History of laminated cards in US driver's licenses

The laminated plastic driver's license is so familiar that it is easy to forget it is a relatively recent development. Paper licenses persisted in some states well into the 1980s, and the shift to laminated plastic cards happened unevenly across the country over roughly two decades.

Before lamination

Early driver's licenses were paper documents, sometimes folded to wallet size, with typed or handwritten information. Some states used accordion-fold designs with photo attached. These were easy to alter — a determined person with a typewriter and some photo paper could modify most of them.

Lamination was initially added to existing paper formats — a paper card sealed between clear plastic sheets. This provided some protection against alteration but the laminate itself could be peeled and resealed, which became a known fraud method. The limitation was that the paper was still fundamentally alterable once you got through the outer layer.

Integrated plastic cards

The transition to cards where the substrate itself was plastic — rather than paper in a plastic sleeve — started in the early to mid-1980s in larger states. California and New York were among the earlier adopters. The plastic substrate made alteration much harder because the personal data was printed into or onto the card material rather than on a piece of paper that could be replaced.

Many rural states maintained older formats through the late 1980s because upgrading the entire licensing infrastructure required capital investment that was harder to justify for low-volume DMV offices. Some states that transitioned late ended up with more modern designs because they skipped the intermediate technology generations.

The hologram addition

Holographic overlays came in the 1990s as an additional layer on top of the laminated plastic format. This added the optically variable element that has since become standard. The transition from flat-laminate cards to holographic overlay cards happened throughout the decade at different times in different states, creating a period where both formats were in legitimate circulation simultaneously.