WASHINGTON — Federal regulators have approved a 25% increase in fees collected by states from motor carriers, brokers and leasing companies that are used to pay for state highway safety programs.
The fee increase in the Unified Carrier Registration (UCR) Plan for the 2025 registration year, announced on Friday by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, amounts to approximately $9 to $9,000 more per year that carriers will pay, depending on the size of their fleet (see table). The fee per entity for a broker or leasing company is $46.
“The agency notes the rare occurrence of this upward adjustment, which has only previously occurred once, over a decade ago,” FMCSA stated in a final rule approving the increase.
“This upward adjustment … follows two years of reductions in fees affecting the 2023 and 2024 registration years, averaging a 37.3 percent decrease in fees, as well as steady, unmodified collections from 2010 to 2017. The agency believes this recalibration of fees is reasonable and in accordance with the structure of, and obligations created by, the statute.”
| Power units | 2024 fee | 2025 fee | $ change | % change |
| 0-2 | $37 | $46 | $9 | +24.3 |
| 3-5 | $111 | $138 | $27 | +24.3 |
| 6-20 | $221 | $276 | $55 | +24.9 |
| 21-100 | $769 | $963 | $194 | +25.2 |
| 101-1,000 | $3,670 | $4,592 | $922 | +25.1 |
| 1,001+ | $35,836 | $44,836 | $9,000 | +25.1 |
The UCR, and the 41 states that participate in the agreement, establish and collect fees that can be used at the discretion of the individual states, but are typically used for truck safety programs, enforcement, and administering the UCR.
After FMCSA proposed the fee increase in January – based on a recommendation from UCR Plan administrators – it received 66 comments, many of whom considered the fees to be unwarranted and believed the UCR Plan should be adjusting its own budget and spending instead.
“To FMCSA’s knowledge, the UCR Plan has operated within its approved budget and in recent years has steadily decreased registration fees,” the agency responded.
“In fact, this is the first upward adjustment since 2010. The UCR Plan’s approved allocation for the costs of administration of the Plan and Agreement over the last several years decreased from $5 million per year and is now at $4.25 million. For these reasons, FMCSA declines to modify the final rule in response to the commenters’ suggested changes.”
The total state funding entitlement under the UCR program has been set at approximately $108 million for 2025. The program collects this amount in the form of UCR fees from transportation businesses and then distributes the respective entitlement to each participating state. Those entitlements range from $7.5 million for Michigan to $372,007 for North Carolina, according to UCR Plan documents.
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