Adding a foreign licence plate

Paid parking by licence plate in the Netherlands works for cars from abroad too. You add such a car exactly the way you add a Dutch one, with one difference: you first pick the country of the plate. There is no separate field for it: the country picker sits inside the plate field itself, with the flag and the country code on the left, just like a phone number field.

Which countries you can pick

Besides the Netherlands, the picker knows five countries: Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Poland. If your car's country is not among them, you cannot add the vehicle and you cannot pay for parking with the app. Contact support in that case before you drive off; use the ticket machine in the meantime.

How to add a foreign plate

Mind the spelling

Copy every letter and digit from the plate, including a regional prefix such as on German plates ("B" for Berlin) and including umlauts. Leave out dashes, spaces and the country sticker; the field strips those itself. So a Belgian plate 1-ABC-123 is entered as 1ABC123. Each country has its own length: a Belgian plate is 2 to 8 characters, a German one 2 to 8, a Luxembourg one 4 to 6, a Swiss one 3 to 8 and a Polish one 4 to 8.

What works the same

A foreign car gets a name like any other, can be set as the default and can only have one parking action at a time. Removing works the same too: hand the hire car back and take it out of your list, see Removing a vehicle.

The other way round it does not work: SimplePark only operates in the Netherlands. A foreign plate parks here fine, but you cannot pay in Belgium or Germany with the app. Where the app does work is in Where you can park with SimplePark.

If a foreign car does get a fine, the municipality sends it to the registered keeper in the country of registration. Check under Activities whether the plate, country, zone and time are right.