About CarPaintCode

CarPaintCode is a free reference for car owners, body shops and paint suppliers: factory paint codes by make, model and year, with a screen swatch, the models that share each code, and where to find the code on the car.

How the data is kept

Paint codes, colour names and model years are compiled from public listings and reference catalogues. We group the listings into one page per make and code, check names against the colour family of the swatch, and flag listings that do not agree. Code-location guides and all page text are written by us.

Screen swatches are approximations: monitors, light and the age of the paint all change how a colour looks. Always confirm the code on your car's label, or ask a dealer, before buying paint.

How we verify

Listings are compiled data, so some will be wrong. These are the checks we run, and what each marker on a page means.

• Colour against name. If the swatch contradicts the colour name, the swatch is hidden.
• One code, one colour. When the sources list the same code for clearly different colours (for example a black and a brown), each colour gets its own page with a warning, instead of being merged into one list of aliases.
• Years against production. Model years are the overlap of the code's years with the model's production years (Wikipedia, cited on each model page) and are never earlier than the make's first model year.
• OEM-verified against the manufacturer. The marker appears only on pages where we opened a manufacturer's own document (a price list or brochure published by the carmaker) and found the same code listed there for the same colour. Carmakers rename colours by market and year and Audi prints its paint numbers in a longer form (A2A2 for the code A2), so the name or format on the page can differ from the one in the document; the OEM code, its printed name and the source are shown on the page.

Status today: 60 of 11,983 code pages carry the OEM-verified marker. Every other page is unverified: treat its code as a lead to check on your car, not as a guarantee.

Verification is done make by make, starting with the most used codes; this list grows as sources are checked.

Corrections

Found a wrong code, name or year? Tell us through the contact page with the make, model, year and, if you can, a photo of the label.