Motor carrier classes by state
Maryland writes its haul-road rule into the weight statute itself. Once a vehicle’s gross maximum weight passes 73,000 pounds it may travel only on State highways — and it reaches a county road only while making a delivery or pickup, by the shortest available legal route. For a truck working out of a pit on a county road, that single sentence decides the route before dispatch does.
Aggregate hauling in Maryland is shaped less by a headline tonnage than by where a loaded truck is entitled to be. The statute that sets axle limits also sets a road-class rule, and the road-class rule is the one that reaches a working dump operation every day. It does not restrict a weight; it restricts a network.
The second thing that shapes the business here is a gross weight table nobody quotes, because it is short and unglamorous and it sits three subsections below the part everyone reads. Maryland caps gross weight by axle count in plain numbers, and the number attached to three axles is low enough that it governs the most common dump configuration on the road.
The third is surety. Maryland runs its hauling permit program through two distinct bond instruments and an insurance endorsement, and an operator who wants to be billed monthly rather than paying per permit is filing a bond to get there. That is unusual enough to be worth setting out carefully, because it is the part of the Maryland regime that lands directly on an agent’s desk rather than a dispatcher’s.
And there is a fourth thing, which reads backward at first. Maryland grants an axle allowance when the weather is bad. Not a restriction — an allowance, written into the same section as the weight limits, for a specific class of truck in two named counties. It is the inverse of the seasonal posting that governs aggregate work farther north, and it says something about how the General Assembly has chosen to legislate here.
Running Maryland aggregate above 73,000 pounds? Send the registered gross weights and the county roads the pits sit on — in Maryland those two facts together determine what the trucks are actually permitted to do.
Md. Code, Transportation § 24–108 is where Maryland puts its axle limits, and it is also where it puts a rule about roads. Subparagraph (a)(3)(i) provides that, except for three named exceptions, “any vehicle with a gross maximum weight in excess of 73,000 pounds may travel only on State highways, except while making a delivery or pickup, and then only when traveling by the shortest available legal route to or from the State highway for the purpose of making such delivery or pickup.”
Read what that permits and what it withholds. It does not forbid a heavy truck from a county road outright. It permits the county road only as an approach — the last leg to a pickup or a delivery, taken by the shortest available legal route. A heavy truck cannot use the county network as a through route, cannot take a shorter or quieter county alternative to a State highway, and cannot treat a county road as ordinary running surface between jobs.
For an aggregate operator that is the haul-road rule in everything but name. Quarries, sand pits, borrow pits and stockpiles are not generally sited on State highways. They are reached by county roads. So the first leg out of the pit and the last leg into the site are the two legs the statute is regulating, and every mile in between has to be on the State system for a truck running above 73,000 pounds.
The subparagraph then adds a sentence that applies to exactly one jurisdiction: “In Baltimore City, the shortest available legal route shall be only on designated truck routes.” In the city, the discretion to pick a shortest route disappears. The shortest route is whatever the truck route network says it is, which converts a driver’s routing judgment into a published map — and makes a wrong turn in Baltimore City a different kind of exposure from a wrong turn in a rural county.
None of this appears on a scale ticket. A truck can be entirely legal on every axle and still be in violation because of the road it is on, which is why a Maryland account benefits from a route discussion that a purely weight-focused review would skip.
The gross weight limits sit one section over, in Md. Code, Transportation § 24–109, and subsection (e) states them by axle count rather than by formula. Three or fewer axles: 55,000 pounds. Four axles: 66,000 pounds. Five axles, as provided for in § 13–916 or § 13–923 of the article: 80,000 pounds.
That first line does most of the work in a dump operation. A conventional tri-axle straight truck — the workhorse of Mid-Atlantic aggregate delivery — is a three-axle vehicle, and the statutory gross ceiling on it is 55,000 pounds. Not 80,000. Not a bridge-formula figure that rises with wheelbase. A flat 55,000, set by counting axles.
The bridge formula does exist in Maryland and it is set out in § 24–109(c) in the familiar form, with the two-consecutive-sets-of-tandems exception at 34,000 pounds each when the first and last axles are 36 feet or more apart, and with the whole thing capped at eighty thousand pounds “including any enforcement or statutory tolerances.” Subsection (d) then prints the full table by axle count and axle spread. But the formula governs groups of axles; subsection (e) governs the vehicle. A four-axle combination that computes to more than 66,000 pounds under the table still answers to the 66,000 in subsection (e).
The practical consequence is that payload in Maryland is bought with axles in visible, discrete steps, and each step is a different truck. Moving from three axles to four adds 11,000 pounds of statutory headroom; moving from four to five adds another 14,000. Those are equipment decisions with capital, registration and physical damage consequences attached, and they are made at purchase rather than at a permit counter.
One further line in the same section is worth knowing for a fleet that has started specifying idle-reduction equipment. Subsection (h) allows up to an additional 550 pounds in gross, axle, tandem or bridge formula weight for a vehicle using an auxiliary power unit or idle-reduction technology, conditioned on carrying written certification of the unit’s weight and proving by demonstration or certification that it is fully functional at all times — and the allowance may not exceed the unit’s certified weight.
The 73,000-pound road rule carries three exceptions, and all three are geographic rather than categorical. They are not classes of vehicle or classes of cargo. They are specific stretches of specific county roads, named in the statute, each with its own approval condition.
In Dorchester County, § 24–108(a)(3)(ii) provides that if approved by the local governing body and the State Highway Administration, a vehicle with a gross maximum weight in excess of 73,000 pounds may use the Linkwood Road when traveling between East New Market and Linkwood. Two approvals, one road, two endpoints.
In Garrett County, subparagraph (a)(3)(iii) lets the County Commissioners establish by ordinance the authorized gross maximum weight of a vehicle that has at least 6 axles, is a truck tractor and semitrailer combination, and is using any part of Table Rock Road and Wilson Run Road that is owned and maintained by the county — and provides that the weight so established “may not exceed 87,000 pounds.” The 87,000 is a ceiling on what the county may authorize, not a weight the statute itself grants, and it is available only to a six-axle tractor-semitrailer on two named roads.
In Washington County, subparagraph (a)(3)(iv) provides that if approved by the county governing body, a vehicle with a gross maximum weight not exceeding 95,000 pounds may use Warfordsburg Road from the Lanco–Pennland Dairy Cooperative cheese factory located at 14738 Warfordsburg Road to the Maryland–Pennsylvania border. The statute gives a street address as the origin point. It is the most narrowly drawn weight provision in the subtitle.
The reason to know these precisely, rather than as a general awareness that carve-outs exist, is that they are the shape of Maryland’s answer to a heavy-haul problem. Where another state would publish a designated heavy corridor or a commodity exemption, Maryland legislates a road and an approval. An operator whose route touches one of them is operating under an ordinance or an approval that can be checked; an operator whose route does not is under the 73,000-pound rule with no argument available.
We place Maryland aggregate and dump accounts, including tri-axle fleets registered under 73,000 pounds and permit haulers carrying SHA credit and performance bonds.
Maryland’s single-axle table in § 24–108(a)(1) runs in a direction that surprises people reading it for the first time. It is keyed not to the load on the axle but to the registered gross weight of the vehicle. A vehicle registered at 73,000 pounds or less gets a 22,400-pound single-axle maximum. A vehicle registered at more than 73,000 pounds gets 20,000.
So the heavier the registration, the tighter the per-axle number. The higher figure belongs to the lighter class, and an operator who raises a truck’s registered gross weight past 73,000 pounds accepts a 2,400-pound reduction on every single axle at the same moment the road rule in (a)(3)(i) takes hold. The two consequences arrive together, on the same registration decision, and neither one is announced at the scale.
Paragraph (a)(2) then caps the front axle of a vehicle combination separately, and caps it by equipment rather than by statute. Except for vehicles operated under a permit issued under § 24–112, the gross weight on the wheels of a front axle may not exceed the lesser of the sum of the rated load capacities for each tire on the axle, or the sum of the rated capacities the manufacturer indicates for each tire the vehicle is currently equipped with. The governing number is printed on the tire that is fitted today, which means a tire change can change a legal limit.
Registration is where all of this is recorded. Under § 24–110, the Administration registers each bus, truck, truck tractor, trailer or semitrailer for a maximum permissible gross weight within the limits of the subtitle, the registration card shows that gross weight, and where the vehicle is used in combination the card also shows separately the total permissible gross weight of the combination. The Administration may additionally issue a special plate showing those weights, which must then be attached and displayed at all times.
That gives a Maryland file a document worth reconciling. The registration card states the weight the owner asked for and the State granted. It can be read against the axle count that drives the § 24–109(e) ceiling, against the road rule that switches on above 73,000 pounds, and against what the operator says the trucks carry. Where those disagree, the disagreement is worth resolving before it is priced into physical damage or auto liability.
Maryland’s permit program is documented in the Maryland Oversize/Overweight Hauling Permit Manual, published by the State Highway Administration’s Motor Carrier Division and stamped on its cover “Permit Manual as of April 10, 2008.” It sets out two separate surety instruments plus an insurance endorsement, and they do different jobs.
The first is a credit instrument. The manual’s general information section explains that permits are paid for by check or money order unless a credit bond has been established, and that an operator who wants to charge to an account and be billed at the end of the month must “set up a credit bond in the amount of not less than $3,000.00.” It is a billing arrangement secured by surety. A fleet pulling permits continuously is a fleet that wants one; a fleet pulling two a year is not.
The second is a damage instrument, and it is not optional. The manual’s excessive-load requirements state flatly that “All excessive loads require a performance bond or a contractual liability bond.” Excessive is defined by threshold rather than by judgment: dimensions of 120 feet or more in length, 16 feet or more in width, 16 feet or more in height, or weight exceeding 150,000 pounds or 27,000 pounds on any axle on Interstate highways in Maryland, or exceeding 120,000 pounds or 27,000 pounds on any axle on Maryland State highways.
The performance bond form itself, SHA 74.2 HP 10A, binds the principal to comply with the permit’s terms, complete the permitted work to the Administration’s satisfaction, and save the State harmless from expense arising from noncompliance or from damage growing out of the principal’s negligence. The manual attaches a retention rule to it: the Hauling Permits Unit requires that a performance bond be kept on file for a minimum of 1 year from the date of the oversize or overweight move, described as office policy based on COMAR 11.04.03.02(d)(1–3), because damages from an excessive move may not surface immediately.
The alternative instrument is an endorsement rather than a bond, and its limit is fixed. The manual’s contractual liability clause has the insurer indemnify and hold harmless the State Highway Administration and the State of Maryland from all loss arising from damage to road beds and wearing surfaces of highways and structures used by the permittee, and to all sub-surface installations, signs and signals — and states that “the Company’s total limit of liability with respect to the insurance afforded by this endorsement shall not exceed an aggregate of $100,000.00.”
That aggregate is the number to carry into a coverage conversation, because it is an aggregate rather than a per-occurrence figure and it is the State’s recovery, not the permittee’s. An operator relying on the endorsement rather than a bond has capped what the State can recover through that route at $100,000.00 in total; it has not capped what the permittee owes. § 24–112(e) prohibits violating any condition of a permit, and the manual notes the Administration may also require a $200.00 fee for monitoring by a District Office representative and a $250.00 fee for escort by off-duty Maryland State Police Troopers, with 48 hours’ notice to the State Police required for a move. A general liability program written for a Maryland permit hauler should be read against those instruments rather than alongside them.
Northern aggregate states restrict axle weights when the subgrade thaws. Maryland has written the opposite instinct into the same statute, for a narrow class of truck in two named counties, and the trigger is the weather itself.
Section 24–108(c)(1) provides that in Anne Arundel County and Baltimore County, garbage and refuse trucks that make collections on a fixed route and are owned by or doing business with any governmental entity in the respective county are permitted rear axle load limit tolerances of 10 percent — but only if the overweight is due to bad weather, and only if the truck does not exceed its registered gross weight limit. Paragraph (2) adds that a privately owned truck gets the tolerance only while actually engaged in the business of the governmental entity.
Every clause in that is a condition. Two counties. Refuse collection on a fixed route. A governmental customer. Rear axle only. Ten percent. Weather as the cause. And the registered gross weight as a hard outer boundary that the tolerance does not lift. A dump operator does not qualify for it — the point of knowing it is what it reveals about how Maryland legislates in this area.
Maryland’s other axle tolerance runs on commodity rather than weather. Subsection (b) provides that except on Interstate highways, a vehicle carrying farm products as defined under § 10–601 of the Agriculture Article, or forest products, that have been loaded in fields or other off-highway locations is permitted an axle load limit tolerance of 10 percent. Section 24–109(g) layers a more detailed structure over the bridge formula for the same commodities — 5 percent generally, rising to 15 percent at harvest for wheat between June 1 and August 15, corn between July 1 and December 1, soybeans between September 1 and December 31 and vegetable crops between June 1 and October 31, with a 5 percent gross vehicle weight tolerance limited to travel within 100 miles of the loading point.
Sand, gravel, stone and fill appear in none of it. Maryland extends tolerance to agriculture, to forestry, and to municipal refuse in bad weather. Construction aggregate is not on the list, which means an aggregate hauler here runs to the plain limits with no commodity allowance to fall back on.
One enforcement detail keeps the tolerances from stacking. Under § 24–111(b)(3), if more than one statutory weight limit tolerance applies to a vehicle being weighed, the police officer “shall grant only the greatest applicable tolerance.” The largest one applies; they do not add.
Permit pricing is statutory rather than administrative at its base. Section 24–112 authorizes the Administration to issue oversize permits and overweight permits, and fixes floors on both: not less than $30 for an oversize permit, and for an overweight permit not less than $30 for the first 45 tons (90,000 pounds) or less of gross weight, plus $5 for each additional ton or part of a ton in excess of 45 tons. The Secretary may promulgate a fee schedule by rule, using amounts that recover but do not exceed the administrative costs of issuing and monitoring the permits.
The 2008 manual describes the same arithmetic in operational terms and adds the permit shapes it is charged against — a Special Hauling Permit issued for a specific load or vehicle, valid for a single trip one way for five days with the fee doubled for a ten-day return trip, and a Blanket Permit at $50.00 monthly or $500.00 yearly whose gross weight “may not exceed 80,000 pounds (40 Tons)” and whose overall dimensions may not exceed 75 feet long, 12 feet wide and 14 feet high. A blanket permit is therefore not a route to extra payload for an aggregate fleet; it stops exactly where the ordinary five-axle ceiling stops.
Every permit under § 24–112(d) must specify the maximum size or weight permitted, the route to be followed, and the date and hour on which the trip is to be made. Route and timing are permit conditions, not suggestions, and subsection (e) prohibits both violating a permit condition and moving a load that requires a permit without first obtaining it and having it in the person’s possession.
The penalty structure is escalating and it is per offense rather than per pound. A person convicted of violating § 24–112 faces a fine not exceeding $1,000 for a first offense, $2,000 for a second and $3,000 for a third or subsequent offense. The identical ladder appears in § 24–111(f) for refusing or failing to submit a vehicle to weighing or measuring when directed. Under § 24–111(d)(2) an officer may take the vehicle and its load into temporary custody to weigh and measure it, and under (d)(4) the driver is responsible for the actual costs incurred in doing so.
Section 24–111 also records how a Maryland stop can begin. The driver must submit to measurement or weighing when directed by a police officer with reason to believe the vehicle violates the subtitle, or “when directed by an electronic signal to a CVISN transponder” — the Commercial Vehicle Information Systems and Network program the Department manages with other State agencies. Operating on any Maryland highway is defined by subsection (c) as the consent of both driver and owner to that measurement and weighing. One last ceiling belongs here for completeness: § 24–109(i) caps the gross vehicle weight of a vehicle permitted under § 24–113.3 for a designated heavy weight port corridor at 100,000 pounds, which is the highest gross the subtitle contemplates and is a port program an aggregate fleet will not ordinarily touch.
The state minimum is a licensing threshold. The program an operator actually needs is built from these lines:
We write dump and aggregate hauling as a named class rather than as an exception to general trucking, and we read each account against the weight and permit regime of the state it operates in. For a Maryland operator that means starting from what the trucks are actually licensed and configured to carry, sizing physical damage to bodies and hoists rather than to a chassis value, and treating pit, stockpile and job-site work as its own exposure rather than an extension of the highway auto form.
If the operation also runs freight under separate authority, the Maryland trucking insurance page covers the state’s broader motor carrier picture, and the dump trucking insurance page covers the class mechanics that apply wherever the operator runs.
Only as an approach. Md. Code, Transportation § 24–108(a)(3)(i) provides that a vehicle with a gross maximum weight in excess of 73,000 pounds may travel only on State highways, except while making a delivery or pickup, and then only by the shortest available legal route to or from the State highway for that purpose. It cannot be used as a through route. In Baltimore City the statute adds that the shortest available legal route must be on designated truck routes.
55,000 pounds. Md. Code, Transportation § 24–109(e) sets gross weight by axle count: three or fewer axles at 55,000 pounds, four axles at 66,000, and five axles as provided for in § 13–916 or § 13–923 at 80,000. A conventional tri-axle straight dump is a three-axle vehicle, so the flat 55,000 governs it regardless of what the bridge formula table in § 24–109(d) would allow for its axle groups.
Because the table in § 24–108(a)(1) is keyed to registered gross weight rather than to the axle. A vehicle registered at 73,000 pounds or less carries a 22,400-pound single-axle maximum; a vehicle registered above 73,000 pounds carries 20,000. Raising a registration past 73,000 pounds therefore tightens every single axle by 2,400 pounds at the same moment the State-highways-only routing rule in (a)(3)(i) takes effect.
Two instruments do different jobs. Per the SHA Maryland Oversize/Overweight Hauling Permit Manual, stamped as of April 10, 2008, an operator who wants to be billed monthly rather than paying per permit must set up a credit bond “in the amount of not less than $3,000.00.” Separately, the manual states that “All excessive loads require a performance bond or a contractual liability bond,” and the Hauling Permits Unit keeps a performance bond on file for a minimum of 1 year from the date of the move.
$100,000.00 in the aggregate. The endorsement reproduced in the SHA hauling permit manual has the insurer indemnify and hold harmless the State Highway Administration and the State of Maryland from loss arising from damage to road beds, wearing surfaces, sub-surface installations, signs and signals, and states that “the Company’s total limit of liability with respect to the insurance afforded by this endorsement shall not exceed an aggregate of $100,000.00.” It is an aggregate, and it caps the State’s recovery through that route rather than the permittee’s underlying obligation.
Three, each named in § 24–108(a)(3). Dorchester County’s Linkwood Road between East New Market and Linkwood, on approval of the local governing body and the State Highway Administration. Garrett County’s Table Rock Road and Wilson Run Road, by county ordinance, capped at 87,000 pounds and limited to a truck tractor and semitrailer combination with at least 6 axles. And Washington County’s Warfordsburg Road, from 14738 Warfordsburg Road to the Maryland–Pennsylvania border, not exceeding 95,000 pounds on county approval.
Section 24–108 runs the other way for one narrow class. Subsection (c) permits garbage and refuse trucks on fixed-route collections in Anne Arundel and Baltimore Counties, owned by or doing business with a governmental entity, a 10 percent rear axle tolerance where the overweight is due to bad weather and the truck stays within its registered gross weight. Aggregate does not qualify — the section’s other tolerances go to farm and forest products, not to sand, gravel or stone.
Section 24–112(b)(2) sets the floor: not less than $30 for the first 45 tons (90,000 pounds) or less of gross weight, plus $5 for each additional ton or part of a ton above 45 tons, with oversize permits at not less than $30. The SHA manual describes a Blanket Permit at $50.00 monthly or $500.00 yearly, but its gross weight may not exceed 80,000 pounds, so it adds no payload for an aggregate fleet already at the five-axle ceiling.
Every figure on this page was read at the source below on August 11, 2026, with the effective date of the version read. Treat each as current as of that date rather than as permanent.
Send the declared or registered weights alongside the axle configurations, and tell us where the material moves from. We will size the program against the work the trucks actually do rather than against a statutory floor.
