The barcode on the back of a U.S. driver’s license holds almost everything printed on the front: your full legal name, date of birth, address, physical description, license number, issue and expiration dates, class, restrictions, endorsements, and a few administrative codes. It’s stored as plain text in a format called PDF417, and any compatible scanner can read it in a second. So when people ask what information is on a driver’s license barcode, the short answer is: the visible card data, unencrypted, in a standardized layout.
The Full List of Data in the Barcode
The American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) sets the design standard that every U.S. state and Canadian province follows, which is why a scanner in one jurisdiction can read a license from another without any trouble.1American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators. AAMVA DL/ID Card Design Standard 2025 The standard specifies the mandatory fields each jurisdiction has to encode.2American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators. Driver License and Identification Standards
- Full legal name, date of birth, gender, height, eye color, and hair color.
- Residential address: street, city, state, and ZIP code. Some states encode a separate mailing address when it differs from the residential one.
- Driver’s license number, issue date, expiration date, and license class.
- Restrictions (such as a corrective-lens requirement) and endorsements (such as a motorcycle endorsement).
- For younger cardholders, the date they turn 21, so retailers can verify age at a glance.
- Organ donor status.
- A document discriminator, a unique number tied to the specific issuance of your card that’s used to confirm the physical document is genuine.
Individual states can also encode jurisdiction-specific fields on top of the AAMVA core set, but the fields above show up consistently across every compliant license.
What’s Not in the Barcode
Your photo is not in the barcode. The PDF417 format caps out at roughly 1,100 bytes of data capacity, which isn’t enough room for even a compressed thumbnail. The photo is printed on the card and stored in your state DMV’s database, but a scan of the barcode doesn’t return it.
Your Social Security number isn’t there either. Your state DMV may have your SSN on file, but the AAMVA standard doesn’t include it as a barcode data element. Fingerprints and other biometric identifiers aren’t in the barcode either. If someone scans your license, they aren’t pulling your SSN or your biometrics out of it.
The Data Isn’t Encrypted
This part surprises most people. The AAMVA standard requires that all mandatory and optional barcode data stay unencrypted.3American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators. 2020 AAMVA DL/ID Card Design Standard It’s a deliberate design choice: the whole system depends on any authorized scanner being able to read any state’s license without needing a decryption key. An officer in Florida has to be able to scan a license issued in Oregon, and the only way that works everywhere is if the data is in plaintext.
States are allowed to encrypt jurisdiction-specific data stored in a separate subfile or on a different storage medium like a chip, but the standard barcode fields are not encrypted.3American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators. 2020 AAMVA DL/ID Card Design Standard A free barcode-scanning app on a phone can read every field listed above. That isn’t a hack; it’s how the system was designed.
So when you hand your license to a bouncer, a hotel clerk, or a store cashier who scans it, that scan can capture your full name, home address, date of birth, and license number in one swipe. Whether they’re allowed to store or use that data is a separate question.
Who Scans Your Barcode
Law enforcement scans licenses during traffic stops to auto-populate citation forms and check databases for warrants or suspended-license flags.2American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators. Driver License and Identification Standards Retailers and bars scan for age verification on alcohol and tobacco sales; the scan is faster than reading the printed date and catches some fake IDs where the printed information doesn’t match the encoded data. Pharmacies, rental car companies, and banks also scan during identity checks. Scanning software can flag fakes whose data layout doesn’t match the issuing state’s standard format.
What Scanners Are Allowed to Do With the Data
The federal Driver’s Privacy Protection Act (DPPA) restricts how state DMVs share personal information from motor vehicle records, including fields that overlap with the barcode: name, address, phone number, SSN, driver identification number, photograph, and medical or disability information.4Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 U.S. Code 2725 – Definitions The DPPA limits disclosure to specific permitted uses, including law enforcement operations, vehicle safety recalls, court proceedings, insurance underwriting, and situations where you’ve given written consent.5Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 U.S. Code 2721 – Prohibition on Release and Use of Certain Personal Information From State Motor Vehicle Records
The DPPA governs the DMV as a data source. It doesn’t directly regulate the bartender or clerk who scans the physical card in front of you. That’s a gap filled, unevenly, by state law. Some states prohibit businesses from storing or compiling databases from scanned license data. Others limit scanning to specific permitted purposes like age verification. Many states still have no specific restrictions on commercial barcode scanning at all, so what a business can legally do with your scanned data depends heavily on where you are.
Mobile Driver’s Licenses Share Less
If you use a mobile driver’s license (mDL) stored in a smartphone wallet, the data-sharing picture changes. An mDL can share only the specific piece of information the situation requires: for an age check, it can confirm “over 21” without disclosing your name, address, or license number. TSA accepts eligible mDLs at participating airport checkpoints, though it still recommends carrying a physical ID as backup, and the eligible credential must be based on a REAL ID-compliant license.6Transportation Security Administration. Participating States and Eligible Digital IDs Acceptance varies by state and wallet platform, so the physical card and its unencrypted barcode remain the fallback that every scanner can read.