UCR Registration Every Carrier Owes

6 min

49 CFR §367.50

An annual fee set by fleet size, in six brackets from $46 for 0-2 vehicles to $44,836 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.

Low-poly render of a blank sign gantry at a state line
Crossing a state line is what puts a carrier into the registration.

The fee brackets

BracketVehiclesCarrier feeBroker / leasing
B10-2$46$46
B23-5$138$46
B36-20$276$46
B421-100$963$46
B5101-1,000$4,592$46
B61,001 and above$44,836$46

These are the fees for registration years beginning in 2025 and each subsequent year, as the section stands. The UCR board proposes fee changes and they take effect by rulemaking — check the section itself before budgeting a future year.

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 $46 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.

Sources

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