Information on CBE service delivery Bulgaria

Functional contact: CBEc.pointBG@mvr.bg
Technical contact:

Main characteristics of the Bulgarian vehicle register:

  • In Bulgaria the license plate is always registered to a vehicle and need not be changed with the change of holder/ownership
  • The registration number is unique (with few exceptions due to old standard) and is not reusable – once returned, it is never used  again. And by  “Old standard” it means  that registration plates issued before the year 2000, when the current standard was adopted, had to be returned to registration authorities up to 01.01.2008 by their owners, but they weren’t until now.
  • Regular registration numbers contain regional code  (i.e. correspond to the district of registration of the owner) and have to be changed with the change of  district of registration of the old/new owner .
  • Transit and special registration numbers do not contain any regional code.
  • There are 3 regional codes for regular plates – С, СС and СТ, that duplicate letters for special plates for diplomats. This results in not unique plates.
  • It’s possible to purchase a personalized number plate, but when such plate is attached to a vehicle during the process of registration, it can’t be used for another one.
  • Both the holder and the owner of the vehicle are kept in the Bulgarian register and will be returned.
    Exceptions  are the old data  – for such vehicle there’s no information about holder and sometimes about the owner. “Old data” means vehicle whose last registration was prior to December 2003, when the Bulgarian vehicle register was set up after transformation of the current vehicles.
  • The information about the vehicle and its holder/ownership are returned upon the reference date and time (historical). The information about the personal/company name and the address of the holder/owner is the current information (when known), otherwise it’s the last known information (response is accompanied with corresponding “last known” message).
  • Historical data concern the vehicles and its holder/ownership (returned upon the reference date and time).
  • For vehicles or license plates reported stolen, the message = INFORMATION NOT DISCLOSED ; with Message Variable = Vehicle or license plates stolen (upon reference date-time) will be returned
  • The owner/holder information  and addresses returned by Bulgaria are all in Cyrillic

Additional Information:

  • At the first stage of technical implementation of the Directive 2011/82 Bulgaria will use only “single request” functionality.
  • Bulgaria plans using of multiple request functionality when they are ready with optimizing of our information systems. Therefore, Bulgaria have not scheduled a time frame for sending multiple CBE requests yet
  • Bulgaria will respond to multiple requests twice a day; scheduled times: 22:00 – 23:30 and 01:00 – 05:00 (local time).  These times can be changed after analysis of the CBE load in their production environment.
  • Bulgaria expects to send 120.000 requests (request ID’s ) per year
  • Bulgaria will be using all of the codes of traffic offences during the forthcoming exchange of information regarding the CBE Directive.

Data Overview (Restricted access)