Motor carrier classes by state
There is no intrastate operating authority to obtain for a Nebraska dump truck, because the class of carrier the Public Service Commission licenses is a passenger class. Both “common carrier” and “contract carrier” are defined in the statute as carriers of passengers, and the Commission’s own insurance rule establishes four classifications, every one of them passengers or household goods. A gravel hauler is not a class the Commission insures because it is not a class the Commission authorizes.
Most states put a licensing step between a new aggregate operation and its first load — a certificate, a permit, an authority number, an insurance filing that the regulator holds. Nebraska has that machinery and points it somewhere else entirely. Reading it in the right order is what keeps a Nebraska file from looking incomplete when it is actually finished.
What binds the operator instead comes from three separate directions. Federal safety law is adopted into Nebraska law and switched on by vehicle weight rather than by cargo. Registration class does the vocational sorting that authority does elsewhere, right down to a truck class defined by a ten-mile radius. And the operating rules that actually cost money on a bad day are in the highway chapters — county bridges, closed roads, private approaches onto the state system.
Two of Nebraska’s most useful provisions are exclusions rather than grants. The state’s only refuse weight tolerance is written for a body type an open dump truck does not have, and the overweight permit system is closed to loads that can be reduced — both by their own terms, in the text, rather than by omission.
And one number a hauler pays every week is fixed by the Legislature rather than by the gate: Nebraska sets its landfill disposal fee per ton in statute.
Starting or moving an aggregate operation in Nebraska? Send the registered gross weight on each unit and whether any truck carries local truck plates — in Nebraska the registration class, not an operating authority, is where the vocational line is drawn.
Neb. Rev. Stat. § 75-309 makes it unlawful for “any common or contract carrier by motor vehicle” to engage in intrastate operations on a Nebraska public highway without a certificate of public convenience and necessity, a permit, or a transportation network company permit issued by the Commission. The prohibition is real. The question is who it names.
Neb. Rev. Stat. § 75-302 answers it in the definitions. Subdivision (6): “Common carrier means any person who or which undertakes to transport passengers for the general public in intrastate commerce by motor vehicle for hire.” Subdivision (7): “Contract carrier means any motor carrier that transports passengers for hire other than as a common carrier.” Subdivision (19) defines a regulated motor carrier as a person operating a motor vehicle “used to transport passengers.” The authority requirement in § 75-309 attaches to those definitions and to nothing else.
Subdivision (18) then closes a second door. A private carrier is a motor carrier hauling passengers or property to or from its own facility, plant or place of business, or delivering its own products, supplies or raw materials, where the transportation furthers a primary business other than transportation and is not for hire — and the subdivision ends: “Nothing in sections 75-301 to 75-322 shall apply to private carriers.” A contractor hauling its own material to its own job is outside the article twice over.
The exception list at § 75-303 reads the same way from the other side. School children and teachers, streetcar systems, agritourism passenger services, ambulances and hearses, transit authorities, elderly transportation under a municipal or county contract, railroad-employee transport, household goods, medicaid nonemergency medical transportation, residential care and attended services — every carve-out in the section is a passenger or human-services class. There is no aggregate, dump, construction or general-freight entry anywhere in it, in either direction.
Confirmation from the insurance side is the strongest form of the finding, because it is an affirmative enumeration rather than a gap. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 75-307 lists exactly which carriers must satisfy the Commission’s bond, insurance or self-insurance rules: common and contract carriers, household goods carriers licensed under § 75-304.03, railroad-employee carriers licensed under § 75-304.04, and medicaid nonemergency medical transportation licensees under § 75-311. A dump operation appears on none of the four lines, and a certificate, permit or license may not be issued or remain in force for any of them without compliance.
The obligations a Nebraska aggregate fleet does carry arrive by adoption rather than by license. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 75-363 adopts named parts of 49 C.F.R. as Nebraska law and applies them to all motor carriers transporting persons or property in intrastate commerce, reaching every vehicle of such a carrier with a gross vehicle weight rating, gross combination weight rating, gross vehicle weight or gross combination weight over ten thousand pounds.
The adopted parts include Part 387, minimum levels of financial responsibility for motor carriers, alongside Parts 382, 385, 386, 390, 391, 392, 393, 395, 396, 397 and 398. So the floor under a Nebraska intrastate dump operation is the federal floor, pulled into state law at a ten-thousand-pound trigger, and enforced by the state rather than filed with the Public Service Commission. Nothing about the absence of a certificate softens it.
Two exceptions are drafted into the same section and both are narrow. Subsection (5) removes the adopted parts from farm trucks registered under § 60-3,146 with a gross weight of sixteen tons or less. Subsection (4) removes the physical qualification rules of 49 C.F.R. part 391 subpart E from a driver who operates a commercial motor vehicle exclusively in intrastate commerce and who holds, or has held, a commercial driver’s license issued by this state prior to July 30, 1996. Neither reaches a working aggregate fleet on its ordinary business.
Nebraska also stands outside the federal registration mandate for purely local work. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 75-399 provides that the Unified Carrier Registration sections “do not apply to a foreign or domestic motor carrier, private carrier, leasing company, broker, or freight forwarder, including a transporter of waste or recyclable materials, engaged exclusively in intrastate commerce.” The Legislature hand-named waste transporters inside an intrastate exemption, which tells you the question had come up.
There is therefore no state authority file to review and no Commission filing to lapse, but a federal financial-responsibility standard applies at a weight almost every dump unit exceeds — which makes the auto liability limit the load-bearing document rather than a filing that points at one.
Neb. Rev. Stat. § 60-3,147 prices a commercial motor vehicle registration on gross vehicle weight, and the ladder is short: eighteen dollars at three tons or less; twenty-five over three and not over four; thirty-five over four and not over five; sixty over five and not over six; eighty-five over six but not over seven; and above seven tons, the seven-ton fee plus twenty-five dollars for each ton of gross vehicle weight over seven. The declared weight is capped by what § 60-6,294 authorizes.
The class built for short-radius aggregate work is the local truck. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 60-336 defines it as a truck, or combination of trucks, truck-tractors or trailers, “operated solely within an incorporated city or village or within ten miles of the corporate limits of the city or village in which they are owned, operated, and registered.” Ten miles from the corporate limits, and the vehicle must be owned, operated and registered in that same city or village.
Neb. Rev. Stat. § 60-3,145 prices the class at thirty percent of the ordinary commercial registration fee, with a floor of eighteen dollars, an eighteen-dollar flat for a truck of one-ton factory-rated capacity or less, and a carve-out returning commercial pickup trucks with a gross load over three tons to the full commercial fee. Local truck plates must display the designation of local motor vehicles in addition to the registration number, so the class is visible on the vehicle.
Leaving the radius is handled by a discrete and inexpensive instrument, and its purpose is narrow. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 60-3,110 lets the owner apply for a special permit to operate a local truck beyond the statutory limits “for the sole purpose of having such truck equipped, modified, or serviced.” The operator must have the permit in possession at all times when outside the limits and display it on demand, and the fee is five dollars. It buys a trip to the shop, not a job outside the radius.
Weight class is not something a driver can re-declare in the field either. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 60-3,148 confines an increase in registered gross vehicle weight to the office of the county treasurer in the county where the vehicle is currently registered, unless the need arises more than one hundred miles from that county seat, or the Nebraska State Patrol or an authorized state scale examiner authorizes it as an emergency.
A truck plated as a local truck is telling the state it works inside ten miles of one municipality, and a registered gross weight raised at a scale house on a Patrol authorization is telling a different story. Where plate class, registered weight and described operation disagree, that belongs in the underwriting conversation before it reaches a physical damage valuation.
We place Nebraska dump, gravel and demolition fleets, including local-truck registrations inside a ten-mile radius and operations running out of permitted pits onto county roads.
Neb. Rev. Stat. § 60-6,294(2) sets the two figures every operator knows: no wheel on pneumatic or solid rubber tires may carry a gross load over ten thousand pounds on any highway, and no axle may carry a gross load over twenty thousand pounds. An axle load is defined as the total load transmitted by all wheels whose centers fall between two parallel transverse vertical planes forty inches apart across the full width of the vehicle.
Subsection (3) then runs an axle-group table by distance between the extremes of the group and by number of axles, climbing to ninety-five thousand pounds at sixty feet for a seven-axle group. The interstate carries its own ceiling inside the same subsection: no group of two or more axles may exceed eighty thousand pounds on the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways unless the Director-State Engineer authorizes a greater weight under § 60-6,295. Off that system, the table is the limit.
Subsection (4) carries the provision that decides most tri-axle dump questions in Nebraska, and it is a spacing rule rather than a weight one. Distances are measured to the nearest foot, with exactly one half foot rounding up — “except that: (a) Any group of three axles shall be restricted to a maximum load of thirty-four thousand pounds unless the distance between the extremes of the first and third axles is at least ninety-six inches in fact.” Ninety-six inches, in fact, not by rounding. A tri-axle group that measures short by an inch drops from the table value to thirty-four thousand pounds.
The same subsection adds a second trap at (4)(b): the maximum gross load on any group of two axles whose extremes are more than eight feet but less than eight feet six inches apart is thirty-eight thousand pounds. Subsection (7) allows two consecutive sets of tandem axles thirty-four thousand pounds each where the overall distance between the first and last axles is thirty-six, thirty-seven or thirty-eight feet.
Subsection (5) does something few weight statutes do — it makes the limits depend on the character of the road rather than on an ordinance. The limitations of subsections (2) through (4) apply as stated to all main, rural and intercity highways, “but shall not be construed as inhibiting heavier axle loads in metropolitan areas, except on the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, if such loads are not prohibited by city ordinance.” The city ordinance is the condition, not the source of the allowance.
Nebraska writes a flat statutory speed limit into its work zones instead of leaving the number to a sign. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 60-6,188(1): “The maximum speed limit through any maintenance, repair, or construction zone on the state highway system shall be thirty-five miles per hour in rural areas and twenty-five miles per hour in urban areas.” Subsection (2) conditions it on notice — the limit takes effect only after signs are erected or displayed conspicuously in advance of the area, and those signs are “regulatory signs imposing a legal obligation.” They may sit on a fixed, variable or movable stand, or be mounted on moving Department of Transportation vehicles.
Subsection (3) lets the Director-State Engineer raise a zone limit in five mile per hour increments and delegate that power to a department supervisor or to a county, municipal or local engineer maintaining the state system by contract, effective only on a written order plus posted signs. Subsection (4) requires the department to post signs informing motorists that the fine for exceeding the posted limit in the zone is doubled.
The doubling itself, and its predicate, are in the fine statute. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 60-682.01(2) sets the base ladder: fifty dollars for one to five miles per hour over; seventy-five for over five and not over ten; one hundred twenty-five for over ten and not over fifteen; two hundred for over fifteen and not over twenty; three hundred for over twenty and not over thirty-five; four hundred for over thirty-five.
Subsection (3) then doubles those fines inside a § 60-6,188 zone — and defines the zone conjunctively. It means (a) the portion of highway identified by posted or moving signs as being under maintenance, repair or construction, or identified by zone speed limit signs displayed under § 60-6,188, and (b) “within such portion of a highway where road construction workers are present.” Both limbs must be satisfied. Signs alone do not carry the doubling; workers alone do not either. The zone starts at the first identifying sign and continues until a posted or moving sign indicates that it has ended.
The predicate cuts both ways in a dispute: a citation doubled in a signed but unstaffed stretch of highway is doubled on a condition the statute does not supply. The ladder itself was last amended by Laws 2025, LB530, § 26.
The permit side echoes the same zones from the width direction. The Department of Transportation’s permit regulation, 408 Neb. Admin. Code ch. 3 § 005.01E, puts the burden squarely on the holder: the permittee “shall be aware of construction zones with width restrictions and not enter those zones with allowable widths less than those permitted by the Continuous Permit.”
Nebraska runs exactly one overweight tolerance for waste hauling, and it excludes an open dump body on the face of the rule. Section 007.03A of 408 Neb. Admin. Code ch. 3, the Department of Transportation’s permit regulation effective April 30, 2023, provides that Garbage Permits “may be issued for the movement of a truck with an enclosed body and a compacting mechanism designed and used exclusively for the collection and transportation of garbage or refuse.”
What that truck gets is worth knowing precisely, because it is the shape of the relief Nebraska was willing to grant. Such a truck and load “may exceed the maximum axle load permitted by law by no more than 20 percent on only one axle, on one tandem axle, or on a group of axles,” while remaining within the maximum gross load permitted by Neb. Rev. Stat. §§ 60-6,290 and 60-6,294. The permit issues only for travel on a designated route, is valid twenty-four hours a day including weekends and holidays on the Nebraska highway system, and carries a capitalized limitation in the rule itself: garbage permits are not valid for the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. Terms run from one month up to one year, at ten dollars per month capped at one hundred dollars per year.
An open dump body and a roll-off both fail the body test before the weight question is ever reached, so the twenty percent tolerance is structurally out of reach for the vehicle this page is about. That is a cleaner answer than an absence would have been — the rule states the class it means to reach and the class is a packer truck.
The general permit rules explain why no aggregate counterpart exists. Section 003.17 of the same chapter, sitting in the general provisions governing overweight and over-dimensional permits, states that “Permits will not be issued for vehicles or loads which can be reduced to comply with the size and weights permitted by statutes (divisibility of vehicles or loads).” The statute says the same thing at Neb. Rev. Stat. § 60-6,298(1)(b)(i): no permit issues for a vehicle carrying a load unless the load exceeds the size or weight limits, “cannot be dismantled or reduced in size or weight without great difficulty,” and of necessity must move over the highways.
The permit fees themselves are statutory ceilings rather than prices, and the hedge is load-bearing. Section 60-6,298(7) allows a permit fee “of not to exceed fifty dollars,” with continuing or continuous permits not exceeding fifty dollars for ninety days, one hundred dollars for one hundred eighty days or two hundred dollars for one year, and single trip superload ceilings of two hundred fifty dollars at three hundred thousand pounds or less, four hundred dollars above that to five hundred thousand, and eight hundred dollars beyond it. The section as read carries source line Laws 2026, LB1126, § 85, with an effective date of July 18, 2026, and the Department may charge direct costs on a superload in addition to the fee.
Two further conditions in the same statute reach an aggregate operator directly. Section 60-6,298(3) lets the Department or local authority “require such undertaking or other security as may be deemed necessary to compensate for any injury to any roadway or road structure,” and § 60-6,298(8) requires that the vehicle already be registered under § 60-3,147 or § 60-3,198 for the maximum gross vehicle weight the permit would allow before the permit issues. Section 003.06 of the regulation adds that the Department may require a certificate showing the amount of public liability and property damage insurance carried.
Neb. Rev. Stat. § 60-6,304(1)(b) is a freeboard rule, not a securing rule, and it names the commodity set directly: no person shall transport “any sand, gravel, rock less than two inches in diameter, or refuse in any vehicle on any hard-surfaced state highway if such material protrudes above the sides of that part of the vehicle in which it is being transported unless such material is enclosed or completely covered with canvas or similar covering.”
Three elements of that sentence are worth separating. The scope is a hard-surfaced state highway rather than every road in Nebraska. The trigger is geometric — material protruding above the sides of the body — so it regulates how full the body may be loaded, not merely how the load is fastened. And the two-inch rock diameter threshold is a drafting choice specific enough to matter at a pit gate, because material above that size is outside the subdivision entirely.
Securement is handled separately at subdivision (1)(c), and it names the parts. Cargo must be properly distributed and adequately secured to prevent falling, and “the tailgate, doors, tarpaulins, and any other equipment used in the operation of the motor vehicle, trailer, or semitrailer or in the distributing or securing of the cargo” must be secured against contents falling from the vehicle. The means of securement must be either tiedowns and tiedown assemblies of adequate strength, or sides, sideboards or stakes and a rear endgate, endboard or stakes strong enough and high enough to assure cargo will not fall.
Subdivision (3) applies a parallel and stricter regime to commercial motor vehicles and commercial trailers, adding that the structures, systems, parts and components used to secure the cargo must be in proper working order with no damaged or weakened components that affect performance. Its penalty ladder is where the exposure sits for a fleet: a violation is an infraction, fined two hundred dollars for a first offense and five hundred dollars for a second or subsequent offense.
The next line is the one that reaches the company rather than the driver. In addition to the citation issued to the operator, “the Superintendent of Law Enforcement and Public Safety may assess the owner of the vehicle a civil penalty for each violation of this subsection of one thousand dollars,” by an order issued in the same manner as an order under Neb. Rev. Stat. § 75-369.04. A general violation of subsection (1) is separately a Class IV misdemeanor.
Nebraska therefore prices a spill twice — once at the roadside against the driver, once by administrative order against the owner.
Neb. Rev. Stat. § 13-2042(1) imposes a disposal fee “of two dollars and thirty-four cents … for each six cubic yards of uncompacted solid waste, two dollars and thirty-four cents for each three cubic yards of compacted solid waste, or two dollars and thirty-four cents per ton of solid waste” disposed of at landfills regulated by the department, or transported for disposal out of state from a permitted solid waste processing facility. Operators pay quarterly, on or before the forty-fifth day following the end of each quarter, with interest on late payment at the § 45-104.02 rate.
That figure is a statutory input into every demolition and cleanup haul price in the state, which is a different situation from a market rate negotiated at a scale house. It is also bounded: subsection (4) provides that the section “shall not apply to a site used solely for the reclamation of land through the introduction of landscaping rubble or inert material,” which is the clean-fill case rather than the landfill case.
Where the material may go at all is fixed by Neb. Rev. Stat. § 13-2033(1): no person shall dump or deposit solid waste anywhere other than a landfill approved by the director unless the department has granted a permit allowing the dumping or depositing at another facility. The same subsection authorizes rules defining beneficial reuse and exempting from permit requirements “the use of dirt, stone, brick, or some inorganic compound for landfill, landscaping excavation, or grading purposes,” with construction standards developed considering the standards and practices established by the American Society for Testing and Materials.
Subsection (2) supplies a narrow self-disposal defense that a contractor should not rely on. It reaches only waste generated by an individual, disposed of on that individual’s own property, where the property is outside the corporate limits of a municipality and the department determines that the county has not provided integrated solid waste management facilities for its residents. Three conditions, all of them cumulative, none of them describing a hauling business.
The distinction between a permitted disposal and an exempt beneficial reuse is where a load of excavated material becomes either a routine tipping cost or a regulatory problem, and it turns on what the material is and what it is being used for rather than on where the truck is going. That is a question worth settling in the file, because the pollution exposure that follows a wrongly characterized load is not an auto exposure at all — it sits with pollution liability.
Nebraska touches six states, and its most specific border provision is a number written into the fuel tax statute. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 66-1404 authorizes the director to enter cooperative fuel tax agreements with other states for base-state administration, collection and enforcement of each state’s motor fuel taxes on fuel used by interstate motor carriers — and then authorizes something narrower: agreements “that provide for local reciprocal exemptions from motor fuel tax apportionment for a motor carrier operating within a limited local delivery area near the borders of the state.”
The bounds are express. Those agreements “may only extend to deliveries not more than fifteen miles into another state and shall require a ninety-day notice to rescind the agreement.” Fifteen miles is the statutory width of Nebraska’s cross-border local delivery area and ninety days is the notice that ends it — an unusually concrete answer for an operator whose nearest market sits across a state line.
The same section then fences what a fuel tax agreement can do, in a sentence that forecloses a common assumption: the agreement “shall not contain any provision which exempts any motor vehicle, owner, or operator from complying with the laws, rules, and regulations pertaining to vehicle licensing, size, weight, or load or the operation of motor vehicles upon the highways of this state.” A reciprocal tax arrangement buys nothing on weight.
Registration reciprocity runs on its own track. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 60-3,193.01 adopts the International Registration Plan by reference “as the plan existed on January 1, 2026,” under a source line refreshed each session and carrying an effective date of April 15, 2026. The adoption date is part of the rule, and it moves — a citation to the Plan without the date it was adopted on is a citation to a moving target.
Cabotage is priced at full freight. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 60-3,179 provides that owners of trucks, truck-tractors, trailers or buses from other jurisdictions “doing intrajurisdiction hauling in this state shall pay the same registration fees as those paid by residents of this state” unless the equipment is registered as part of a fleet in interjurisdiction commerce under § 60-3,198, and that equipment from a jurisdiction which is not reciprocal as to license fees pays resident rates outright.
Neb. Rev. Stat. § 39-1801 gives county and township boards two powers in one sentence. A road may be temporarily closed where it is impassable or unusually dangerous, where construction or maintenance work makes it necessary to suspend travel, or where necessity justifies it for public safety, with a suitable detour provided when feasible. And the weight limitations of § 60-6,294(2) through (4) “may be restricted to the extent deemed necessary for a reasonable period where the subgrade or pavement of such roads is weak or materially weakened by climatic conditions,” by the county board as to county roads and the township board as to township roads, or by a person to whom either board has delegated the authority.
Those are the same operative words the Department of Transportation’s own restriction power uses at § 60-6,294(6), re-enacted for local roads. The local version, unlike the state one, carries a posting duty: on closure the responsible person, board or contractor must erect suitable barricades, fences or other enclosures at both ends and post signs warning that the road is closed by authority of law, which “shall serve as notice to the public that such road is unsafe and that anyone entering such closed road, without permission, does so at his or her own peril.” Violation, including interfering with a barricade or sign, is a Class V misdemeanor.
County bridges carry a rule that runs against the operator’s own recovery rather than only for the county’s. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 39-1412 prohibits driving across or going upon any county bridge with a greater weight than the § 60-6,294 limits or the capacity posted under § 39-1411, and provides that a violator “shall recover no damages from the county for any accident or injury which may happen to him or her upon such bridge because of damage to or the failure of such bridge caused by such violation.” The violation is a Class III misdemeanor. Section 60-6,294(8) supplies the other direction, making the owner responsible for all damage where an over-posted crossing damages the bridge.
Getting onto the state system from a pit or a job is itself permitted. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 39-1332 prohibits constructing or using any private entrance, exit, approach road, facility or appurtenance on or connected to a highway right-of-way without a written permit from the department, with a grandfather for those existing on September 18, 1955 that the department may end on written notice requiring an application within thirty days. Enforcement is at § 39-1335, where operating without the required permit or outside the department’s rules or the permit’s conditions is a Class III misdemeanor, and “Each and every day that such violation continues after the department issues written notification to the violator may constitute a separate offense.”
Material that ends up on the road rather than at the job carries its own escalating ladder. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 39-310 penalizes depositing wood, stone or other kinds of material on any part of a lawful public road inside the ditches: a Class III misdemeanor for a first offense, Class II for a second, and Class I for a third or subsequent. Between that, the bridge rule and the access permit, a Nebraska aggregate haul answers to highway law far more than to carrier law, which is why a Nebraska dump truck program is built around road exposure rather than around a filing.
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 Nebraska 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 Nebraska 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.
No. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 75-309 requires a certificate or permit of “any common or contract carrier by motor vehicle,” but § 75-302 defines a common carrier as one transporting passengers for the general public for hire and a contract carrier as a motor carrier transporting passengers for hire other than as a common carrier. Section 75-302(18) adds that nothing in §§ 75-301 to 75-322 applies to private carriers. The Commission’s insurance duties under § 75-307 reach only common and contract carriers and three named licensed classes.
The federal ones, adopted into Nebraska law. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 75-363 adopts named parts of 49 C.F.R. — including Part 387, minimum levels of financial responsibility, along with Parts 382, 385, 386, 390 through 393 and 395 through 398 — and applies them to intrastate motor carriers of persons or property for every vehicle over ten thousand pounds gross vehicle weight or rating. Narrow exceptions cover farm trucks of sixteen tons or less and part 391 subpart E for certain pre-1996 Nebraska CDL holders.
A registration class defined by radius. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 60-336 defines a local truck as one operated solely within an incorporated city or village or within ten miles of the corporate limits of the city or village where it is owned, operated and registered. Section 60-3,145 registers it at thirty percent of the commercial motor vehicle fee, never below eighteen dollars, and returns commercial pickups with a gross load over three tons to the full commercial fee. The plates must display the local motor vehicle designation.
Only if the group measures at least ninety-six inches. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 60-6,294(4)(a) restricts any group of three axles to thirty-four thousand pounds “unless the distance between the extremes of the first and third axles is at least ninety-six inches in fact.” The words “in fact” matter, because the same subsection otherwise measures distances to the nearest foot. A group that measures short does not round up into the table value.
No, and the regulation says why rather than leaving it out. Section 003.17 of 408 Neb. Admin. Code ch. 3 provides that “Permits will not be issued for vehicles or loads which can be reduced to comply with the size and weights permitted by statutes (divisibility of vehicles or loads),” and Neb. Rev. Stat. § 60-6,298(1)(b)(i) says the same in statute, requiring a load that cannot be dismantled or reduced without great difficulty. The rule states a mechanism, not an oversight.
No. Section 007.03A of 408 Neb. Admin. Code ch. 3 issues Garbage Permits only for “a truck with an enclosed body and a compacting mechanism designed and used exclusively for the collection and transportation of garbage or refuse.” An open dump body and a roll-off both fail that description. The permit it excludes them from allows up to twenty percent over the legal axle load on one axle, tandem or group, on a designated route, never on the Interstate system, at ten dollars per month capped at one hundred dollars per year.
Only when workers are present as well as signs. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 60-682.01(3) doubles the fine ladder inside a § 60-6,188 zone, and defines that zone as (a) a portion of highway identified by posted or moving signs or by zone speed limit signs and (b) “within such portion of a highway where road construction workers are present.” The base fines run fifty, seventy-five, one hundred twenty-five, two hundred, three hundred and four hundred dollars by margin over the limit, most recently amended by Laws 2025, LB530.
Not above the sides on a hard-surfaced state highway. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 60-6,304(1)(b) prohibits transporting sand, gravel, rock less than two inches in diameter, or refuse where the material protrudes above the sides of that part of the vehicle carrying it, unless it is enclosed or completely covered with canvas or similar covering. Securement duties in (1)(c) separately require the tailgate, doors and tarpaulins themselves to be secured.
Two dollars and thirty-four cents per ton, set by statute rather than by the site. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 13-2042(1) imposes that fee per ton, and equally for each six cubic yards of uncompacted or each three cubic yards of compacted solid waste, at department-regulated landfills and on waste transported out of state from a permitted processing facility, payable quarterly within forty-five days of quarter end. Subsection (4) excludes a site used solely for land reclamation through landscaping rubble or inert material.
Two things at once. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 39-1412 makes the crossing a Class III misdemeanor and provides that the violator “shall recover no damages from the county” for any accident or injury on that bridge caused by damage to or failure of the bridge from the violation. Separately, § 60-6,294(8) makes the owner of the vehicle responsible for all damage to the bridge. Nebraska closes the loop from both directions on the same crossing.
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.
