken for. Knowing the shape of it turns a VIN from a serial number into a description of the car.

**The four blocks of a 17-character VIN and what each one carries.**

| Positions | Block | What it encodes |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 1–3 | World Manufacturer Identifier | Country of the manufacturer, the maker, and the vehicle class |
| 4–8 | Vehicle Descriptor Section | Model, body style, engine, restraint system, series — the specification |
| 9 | Check digit | Nothing about the car. A calculated test of the other sixteen characters |
| 10 | Model year | The code in the chart above |
| 11 | Plant code | The specific factory that assembled the vehicle |
| 12–17 | Sequential serial | The individual vehicle’s production number |

Split across the four samples above, the structure is easy to see:

**The same four VINs broken into their blocks, with the plant the decoder named.**

| VIN | WMI | VDS | Check | Year | Plant | Assembled at |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| WBA8E9G59GNT84880 | WBA | 8E9G5 | 9 | G | N | Rosslyn, South Africa |
| 4T1B11HK4JU123456 | 4T1 | B11HK | 4 | J | U | Georgetown, USA |
| 1FTFW1ET5DFA12345 | 1FT | FW1ET | 5 | D | F | Dearborn, USA |
| SALGS2VF4FA123456 | SAL | GS2VF | 4 | F | A | Solihull, England |

### The first character is a country, and it is not where the car was built

Position 1 identifies the country that assigned the manufacturer its identifier. Broadly: **1**, **4** and **5** are the United States, **2** is Canada, **3** is Mexico, **J** is Japan, **K** is South Korea, **L** is China, **S** is the United Kingdom, **W** is Germany, and **Z** is Italy.

The BMW in the table is the reason this distinction matters. Its WMI is **WBA** — W for Germany, because BMW AG is a German manufacturer. But the plant code in position 11 resolves to Rosslyn, and the decoder returns South Africa. The car is German-branded, German-engineered and South African-built, and only position 11 tells you the last part.

**A seller saying “it is a German car, look at the W” is telling you about the company, not the factory.** If build origin matters to you — and for some buyers it genuinely does — position 11 and the decoder’s plant field are the fields to read. Position 1 will not answer it.

## Position 9: the free fraud check nobody runs

Character 9 carries no information about the vehicle. It is a *check digit* — a value calculated from the other sixteen characters, so that changing any one of them produces a VIN that no longer adds up. It exists to catch transcription errors, and it happens to catch invented VINs too.

The arithmetic is fixed and you can do it by hand:

- **Turn every letter into a number.** A, J and 1 are all 1. B, K and S are 2. C, L and T are 3. D, M and U are 4. E, N and V are 5. F and W are 6. G, P and X are 7. H and Y are 8. R and Z are 9. Digits are worth themselves.
- **Multiply each position by its weight.** Running left to right the weights are 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 10, 0, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2. Position 9 is weighted 0, so the check digit never tests itself.
- **Add the results and divide by 11.** The remainder is the check digit. A remainder of 10 is written as the letter X — the only place an X legitimately appears in position 9.

Run that against a VIN and the answer either matches position 9 or it does not. There is no partial credit.

### What happened when we checked our own sample VINs

We ran the calculation across the four VINs in the table above. All four failed — and NHTSA’s decoder agreed, returning the same verdict in a field almost every tool discards:

**Check-digit verification of the four sample VINs, against what NHTSA’s decoder reported.**

| VIN | Position 9 says | Calculation gives | What vPIC returned |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| WBA8E9G59GNT84880 | 9 | 5 | Error 1 — check digit does not calculate |
| 4T1B11HK4JU123456 | 4 | X | Error 1 — check digit does not calculate |
| 1FTFW1ET5DFA12345 | 5 | 9 | Error 1 — check digit does not calculate |
| SALGS2VF4FA123456 | 4 | 2 | Error 1 — check digit does not calculate |

These are constructed sample VINs, not vehicles — the serials give it away, and a real car does not end 123456. But look at what the decoder did with them anyway. It returned a make, a model, a model year, an engine, a horsepower figure and a plant city for every one, and it filed the failure quietly in an error field alongside.

**This is the thing to take away from the whole article.** The federal decoder did not refuse these VINs. It decoded them, because the WMI, the descriptor section, the year code and the plant code are all readable whether or not position 9 adds up — and it told the truth about the check digit in a field that most consumer VIN tools strip out before showing you anything. If a decoder gives you a confident answer and no error line, you have not been told whether the VIN is valid. You have only been told what its characters would mean if it were.

The practical version: before you act on any decode, run position 9. A VIN copied wrong from a listing fails it. A VIN someone made up fails it. A genuine VIN read correctly passes it, every time, and it costs you two minutes of arithmetic. The same principle applied to a pre-1981 number produces an even worse outcome, which we cover in the [classic car VIN decoder](https://baronauto1.com/vehicle-history/classic-car-vin-decoder/) guide.

## Model year is not the year it was built

A manufacturer can begin selling a model year well before the calendar catches up. A car whose tenth character reads T is a 2026 model, and it may have been assembled in the middle of 2025. The VIN records the designation, not the date.

This matters more than it sounds. Depreciation, warranty terms, emissions certification and insurance classification all follow the model year in the VIN. A seller describing a car by its build date or its first registration date is quoting a different number from the one the paperwork will use.

**Where a seller can mislead without lying.** A car first registered in 2021 may be a 2020 model that sat unsold. Both statements are true; only one is in the VIN. Check position 10 against whatever the listing claims, because every valuation the car ever receives will follow the VIN.

### Where the actual build date lives

If you need the month the car was assembled rather than the year it was sold as, the VIN cannot give it to you. The certification label in the driver’s door jamb can. That label carries a month and year of manufacture printed separately from the VIN, alongside the tyre and loading information, and it is the document the manufacturer used to certify the vehicle met federal standards on that date.

The gap between the two is normal and usually small. A gap of more than a few months — a 2020 model built early in 2019, say — is worth understanding, because it can mean a long stay on a lot or a model-year changeover the seller has not mentioned.

## Where to read the VIN on the car

All of the above assumes you are reading the right seventeen characters. On any modern vehicle the VIN appears in at least three places, and the point is not to find one — it is to find all three and confirm they agree.

- **The base of the windscreen,** driver’s side, readable from outside the car through the glass.
- **The driver’s door jamb sticker,** which also carries the build date and the tyre pressures.
- **The title and registration documents** the seller hands you.

Any disagreement between those three ends the conversation. So does a VIN plate with mismatched rivets, adhesive residue at the edges, or scratching around the characters. There is no innocent reason for a VIN plate to have been disturbed, and a swapped plate is the mechanism behind vehicle cloning — where a stolen car is given the identity of a legitimate one of the same model and colour.

The full sequence of checks to run once you have a VIN you trust is in our guide to [checking a used car’s history](https://baronauto1.com/vehicle-history/how-to-check-a-used-cars-history/).

## Decoding older VINs, and why the chart stops

The 17-character format became mandatory for the 1981 model year. Before that, manufacturers used their own schemes — 11, 13 and 14 characters were all common, and the year could be encoded anywhere or nowhere. Counting to position 10 on a 1968 Chevrolet tells you nothing at all.

If the number in front of you is shorter than 17 characters, you are decoding a pre-1981 vehicle and you need the manufacturer’s own scheme for that era rather than a general chart. Feeding it to a modern decoder is actively dangerous rather than merely useless, because the tool will pad the string and answer anyway.

## What position 10 will not tell you

The chart resolves one character. It is worth being precise about how much that leaves open, because a decoded model year gets treated as a verified vehicle far more often than it should.

- **Whether the odometer reading is honest.** Nothing in the VIN changes as the car is driven — see our guide to a [mileage check by VIN](https://baronauto1.com/vehicle-history/mileage-check-by-vin/).
- **Whether the title is branded.** Salvage, flood, lemon and junk brands live in state title records, not in the VIN.
- **How many owners it has had,** or where it was registered.
- **What colour it left the factory,** which is not encoded anywhere in the VIN at all — the [paint code](https://baronauto1.com/vehicle-history/vin-paint-code/) is on a separate label.
- **Whether the car in front of you is the car the VIN describes.** That is what matching the three locations is for.

## Verify the year rather than trusting the chart

The chart above tells you what the manufacturer encoded. It cannot tell you whether the VIN on the dashboard matches the VIN on the title, whether the plate has been swapped, or whether the car has a branded history. Three free federal checks close most of that gap in about five minutes:

- **Run the check digit.** Two minutes of arithmetic that tells you whether the VIN is internally consistent before you rely on anything it says.
- **Decode it.** NHTSA’s public decoder returns the model year, plant, engine and body class the manufacturer filed. If it disagrees with the listing, the listing is wrong. Read the error field, not just the specification.
- **Check open recalls.** NHTSA’s recall lookup takes the same VIN and returns any safety campaign that has not been completed.

All three are free and none asks for an email address. If you want the ownership trail, title brands and reported mileage history that the federal decoder deliberately does not carry, that is what a paid vehicle history report is for — and our guide to [where vehicle history data actually comes from](https://baronauto1.com/vehicle-history/carfax-alternatives/) explains which providers hold which records before you pay anyone.

## Frequently asked questions

### What does the 10th digit of a VIN tell you?

The model year. It is a single character drawn from a fixed 30-character alphabet, so 2016 appears as G and 2026 appears as T. It does not encode the month, the build date or the registration date.

### Can a VIN number be 10 digits?

Not on a vehicle built for the 1981 model year or later — those are 17 characters by federal rule. Shorter numbers do exist on older vehicles, and on trailers, engines and off-road equipment, but they do not follow the position-10 year convention.

### Is the 10th digit of a VIN number always 0?

Never. The digit 0 is excluded from position 10 entirely, along with the letters I, O, Q, U and Z. Seeing a 0 there means you are misreading a character or looking at something that is not a modern VIN.

### What year is G on a VIN number?

G is 1986 or 2016. Check position 7: a letter there puts the car in the 2010–2039 cycle, making it 2016; a digit puts it in the 1980–2009 cycle, making it 1986.

### What is the 9th digit of a VIN for?

It is a check digit, calculated from the other sixteen characters. Convert each letter to its assigned value, multiply every position by a fixed weight, total the results and divide by 11 — the remainder is the check digit, written as X if it comes to 10. A VIN that fails this test has been mistyped or invented.

### Why does a VIN decoder return a car for an invalid VIN?

Because the manufacturer identifier, descriptor section, year code and plant code can all be read whether or not the check digit adds up. NHTSA’s decoder returns the specification and reports the failure separately as an error code. Most consumer tools drop that error field, so a bad VIN comes back looking exactly like a good one.

### Does the VIN tell me the exact build date?

No. For the assembly date you need the certification label in the driver’s door jamb, which carries a month and year of manufacture separately from the VIN.

### Does the first letter of a VIN tell me where the car was built?

No — it tells you which country assigned the manufacturer its identifier. A BMW carrying the German WMI “WBA” in our sample set was assembled in Rosslyn, South Africa. The assembly plant is position 11, and the federal decoder names the plant city directly.

### How do I decode old VIN numbers from before 1981?

You cannot use this chart. Pre-1981 numbers are shorter than 17 characters and follow manufacturer-specific schemes, so you need the format published for that make and era rather than the federal standard.

## Sources and further reading

- [NHTSA VIN decoder](https://vpic.nhtsa.dot.gov/decoder/)
- [NHTSA recall lookup](https://www.nhtsa.gov/recalls)
- [NMVTIS (US Department of Justice)](https://vehiclehistory.bja.ojp.gov/)
- [FTC used car buying guide](https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/buying-used-car-dealer)

Recall, complaint and safety-rating figures on this page were retrieved from the federal databases above on August 19, 2026. Federal data changes — re-check any VIN before you rely on it.

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*This site is under new ownership and is not affiliated with Baron Auto Emporium dealership.*

Canonical source: https://baronauto1.com/vehicle-history/vin-year-chart/