Most license plates in the United States are made by incarcerated workers inside state prison factories. Roughly 80 percent of plates issued nationwide come out of correctional industries programs, and the remaining share is split among private contractors, a handful of state-run government shops, and a small group of technology companies producing digital plates. So the short answer to who makes license plates is: mostly prisoners, working for pennies to a few dollars an hour, under contracts with their state’s motor vehicle agency.
Prison Factories Produce Most State Plates
Nearly every state runs some form of prison manufacturing program that stamps plates for its DMV. The arrangement is legal under what’s sometimes called the “state-use” system. Federal law makes it a crime to ship prison-made goods across state lines for commercial sale, but it carves out a broad exception for products made for government use.1Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 USC 1761 – Transportation of Prisoners’ Goods License plates fit squarely inside that exception, because the buyer is always a government agency.
Federal policy is open about the tradeoff. The Federal Acquisition Regulation calls meaningful employment “essential” to rehabilitation while warning that “care must be exercised to avoid either the exploitation of convict labor or any unfair competition between convict labor and free labor.”2Acquisition.GOV. Federal Acquisition Regulation Subpart 22.2 – Convict Labor The economics are hard to ignore. Wages for incarcerated manufacturing workers run from nothing in a few states to roughly $2 or $3 per hour at the high end, with most well under a dollar. Revenue from the plates usually flows back into the correctional system to offset incarceration costs and fund vocational programs.
At the federal level, the plates on postal trucks, military vehicles, and other federal fleet cars come from Federal Prison Industries, better known as UNICOR. UNICOR is a government corporation created by statute to employ federal inmates in manufacturing goods sold to federal agencies,3Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 USC 4121 – Federal Prison Industries; Board of Directors and it produces official U.S. Government plates under a memorandum of understanding with the General Services Administration.4eCFR. 41 CFR 102-34.125 – Where May We Obtain US Government License Plates UNICOR does not make state plates, though. Those come from each state’s own prison program.
How a Plate Actually Gets Made
The manufacturing process looks the same whether the workers are incarcerated or not. It starts with large coils of aluminum sheeting, typically 0.5 to 1.2 millimeters thick. The coil feeds through a machine that straightens and flattens the metal, and reflective film is laminated onto the surface. That film is what makes a plate glow back at headlights in the dark. The laminated sheets are cut into blanks of 12 inches by 6 inches, the dimension used by every U.S. jurisdiction under the AAMVA license plate standard.5American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators. License Plate Standard Edition 3
Then comes embossing. A hydraulic press stamps the plate number, state name, and design elements into the metal so the characters stand up above the surface. Workers heat-press colored foil onto those raised characters, which is what gives you the contrast you can read from the next lane over. The plates go through a quality check for alignment, reflective performance, and defects. Edges get smoothed. Mounting holes get punched. Done.
Private Suppliers and Full-Outsource Contractors
Even when a prison stamps the plate, private companies supply the materials that matter most. The reflective sheeting layer is a specialized product dominated by a handful of manufacturers. 3M produces reflective sheeting designed for multi-year outdoor use, built with lens elements enclosed in a transparent resin that enhances nighttime legibility.63M. 3M Reflective License Plate Sheeting Product Bulletin 3750/3750P Avery Dennison and a few other firms compete in the same market.7Federal Highway Administration. 2014 Traffic Sign Retroreflective Sheeting Identification Guide Without this layer, plates would be close to invisible to toll cameras and police scanners after dark.
Some states skip the prison system entirely and hand the whole plate operation to a private contractor. In those arrangements, one company stamps the metal, applies the design, and ships the finished plates directly to vehicle owners. Per-unit costs vary with design complexity and security features. A few states also outsource their specialty plate programs to private firms that run the ordering, production, and fulfillment for custom designs.
State-Run Government Shops
A small number of states produce plates inside government-operated shops staffed by regular civil-service employees rather than incarcerated workers. These shops usually sit inside a department of transportation or motor vehicle agency, and they tend to handle smaller runs, immediate-issue temporary plates, and specialty orders needing fast turnaround. Wages and benefits are standard, so per-plate costs are higher, but the state gets direct control over schedules and security.
Funding comes from legislative appropriations and a share of vehicle registration fees. The model avoids the ethical questions around prison labor while keeping production fully under government supervision. The tradeoff is price: a full manufacturing operation with salaried staff and government-maintained presses costs significantly more per plate than a correctional facility running the same equipment.
Specialty and Vanity Plates
Specialty plates tied to causes, universities, or organizations, along with personalized vanity plates, follow a slightly different path. You order them through your state’s motor vehicle agency, usually online or in person, and pay a fee that is often well above the cost of a standard plate. Part of that premium frequently goes to the group featured on the plate.
On the manufacturing side, specialty plates need extra design work and small-batch production. The base aluminum blank may still come from the same correctional or government facility that produces standard plates, but the custom graphics and colors require separate die setups and additional quality checks. In states that outsource specialty programs, a private vendor handles the whole workflow from design approval through shipping.
Digital Plate Manufacturers
A new category of plate maker has appeared as a few states start allowing electronic displays in place of stamped aluminum. Reviver, the most prominent company in this space, builds digital plates with a battery-powered screen that can update remotely to show current registration, display stolen-vehicle alerts, or change its look for fleet branding. As of mid-2024, only Arizona, California, and Texas (commercial vehicles only) had approved digital plates for road use.8Reviver. Are Digital License Plates Legal in Your State? Tracking the Digital Plate Roll Out
The price gap is wide. Reviver’s digital plate retails for around $899 plus an annual service fee for the connected features, while a traditional stamped plate costs a state only a few dollars to produce. Digital plates contain wireless modules and GPS hardware, which puts them under Federal Communications Commission rules on radio-frequency emissions. Adoption is still small, but the category is growing as more state legislatures take up bills to allow it.