How to register a car in Belgium

After 6 months since arriving in Belgium (and getting your residency and ID card fixed), you are obliged to register your car in Belgium. That means that if you are stopped in police in foreign car, but you are in country for more than 6 months, you can get a nice ticket. What makes the whole experience a hard and annoying is the fact that you need to go and fill out so many forms and that most office hours are during your working time anyway. It is even harder there are only few people who actually know how the process go, and you will need a lot of effort to convince people to do their job as they are suppose to. But lets start from the beginning.

Importing your old car in Belgium

First you will need a pink form and a lot of coper change. That form is obtained from the Import office and for it you need your Belgian permit (e-card), invoice for the car and registration form from EU country. To get that form you need 0.08 EUR!
And they only take cash!

Getting insurance for your car in Belgium

This is one of the trickier parts. You need to get the sticker/stamp from insurance BEFORE you go to DIV to pick registration. Most insurances will try to get registration before giving you that stamp but you need to be firm. What is even more strange is that in Belgium you do not have nice websites to receive insurance offers. You will need to manually contact each and every insurance company you can find on internet. I will leave this to your Googling skills.

Get registration (but not plates) from DIV for your car in Belgium

Now you should go to DIV to get registration. Do not worry - you will not need any money, and what is more funny they will take your old registration papers, but will not give you the new papers in return as you get them by post. Also no plates for your car will be handed to you. Expect postman next day and again prepare cash for registration plates. It was around 40 EUR, but you might be more safe to ask. The funny part when you will open the package from DIV is that you get 1 (one, single) plate. In Belgium you receive one plate from government and that one should go on back of the car, but after you go to any standard/local auto service and they will make you the second plate for like 10 EUR. Now you got your plates and registration papers, but except for plates you did not pay anything right?

Payment for registration in Belgium

I have received an invoice for my registration in Belgium more than 2 months later. And there was 2 months period until payment...

No idea how the Bureaucratic Centre of Europe is soooo bad at handling papers and has such a manual process for such a simple task. What was even more funny is that they have never confirmed that we are really owners of the car at our home country, they just checked the papers and that was it. Playing on plain trust.

Newest from this category: