Chinese VIN Year Code — Model Year from Position 10
The Chinese VIN year code is the tenth of the seventeen characters, and it encodes the model year on a cycle that repeats every thirty years. It follows the same international scheme as everywhere else, so a car built in Hefei and a car built in Wolfsburg in the same model year carry the same letter.
It is the character buyers most often misread, partly because five letters are missing from the sequence and partly because the model year a manufacturer assigns is not the same thing as the date the car came off the line.
How position 10 encodes the model year
Count ten characters from the left. That single character is the model year, assigned by the manufacturer when the vehicle is built and never changed afterwards.
Thirty values are in rotation: twenty-one letters followed by nine numerals. The letters ran through the 2010s and 2020s, and the numerals 1 to 9 covered 2001 to 2009. When the letters are exhausted after 2030, the numerals come back around.
Position 10 sits immediately after the check digit and immediately before the assembly plant code, so the easiest way to find it without miscounting is to locate the four-character run at positions 9 to 12 and read the second character of it.
The letters and numerals that are never used
I, O and Q are excluded from the entire VIN, so they cannot appear here either. Position 10 additionally omits U and Z, and it never uses the numeral 0.
That leaves A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, J, K, L, M, N, P, R, S, T, V, W, X and Y as the twenty-one usable letters, plus 1 to 9. Knowing which characters are impossible is a quick sanity check in itself: a 0 or a Q in position 10 means you have miscounted or misread the plate.
Year codes from 2001 to 2030
The numerals cover the first decade of the century: 1 is 2001, 2 is 2002, and so on in order through to 9 for 2009.
The letters then take over. A is 2010, B 2011, C 2012, D 2013, E 2014, F 2015, G 2016, H 2017, J 2018 and K 2019. L is 2020, M 2021, N 2022, P 2023, R 2024, S 2025 and T 2026. The sequence continues V 2027, W 2028, X 2029 and Y 2030, at which point the numerals return for 2031.
Model year confirmed. Mileage and accident history are the next questions: Check on ChinaVehicleHistory.com →
Model year is not the same as build date
Manufacturers roll a new model year forward before the calendar year turns. A vehicle assembled in October can already carry the following year's code, which is entirely normal and not a sign that anything has been altered.
The practical consequence is that a decoded year and a build plate date of manufacture can legitimately differ by a few months. What should not differ is the decoded year and the year recorded on the registration document. A gap of a full year or more there is worth investigating before you go further.
This gap has a price attached. Cars registered late in a model year, or held in stock and registered a year after they were built, are frequently advertised on the registration year rather than the model year. Reading position 10 yourself is the only way to know which of the two figures you are being quoted, and on a used listing the difference is routinely worth a four-figure sum.
The thirty-year repeat and how to resolve it
Because only thirty values exist, each one serves two vehicles thirty years apart. A is 1980 as well as 2010; L is 1990 as well as 2020.
In practice the ambiguity rarely bites on Chinese-built cars, because volume passenger-car production for export is a recent phenomenon and almost nothing in circulation predates the 1990s. Where it does need resolving, position 7 helps — on many manufacturers a letter rather than a numeral there indicates the later cycle — and the assembly plant code plus the model itself will settle it immediately.
Frequently asked questions
Which character is the year in a Chinese VIN?
The tenth, counting from the left. Positions 1 to 3 are the manufacturer identifier, 4 to 8 describe the vehicle, 9 is the check digit, and 10 is the model year immediately before the assembly plant code at position 11.
What is the 2026 model year code?
T. The sequence runs R for 2024, S for 2025, T for 2026 and V for 2027, since U is one of the letters skipped in this position.
Why is there no U or Z in the year position?
Both were excluded to reduce misreading — U against V, and Z against the numeral 2. Combined with the I, O and Q exclusions that apply across the whole VIN, this leaves twenty-one usable letters. The numeral 0 was dropped for the same reason, since it would otherwise be mistaken for the letter it replaced.
Can the year code be faked?
Altering it means re-stamping the plate, which usually leaves visible evidence and breaks the check digit at position 9. That is precisely why the checksum exists, and why the decoded year should always be cross-checked against the paperwork.