Pennsylvania license plates haven’t changed much this millennium.
While a few tweaks have been made to the standard blue, white, and yellow design that has been in place since 1999, it takes a discerning eye to notice them.
A totally new version, coming this spring, will be a pretty substantial overhaul. But the revamp — which features the Liberty Bell and a patriotic mix of red, white, and blue to celebrate the upcoming semiquincentennial — is just one small chapter in the commonwealth’s long and surprisingly interesting history of designs.
In spurts, Pennsylvania’s been a hub for eye-catching plates honoring everything from river otters to D.A.R.E to Quaker friendliness. Some designs, such as a tribute to Pennsylvania’s state flagship, have even won awards from enthusiasts.
While the new design is respectable, reviewing the past 119 years of Pennsylvania plates reveals the more whimsical side to this mandatory vehicle ornament.
The early days
The commonwealth started providing plates to drivers in 1906, three years after making them mandatory. Unlike the aluminum plates of today, early ones were made from porcelain and came in an array of colors.
A few years into the 1920s, though, blue and yellow — the colors of our state flag — began to prevail in the designs.
What started as straightforward combinations of gold and navy morphed into a series of plates with the number displayed atop a silhouette of Pennsylvania, a format that held for decades.
Friendly phrases
Pennsylvania started incorporating phrases into its plate designs in the 1970s, a change that’s carried into the present.
The first phrase-forward plate was blue, with a monotone yellow Liberty Bell separator and “Bicentennial State, ’76” written at the bottom.
Once the nation’s 200th birthday passed in 1976, Pennsylvania flipped the color scheme, replaced the bell with a keystone, and changed the footer to “Keystone State.”
Then came 1983, when Gov. Dick Thornburgh decided to mix things up. As part of a wider tourism initiative, the commonwealth announced a new standard-issue plate complete with the phrase, “You’ve Got a Friend in Pennsylvania.”
The catchphrase had its haters.
“No kidding, the new Pennsylvania plates really say ‘You've Got a Friend in Pennsylvania,’ which makes me wonder who the editor in chief of Pennsylvania license plates is these days,” Russell Baker of the New York Times quipped in a 1986 column, asserting that the “clinker” was “dull” and unspecific.
Decades later, one Morning Call reader was still irked by the saying’s grammar.
Collage by Asha Prihar. Photo sources from Wikimedia and Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania license plates — some standard-issue, some optional — through the years.
But that just shows how deeply the slogan, which was dreamt up by an advertising firm and also used in TV and radio spots, became rooted. Thirty years after its inception, Thornburgh called the “You’ve Got a Friend” tourism campaign one of his administration’s “prime accomplishments.”
“It covers so much of what we market in Pennsylvania, beginning with friendliness,” the former governor told the Pittsburgh Business Times in 2013. “The founder of our state, William Penn, was a Quaker or Friend. That was part of our motivation.”
Funnily, the slogan didn’t appear on commonwealth vehicles for very long. In 1987, and under a new governor, another blue and yellow “Keystone State” design came along.
Special plates for special causes
That new model was in place until the 1990s, when Pennsylvania license plates became more than a means for identifying vehicles and promoting tourism.
In 1993, Pennsylvania allowed any car owner with $35 to deviate from the norm, rolling out optional “special fund” designs that tapped into a nationwide graphic plate trend and began a long line of more bespoke and issue-oriented offerings.
First came one with an image of an owl perched on a green hemlock branch. Proceeds from each plate sold went to the state’s Wild Resource Conservation Fund, which lacked stable funding before then.
Enticed by the new designs, Pennsylvanians began to use their plates to support zoos (the jungly tiger plate was super popular), discourage drug use, and commemorate the Erie-based Flagship Niagara. (Sadly, the Niagara plate — Pennsylvania’s second “Best License Plate” winner — was discontinued less than two years after its release, thanks to contrast issues that hindered readability.)
By 2000, PennDOT had issued around 450,000 special fund plates, according to the Associated Press. Currently, there are almost 138,000 active special fund plates on the road, per PennDOT data provided to PA Local — including 26,462 with the owl that started it all, and 5,368 with the elusive battleship.
But the eye-catching, full-plate designs of the 90s are pretty much no more. Today’s special and special fund plates use the standard-issue design as a foundation and relegate images or logos to the left of the plate number — a modification lamented by Pennsylvanians who miss the old days of plate-wide images. (The exception is the “Preserve Our Heritage” plate, which features a 1928 painting of a Pennsylvania Railroad train.)
Entering the digital age
The last big shakeup before this year’s redesign happened at the turn of the century, when the color white — and the World Wide Web — hit the road.
Under Gov. Tom Ridge, the earliest version of our current design debuted in 1999, boasting a primarily white plate with blue letters, a small keystone separator, a strip of blue at the top, and a strip of yellow at the bottom.
In place of a state nickname or saying, it notably included the URL for the state’s former website, “WWW.STATE.PA.US,” making Pennsylvania the first in the union to incorporate a web address into its license plate.
“This new license plate reflects Pennsylvania on the move,” Ridge said at the time. “It reflects the interest in bringing technology to Pennsylvania.”
This layout has evolved a little over the past 26 years — the URL is now VisitPA.com, registration stickers have been retired, and the yellow and blue stripes are more opaque — but there haven’t been major changes until this year.
A new era
The commonwealth will start rolling out the new design this spring, once its supply of the current plate is exhausted.
Announced last summer, the “Let Freedom Ring” plate, with a grayscale Liberty Bell in the background, stirred up discourse statewide. Some Pennsylvanians argued the prominence of the landmark makes it too Philadelphia-centric.
The patriotic color scheme, language, and imagery are meant to celebrate “Pennsylvania as the birthplace of American democracy and freedom,” as well as highlight “the state’s leading role in the 250th anniversary celebrations of our country in 2026,” PennDOT spokesperson Aimee Inama told PA Local. It’s also supposed to “complement” Pennsylvania’s revamped tourism branding.
The design breaks the color yellow’s century-long reign on Pennsylvania’s default plates. Also gone for the first time in the internet age: a web address.
“Pennsylvanians should not be looking at state websites while they’re driving – but fortunately, the Commonwealth has invested in new technology and improved digital services that make it simpler than ever before to find needed information on www.pa.gov,” Inama said of the lack of a URL.
The change will also prevent the state from producing license plates with website addresses that “could one day become outdated,” Inama added.
So far, over 100,000 have requested updates on when the new plate will be available, per Inama. If you’re interested in getting those updates, you can sign up here. But if you prefer your nifty owl plate, I get it.
