License Plate Transfers

A Metal Plate Transfer moves a metal plate your customer already holds onto a different vehicle, and prints a new registration for it. Nothing new is issued — the customer keeps the same plate and the same registration, they just now belong to another car. This is not a title transaction and it is not a temporary tag.

Before you start

You must be a verified Florida dealer with registrations access — see Verifying Dealer License and Business Information.

If you are not sure the customer holds a plate at all, you can check that on its own from inside the deal, without starting this transaction.

The plate has to already exist on Florida’s side, registered to the person you are transferring it for. You cannot transfer a plate to a customer Florida has never heard of, and you cannot transfer a plate the customer does not hold. Have the new vehicle’s VIN, the plate number, and the insurance on the new vehicle.

How this differs from issuing a new plate

Three different things in the app can put a plate on a car, and picking the wrong one is the most common mistake here.

If you need to	Use
Move a plate the customer already has onto another car, and nothing else	Metal Plate Transfer
Transfer the title and sort the plate out at the same time	Title and Registration — its Tag step offers moving an existing plate over as one of the choices
Get the car on the road for 30 days while the paperwork runs	Temporary Tag

A Metal Plate Transfer is deliberately narrow. It does no title work at all: no title type, no liens, no sales tax, no registration use, no registration length, no plate design. If the deal needs any of that, it is a Title and Registration, and the plate move happens inside it.

What it costs

The transaction fee is shown on the Transaction Type screen, on the Metal Plate Transfer card.

Record lookups are charged on top, one per record Florida resolves. A plate transfer can spend three of them:

Record	When
The vehicle you are registering	When you check the VIN — again only if you check a different one
The customer	When you look the buyer up
The vehicle the plate is on today	Every plate transfer checks the plate it comes from — once per plate

That third one is worth knowing about, because it is the one that is unique to this transaction. The filing has to name the registration the plate is moving from, so the plate’s current vehicle gets looked up whether or not you went looking for it. It is charged again only for a different plate.

Tip

Searching for the buyer by license plate answers two questions with one lookup: it finds the customer and it fills in the plate number for the Tag step. If you have the plate number in front of you, use it.

Note

Prices differ by dealership, so this article does not print any. The Transaction Type screen shows your current transaction fee, and expanding What is a record lookup? on that same screen shows your lookup price and which lookups this transaction can spend.

Step by step

Six screens. The only part of the wizard you never see is Title work — a plate transfer does no title work at all.

Phase	Screen	What it settles
Your vehicle	Transaction Type	Pick Metal Plate Transfer
Your vehicle	Vehicle	The VIN of the car the plate is moving to
Owners	Buyer	The person the plate belongs to
Registration	Tag	Which plate is moving
Registration	Insurance	The policy on the new vehicle
Finish	Review	The checklist and Issue

Caution

The transaction type locks once the transaction has started with the state. Changing your mind afterwards means starting a new registration.

The vehicle is the new one

The Vehicle step says so on screen: a metal plate transfer moves a customer’s plate from one vehicle to another, so the VIN you enter here is the new vehicle’s. Press Check Florida and the rest of the vehicle arrives filled in where Florida has a record of it.

The buyer is the plate’s owner

Before the search opens, the Buyer step asks whether you know the license plate number being transferred.

• Yes, I have the plate number — the search is fixed to License Plate Number. Finding the plate finds its owner and sets the plate for the Tag step in one go.
• No, search another way — look the customer up by driver license, name and birth date, customer number, SSN, or for a business by FEIN or company name.

Caution

The buyer must already be on file with Florida. If your search finds nothing and you start entering a new customer, the transaction will refuse: a customer being created by this very transaction cannot already hold a Florida plate, so there is nothing to transfer. If you genuinely have the right person and Florida cannot find them, there is no plate to move and this is not the transaction you need.

The plate owner — do you know the license plate number being transferred?

Yes, I have the plate numberrecommended

Searching by the plate finds its owner and sets the plate for the Tag step

No, search another way

Look the customer up by license, name, or customer number

IllustrationThe Buyer step opens with one choice: do you know the plate number being transferred? Yes is marked recommended, and its description is the part worth reading — searching by the plate both finds its owner and sets the plate for the Tag step, so answering yes saves a step later.

The Tag step

Enter the plate number — letters and digits only, no spaces or dashes. Show the plates on file lists the plates Florida has under this buyer, so you can pick rather than type.

If the plate you entered is not among them you get a warning, not a refusal:

Florida does not list this plate under this buyer’s records, so the transfer will be rejected as it stands.

Two things cause that, and they are worth checking in this order. First, a typo in the plate number. Second — and far more often — the buyer holds more than one Florida record, and the plate sits on the older one. The fix for that is to go back to the Buyer step and search by license plate instead of by driver license, so the registration is built on the record the plate is actually attached to.

The warning is advisory because the ownership search does not always return everything, so an absent plate is not proof. But it is usually right.

Insurance

Required, on the new vehicle. Only a few vehicle types are allowed to go uninsured, and a car is not one of them.

If it will not let you continue

What it says	What to do
Search Florida to find this owner before continuing	The buyer step needs a real Florida customer; run the search
All Buyers of this vehicle are being created in Florida’s system by this transaction	Florida has no record of this customer, so they hold no plate. Find their existing record — a plate that does not exist cannot be moved
License Plate Number required	Enter the plate being moved
License Plate Number must be alphanumeric	Remove spaces and dashes — Florida rejects the filing otherwise

Note

“Plate is not on file for this buyer” is a warning, not a stop. The app will let you carry on, because the ownership search caps its results and an absent plate is not proof. But if the plate really is not on that buyer’s record, Florida will reject the filing — so check for a typo, and try searching the buyer by plate instead of by license before you continue.

The setup problems that stop any Florida filing — an unverified dealership, a missing license PIN, an expired driver license on the person signed in — are listed with their fixes in Creating a Temporary Tag Registration.

After you finish

The Documents tab carries the new Registration for the plate, plus an Insurance Affidavit when you entered an insurance company. Use Print PDF for the lot, or the Print button under a document; the send button beside it emails or WhatsApps it to the customer.

If something was wrong, the same-day void deadline applies. The rules are the same as for a temporary tag — see Editing or Canceling Temporary Tags.

If you want to know what the state will charge on a deal before you file anything, that is a different transaction — see Fee Quotes.