Subaru
Where is the paint code on a Subaru?
Under the hood, on the strut tower or firewall plate — Subaru does not put the paint code on the door jamb.
Step by step
- Open the hood and look at the driver's side strut tower and the firewall.
- Find the small metal or foil plate carrying the model and colour codes.
- The paint code is the three-character entry, often labelled COLOR CODE or COLOR NO.
- On some model years the plate is on the passenger side instead — check both.
If the sticker is missing or faded
- Genuine Subaru touch-up part numbers embed the code — part J361SAJ090A1 is Carbide Gray, code K6U.
- Any Subaru dealer parts desk can look the code up from your VIN.
Is the paint code in the VIN?
No. A VIN does not encode paint color. We checked this directly against the US government's vehicle database (NHTSA vPIC): a VIN decode returns 140 fields, and none of them is exterior color or paint code.
A dealer can look your color up from your VIN because it is recorded on the build sheet held by the manufacturer — but it cannot be read out of the seventeen characters themselves. Any site claiming to decode paint color from a VIN alone is either querying a build-record database or guessing.