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Which distintivo ambiental does a petrol vehicle get?

Spain's badge is the distintivo ambiental, and which one you get is decided by your emissions class and what kind of vehicle it is — not by its age. This is the table for a petrol.

A petrol car or van needs Euro 4 or better for a C, and Euro 3 gets a B. The same engine in a bus or a truck over 3.5t needs Euro VI for that C — Euro 4 and 5 are only a B there. Anything older than Euro 3 gets no badge at all.

Find your Euro standard, then your row

Emissions classCarM1Van up to 3.5tN1Bus or coachM2 / M3Over 3.5tN2 / N3Motorbike or mopedL
Euro 1Ano badgeAno badgeAno badgeAno badgeAno badge
Euro 2Ano badgeAno badgeAno badgeAno badgeB
Euro 3BBAno badgeAno badgeC
Euro 4CCBBC
Euro 5CCBBnot enumerated
Euro 6CCCCnot enumerated
We can tell you what the rules say. Only the DGT can tell you what your plate actually holds. Every criterion in the regulation is written as “clasificados en el Registro de Vehículos como…” — the badge is a property the DGT records against your registration number in its own vehicle register, not something you or we derive from a rule. So this table tells you what your vehicle should be classed as. Look the real answer up free against your plate on the DGT site before you rely on it. That is a genuine difference from France, where the Crit'Air vignette follows a published date table anyone can read off, and from Germany, where the group is printed in the vehicle document you already hold.
The category is not a detail — it changes the badge. A petrol Euro 5 is a C as a car and a B as a vehicle over 3.5t. The light rows (M1, N1) and the heavy rows (M2, M3, N2, N3) are written separately in the regulation, and the heavy ones are stricter.
Motorhomes: we can't pick your row for you, and it matters. The regulation says nothing about how a motorhome is categorised — that lives in EU type-approval law, not here. As an M1 a petrol Euro 4 or 5 motorhome is a C; as an M2 or M3 the identical vehicle is only a B. Which applies is whatever the Registro de Vehículos records against your plate — it's on your ficha técnica. We'd rather point you at it than guess, because a guess here is the difference between driving into Madrid's centre and a fine.

Hybrids, gas and electric

This table covers pure petrol and diesel. Three things sit outside it:

Where this table comes from

Transcribed from Anexo II, apartado E of the Reglamento General de Vehículos (RD 2822/1998), “Clasificación de los vehículos por su potencial contaminante”, as added by the Orden PCI/810/2018, de 27 de julio and read from the BOE consolidated text at boe.es. Nothing here is inferred, and the table is generated by the same classifier the city pages use, gated by 194 boundary tests.

One honest gap: the regulation lists only Euro 3 and Euro 4 for L-category vehicles, because the 2018 order predates Euro 5 for motorcycles. Rather than extrapolate, those cells read not enumerated. The DGT issues a C in practice — but practice isn't what we assert from.

Where to get one

The distintivo is a physical sticker for your windscreen, tied to the plate, sold through Correos and authorised outlets including gestorías and some ITV stations. It costs a few euros. We don't sell them and never will — any site charging a premium is a middleman. Foreign-registered vehicles can be classified under the same criteria, which apartado E.1 states explicitly.

The other fuel