UCR Registration Every Carrier Owes

2026-09-04Updated 2026-10-186 min read

An annual fee set by fleet size. For the 2027 registration year, open since 1 October 2026, it runs in six brackets from $55 for 0-2 vehicles to $54,165 for 1,001 and above. Brokers and leasing companies pay the bracket-one fee whatever their size.

Low-poly render of a blank sign gantry at a state line — A state line, an annual fee, and a database an officer can read in seconds.

Who has to file

Motor carriers, private carriers, freight forwarders, brokers and leasing companies operating in interstate commerce. Not just for-hire carriers, and not just the ones with authority: a private fleet crossing a state line with its own goods files UCR the same as a common carrier.

Filing is annual and the registration year opens in the autumn for the following year. It is done once, in your base state, and covers every state in the agreement.

The fee brackets

Bracket	Vehicles	Carrier fee, 2027	Broker / leasing
B1	0-2	$55	$55
B2	3-5	$167	$55
B3	6-20	$333	$55
B4	21-100	$1,163	$55
B5	101-1,000	$5,548	$55
B6	1,001 and above	$54,165	$55

Those are the fees you pay when you file now. Registration for 2027 opened on 1 October 2026. FMCSA adopted the UCR board's recommended increase on 1 September 2026 (91 FR 56063, effective 1 October 2026): a new §367.50 carries these fees for the 2027 registration year and every year after it, an average rise of about 20 percent.

The 2025 and 2026 registration years

A carrier still settling 2026 pays the older table. It lives in §367.40 from 1 October 2026 — until then the same table sat in §367.50, and FMCSA renumbered it in the same final rule rather than changing it.

Bracket	Vehicles	Carrier fee, 2025–2026	Broker / leasing
B1	0-2	$46	$46
B2	3-5	$138	$46
B3	6-20	$276	$46
B4	21-100	$963	$46
B5	101-1,000	$4,592	$46
B6	1,001 and above	$44,836	$46

The UCR board proposes fee changes and they take effect by rulemaking — check the section itself before budgeting a year beyond these two tables.

Counting your vehicles

The count is the number of commercial motor vehicles you operated in interstate commerce, taken from your most recent biennial update. That is a helpful anchor and a trap in equal measure: a carrier that grew from two trucks to six and never updated its registration is filing in the wrong bracket, and the correction arrives with the arrears.

Because the count comes off the biennial update, keeping that update honest is cheaper than fixing UCR later. See the biennial schedule.

How it is enforced

There is no sticker and no certificate to carry. Enforcement is a database lookup: an officer runs the USDOT number and sees whether the year is paid. Several states enforce it hard at scales, and a fine for an unpaid registration that would have cost $55 is a bad afternoon.

Pair the UCR renewal with the insurance renewal and the biennial update on one calendar. All three are cheap, all three are annual or biennial, and all three stop the truck when they lapse.