Ford VIN Standards Overview

This page is a technical reference for how Ford Vehicle Identification Numbers are structured. It is the page the model guides link to when they mention the VIN standard, so it gathers the rules in one place.

Since the early 1980s, vehicles have used a 17 character VIN defined by international standards, principally the ISO standard that fixes the overall format and the way the check digit is calculated. Every character in a 17 character VIN is meaningful, and the letters I, O and Q are never used, because they are too easily confused with the numbers one and zero.

The 17 characters divide into three sections. The World Manufacturer Identifier is the first three characters and identifies the maker and country, so Ford codes such as 1FA, 1FT and 1FM point to Ford built cars, trucks and multipurpose vehicles in the United States, while WF0 covers Ford of Europe and other codes cover Ford’s plants in Australia, Asia and elsewhere. The Vehicle Descriptor Section is characters four through eight and carries the body style, the restraint system, the series and the engine. The ninth character is the check digit. The Vehicle Identifier Section is the last eight characters, where position ten is the model year, position eleven is the assembly plant, and the final six characters are the production sequence number.

The model year is encoded as a single character that follows a repeating cycle. Letters run through the alphabet, skipping the unused letters, and then numbers take over for a stretch before the cycle repeats roughly every thirty years, so the body style and plant are used as context to place a VIN in the correct cycle.

Before this standard, Ford used shorter identification numbers whose layout varied by era and market. These typically packed the model year, the plant, the body and the engine into fewer characters, and they have to be read with references specific to the year in question rather than the modern method.