New Mexico complies with federal regulations requiring all motor vehicles in the United States to be registered. Motor vehicles including trucks, motor homes, buses, trailers, passenger cars, motorcycles, and off-highway vehicles must be registered. When a registration expires, you must renew it.

Before you can register a vehicle for the first time, you’ll need to title it. After this, the vehicle is available to be registered several times. You can update a vehicle’s registration if the vehicle changes ownership or details about the current registration need to be changed.

License plates also need to be registered. New Mexico offers a wide variety of license plates, including:

  • Standardized license plates
  • Personalized license plates
  • License plates for causes and organizations
  • Handicapped license plates
  • Collegiate license plates
  • License plates for emergency responders
  • Vintage and historical license plates
  • Veterans and active military license plates
  • Motorcycle license plates

Performing a License Plate Owner Lookup

There are multiple reasons you may need to find the registered owner of a vehicle, accidents and suspicious activity is the most common. To file an official request for information, you’ll need to use the website of the New Mexico Motor Vehicle Department. The MVD assumes all responsibilities usually carried out by a DMV in other states.

The MVD website has all of the forms you need to fill out to request information about a vehicle. You must print these forms and submit them in-person. Unfortunately, this isn’t always an efficient way of obtaining information. Lines at the MVD can be long, and requests can sometimes take several days to process. Most people don’t have the time or energy to go to the MVD any more than necessary.

Fortunately, there’s still a way to perform a reverse license plate lookup: using an online public database. Online public databases store public information about people and vehicles, but they’re maintained by outside third parties rather than the government which will make it easier to find the owner of a car.

To look up a license plate using an online database, first you’ll be required to make an account on the database of your choice. Then you’ll need to pay any associated fees, and after that you can use the search tools to find information about the vehicle. A license plate can yield information about the vehicle’s history, VIN, the current owner, and even whether or not the vehicle has ever been reported stolen.

If you can’t afford to pay a fee, this website allows you to perform a license plate lookup completely free of charge. If you need to get in touch with the owner, a second search for their name will often yield a phone number or email address.