KEA number plates are showing up on Kenyan roads

Kenyan motorists have started posting photographs of number plates beginning with KEA. That is the opening combination of a new registration generation, and it means the KD series, which has covered private vehicles registered since 2020, has run out.

NTSA has published no notice about the switch, and we have not found one on its website or its social accounts. Registration series in Kenya usually change without ceremony, when the previous one is exhausted.

Here is how the sequence works. A civilian plate is three letters, three digits, then one letter, as in KDA 001A. The digits and the final letter cycle first, so KDA runs from 001A all the way to 999Z before KDB opens. When the third letter reaches Z, the whole generation is done and the second letter moves on. The Star’s history of Kenyan plates records KAA starting in 1989, KBA in 2007, KCA in 2014 and KDA in 2020. KEA is the sixth generation.

The KD run went quickly at the end. In February 2026 the Motorists Association of Kenya said printing problems were already hitting the KDV, KDW, KDX, KDY and KDZ plates. Five letters were left six months ago. They are gone now.

The timing is uncomfortable for NTSA, because the Authority still cannot print the plates it has already been paid for. Director General Nashon Kondiwa told Citizen TV in June that he found a backlog of more than 30,000 plates that motorists had paid for and that were never printed, and that he had cleared 5,000 in three months. In July, Murang’a Senator Joe Nyutu asked the Senate roads committee to examine NTSA’s production capacity and the county-by-county pile of pending applications. We have already written about why the real problem behind the backlog is not the printing press but where the money goes.

The green plates on boda bodas are a different thing

The other plates people are spotting are green, and they are mostly on electric motorbikes. Those came out of the National Electric Mobility Policy launched on 3 February 2026, which put every electric vehicle on its own plate.

They are not the green KD plates dealers use to move unregistered stock, and they are not the green plates county enforcement vehicles carried. When we covered the policy launch we flagged that the perks promised to EV owners back in 2024 still had not arrived, and that officials at the same event gave two different totals for how many EVs Kenya has registered.

If you register a car now, it gets a KEA plate. The thing to watch is whether NTSA says anything at all about the new series, and whether KEA plates reach owners any faster than the KDZ ones did.