Motor carrier classes by state
Colorado draws its commercial-vehicle line at 16,001 pounds of manufacturer’s rating, and it counts the combination. A three-quarter-ton pickup that is nowhere near that number alone reaches it the moment a loaded deck is behind it — and the state patrol’s rules then include a marking provision written for precisely that arrangement, where the trailer wears the number because the truck is too light to be the vehicle in question.
Everything about this work that is true from Maine to Oregon — freight sold on availability, a deck rebuilt for each load, a limit priced against a typical shipment and then tested by an atypical one — belongs on the type page rather than on a state one. It is dealt with at hot shot trucking insurance.
Colorado’s own contribution is a threshold that almost no other state uses. C.R.S. 42-4-235(1)(a)(I) defines a “Commercial vehicle” to mean, among other things, a self-propelled or towed vehicle “Having a manufacturer’s gross vehicle weight rating or gross combination rating of at least sixteen thousand one pounds and used in commerce on public highways”, and separately a vehicle “Bearing an apportioned plate” at any weight at all.
That number is the whole regime’s front door. Every requirement the Colorado State Patrol writes for motor carriers sits inside 8 CCR 1507-1, and MCS 2 of that rule states its own scope as applying to entities “that operate commercial vehicles as defined in Section 42-4-235 (1) (a), CRS.” One definition, one gate, and everything downstream of it — the adopted safety text, the financial responsibility sections, the cargo minimum, hours of service, the intrastate registration — attaches at the same place.
The definition opens with a qualifier that travels with it: 42-4-235(1) applies “As used in this section, unless the context otherwise requires”. Each figure below names the instrument that fixes it and the version this page read, because the statute and the rule run on separate clocks and the rule carries two edition dates inside itself.
Does your loaded combination clear 16,001 pounds of rating? If it does, Colorado treats you as a commercial vehicle for every purpose in the state patrol’s rules — safety, financial responsibility, cargo, hours, and an intrastate number you were supposed to have before the first load.
Send the manufacturer’s rating of the power unit and of the heaviest trailer separately, and tell us whether the plate is apportioned. Apportioned plates take weight out of the question entirely.
The Colorado line is set in the definition rather than in an applicability clause, which is why it is easy to read past. C.R.S. 42-4-235(1)(a)(I) defines a commercial vehicle as a self-propelled or towed vehicle “(A) Bearing an apportioned plate; (B) Having a manufacturer’s gross vehicle weight rating or gross combination rating of at least sixteen thousand one pounds and used in commerce on public highways”, with a third limb for larger passenger configurations. Subparagraphs (II) and (III) reach towing and recovery equipment and placarded hazardous materials separately.
Two words in limb (B) decide the outcome for a light combination. “Gross combination rating” means the arithmetic runs across truck and trailer together, not on the power unit alone; and “used in commerce” means the trigger is not confined to a vehicle type. A one-ton pickup rated well under the line becomes a commercial vehicle in Colorado on the day a heavy enough trailer goes behind it, and no plate change, no purchase and no filing announces the crossing.
Limb (A) removes weight from the question in the other direction. A vehicle bearing an apportioned plate is a commercial vehicle regardless of rating, so an operator who registered for multi-jurisdictional operation is inside the definition even on a day when the combination is light.
Because MCS 2 of 8 CCR 1507-1 borrows that definition wholesale — “These rules and regulations apply to individuals, corporations, Colorado government or governmental subdivisions or agencies, or other legal entities that operate commercial vehicles as defined in Section 42-4-235 (1) (a), CRS” — there is no second, lower Colorado threshold anywhere in the state patrol’s rules. MCS 6.12 repeats the same scope in almost the same words.
The statute’s one weight-based escape route is conjunctive and agricultural, so it does not reach paid freight. C.R.S. 42-4-235(2)(b)(IV) removes from the section a vehicle or combination that is under 26,001 pounds, not operated in interstate commerce, not transporting placarded hazardous materials, not carrying sixteen or more passengers or eight or more for compensation, and — the fifth condition, joined by “and” — “being used solely for agricultural purposes.” A carrier hauling for hire fails the last condition on every load.
Colorado does not name this work anywhere, but one provision in the state patrol’s rules describes the configuration with unusual precision, and it is the most useful sentence in the document for an operator in this class.
MCS 6.7.2.1 of 8 CCR 1507-1 provides: “Motor carriers operating in intrastate commerce, not transporting 16 or more passengers (including the driver) or transporting placarded hazardous materials and having a GVWR or GCWR equal to or over 16,001 lbs., but not in excess of 26,000 lbs., may meet the marking requirements of 49 CFR 390.21 by marking the trailer or secondary unit, if the GVWR of the self-propelled unit itself is less than 16,001 lbs.”
Read that against the equipment. A combination rated between 16,001 and 26,000 pounds, running inside the state, carrying freight rather than passengers or placarded material, whose power unit is itself rated under 16,001 pounds — that is a light truck pulling a loaded deck, described by weight rather than by name. Colorado did not write a rule for this business; it wrote a marking accommodation for the only equipment arrangement that produces this problem, which is a light truck that has become a commercial vehicle by virtue of what is behind it.
The relief is narrow and each condition can be lost. Cross the state line and the intrastate condition fails. Put a placardable quantity behind the truck and the hazardous-materials condition fails. Buy a heavier power unit — one rated at or above 16,001 pounds on its own — and the accommodation stops applying because the truck itself is now the vehicle that has to carry the number. Exceed 26,000 pounds of combination rating and the band closes from above.
The permission is also only about where the number goes. It does not remove the requirement to have an intrastate number, and it does not remove anything else in the rule. The provision sits inside MCS 6.7.2, which amends the marking requirement generally by adding: “Intrastate carriers must mark their vehicles with the assigned intrastate USDOT number, preceded by the letters ‘USDOT’ and followed by the suffix ‘CO’ (e.g.: USDOT 1234567 CO).”
Colorado’s statute contemplates a second, lighter tier and then leaves it unbuilt. C.R.S. 42-4-235(4)(a)(I) directs the chief of the state patrol to adopt rules for all commercial vehicles and, as specified in the next subparagraph, for “vehicles that would be commercial vehicles but for the fact that they have a manufacturer’s gross vehicle weight rating or gross combination rating of ten thousand one pounds or more but not more than sixteen thousand pounds.”
Subparagraph (4)(a)(II) is where the tier is described, and the verb is permissive rather than mandatory. For those vehicles the chief “may adopt rules that authorize the Colorado state patrol to: (A) Annually inspect these vehicles; (B) Enforce with respect to these vehicles all requirements for the securing of loads that apply to commercial vehicles; and (C) Enforce with respect to these vehicles all requirements relating to the use of coupling devices for commercial vehicles.” Annual inspection, load securement, coupling devices — a short, targeted list that would land squarely on a light combination.
It has not been exercised. 8 CCR 1507-1 in its current version was read end to end for this page, MCS 1 through MCS 12, and searched in full. The strings “10,001”, “10001” and “ten thousand one” appear nowhere in it. The only weight figures in the entire rule are 16,001, which appears twice, and 26,000, which also appears twice. There is no adopted rule for the tier the statute authorizes.
That is an unexercised discretion, not a repeal, and the distinction matters for anyone reading this page later. The statutory authority sits there intact and could be exercised at any future rulemaking without a legislative change. The correct statement today is that a Colorado combination rated between 10,001 and 16,000 pounds carries no adopted state patrol rule, and that the sentence enabling one has been on the books unused.
For an operator, the practical consequence is a cliff rather than a ramp. There is no intermediate compliance posture in Colorado. Below 16,001 pounds of combination rating the state patrol’s rules do not reach the operation at all; at 16,001 the entire rule attaches at once — adopted safety text, financial responsibility sections, a cargo minimum, hours of service, and an intrastate registration that was supposed to precede operations.
Send the manufacturer’s rating for the power unit and for the heaviest deck separately, say whether any plate is apportioned, and name the Colorado corridors the trucks actually run. Those three answers decide whether 8 CCR 1507-1 reaches the operation at all, and how it is priced if it does.
Colorado is one of very few states to write a cargo liability minimum into a safety rule rather than into an economic-regulation chapter, and the way it is drafted is more interesting than the number.
MCS 6.4.4 provides, in full: “Motor carriers subject to these rules must carry a minimum level of cargo liability coverage of $10,000 for loss or damage to property carried on any one motor vehicle or an amount adequate to cover the value of the property being transported, whichever is less, unless the shipper and the property carrier otherwise agree by written contract to a lesser amount.”
The words “whichever is less” invert the usual reading. This is not a floor of ten thousand dollars; it is a requirement to carry the lower of ten thousand dollars and the value of the property being hauled. A carrier moving a four-thousand-dollar shipment owes four thousand dollars of cargo coverage under this sentence, not ten. And the closing clause makes even that default contractible — the shipper and the carrier may agree in writing to a lesser amount.
So Colorado’s cargo requirement is a default rule rather than a mandatory one, and it is a small default at that. It is also a carry requirement rather than a filing requirement: nothing in the rule directs the carrier to certify this coverage to the state. What MCS 6.11 imposes instead is a production duty on request — material under the adopted parts “must be filed with or delivered by mutually agreed upon methods upon request” to the state patrol’s motor carrier safety section at its stated Golden address.
The commercial reading follows directly. A cargo limit set to satisfy this rule and nothing else would be badly under-set for a class of work whose loads routinely carry more value per pound than their weight suggests. What sets a workable motor truck cargo limit in Colorado is the value of the heaviest load actually hauled and whatever the shipper agreement requires — the state’s number is a floor beneath a floor.
One structural caveat is carried rather than resolved. MCS 6.4.4 sits inside MCS 6.4, whose opening sentence disapplies “the financial responsibility and insurance provisions of these rules” to commercial vehicles regulated by the public utilities commission and to vehicles operated by licensed river outfitters. Whether that disapplication carries down into the cargo subsection is not stated separately. It is moot for an intrastate property carrier, which is not regulated by the commission at all.
Three obligations in Colorado attach before or independently of any coverage question, and all three are easy to miss because they are not written as insurance requirements.
The first is the intrastate registration. MCS 6.7 amends the federal identification requirement to read: “Each motor carrier that conducts operations in intrastate commerce must apply for and receive an intrastate USDOT Number before beginning operations within the state. The motor carrier is required to update this information every 24 months.” Before beginning operations is the operative phrase, and MCS 6.7.1 notes that the federal agency processes those numbers on the state’s behalf.
The second is marking, described above: the number preceded by “USDOT” and followed by the suffix “CO”, with the MCS 6.7.2.1 accommodation permitting a light-truck combination in the 16,001 to 26,000 pound band to carry the marking on the trailer.
The third is a written declaration, and it is statutory rather than regulatory. C.R.S. 42-4-235(3) provides that “Any motor carrier operating a commercial vehicle within Colorado must declare knowledge of the rules adopted by the chief of the Colorado state patrol … The declaration of knowledge shall be in writing on a form provided by the Colorado state patrol.” The form must be signed and returned according to the chief’s rules. It is a signed acknowledgment that the operator has read the rule described on this page.
Colorado also runs its own new-entrant program for intrastate carriers. MCS 6.3.1 applies a named subset of the adopted safety-fitness sections as “the Colorado Intrastate New Entrant Safety Assurance Program” to intrastate carriers beginning operations and required to obtain an intrastate number, and MCS 6.3.4 makes every new intrastate carrier eligible for it, with a prior interstate safety audit or compliance review satisfying the audit requirement. The federal regime the Colorado program is carved out of — the twelve-month statutory review deadline, the eighteen-month monitoring period and the audit that sits between them — is set out on our insurance for a carrier in its first year of authority page.
The enforcement tail is worth naming because it reaches the plate. C.R.S. 42-4-235(2)(d)(I) treats two lapses identically: leaving a civil penalty unpaid thirty days after notification, and declining to cooperate with a compliance review for thirty days after being told of that failure. Either one costs the operator its registration and places the business and every vehicle it runs out of service in the federal system. It is a registration consequence for an administrative failure, and it begins with unanswered correspondence rather than with anything on the road.
Having pulled the light combination into the rule at 16,001 pounds, Colorado then releases part of the driver file at the other end of the same band.
MCS 6.12.1 provides: “Drivers of intrastate vehicles and vehicle combinations having a GVWR or GCWR of not more than 26,000 lbs., not requiring a CDL to operate, are not subject to 49 CFR 391, Subpart E, Physical Qualifications and Examinations.” Subpart E is the physical qualification and medical examination subpart — the certificate a driver in almost any other posture has to obtain, retain and renew on a schedule.
Two conditions gate it and both must hold. The operation must be intrastate, and the combination must be at or under 26,000 pounds of rating and not require a commercial driver’s license to operate. So the relief is available across the upper part of the band the rule reaches — from 16,001 up to 26,000 pounds — and stops at the state line and at the point where the licensing question changes.
The rest of the rule reads consistently with that. Colorado’s medical waiver program at MCS 8 exists for drivers who cannot satisfy that same subpart, and MCS 8.4.1 provides that an application may be denied if the applicant “does not currently possess or is not in the process of attaining a Colorado CDL.” The waiver program is licensed-driver-facing because the drivers MCS 6.12.1 releases do not need a waiver in the first place.
The statute preserves the same class expressly. C.R.S. 42-4-235(2)(b)(III), inside the civil-penalty provisions, states that nothing in that subsection is to be construed to repeal, preempt or negate any existing regulatory exemption for agricultural operations, intrastate farm vehicle drivers, or “intrastate vehicles or combinations of vehicles with a gross vehicle weight rating of not more than twenty-six thousand pounds that do not require a commercial driver’s license to operate”.
It is worth saying plainly what has and has not been released, because a thinner file is easy to mistake for a lighter regime. Colorado adopts the drug and alcohol testing, special training, safety fitness, general applicability, driving, parts and accessories, hours of service, inspection and maintenance, hazardous materials driving and employee safety parts of the federal text, and MCS 6.1 extends every reference to interstate commerce in them to intrastate commerce as well. What MCS 6.12.1 removes is one subpart of one of those parts, and only inside its two conditions. A carrier that keeps medical certificates anyway is not over-complying in any sense that matters after a loss; it is holding the document a plaintiff will ask for.
Colorado states its federal edition date four separate times inside the same rule, which is unusually careful drafting and makes the date easy to verify. MCS 6 lists the adopted parts in a table and closes: “of the FMCSRs as the same were effective October 1, 2025, and published in Title 49 of the CFR, Subtitle B, Chapter III, Parts 200 through 399, with references therein, with modifications as are necessitated by state law and set forth by and within these rules”. MCS 4.2, MCS 4.3 and the formal incorporation list at MCS 12.1.2 repeat the same date.
The rule carrying that date is itself newer. The version read for this page is the current 8 CCR 1507-1, effective April 1, 2026, adopted as a permanent rule on February 3, 2026 and published in the Colorado Register of March 10, 2026. The state updated the rule and the federal edition it points at in the same motion, and the two dates are five months apart.
A second, later edition date sits in the same document on a different instrument. MCS 4.1.1 and MCS 12.1.1 adopt the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance out-of-service criteria “effective April 1, 2026” and “revised and effective April 1, 2026”. So a Colorado carrier is answering to a federal safety text frozen at October 1, 2025 and to out-of-service criteria at an April 1, 2026 edition, in one rule. Collapsing them would misstate both.
The rule also reaches intrastate operation by an express instruction rather than by inference. MCS 6.1 provides: “Unless otherwise specified, all references to interstate commerce by the FMCSRs hereby adopted by these rules also include and apply to intrastate commerce.” That single sentence is the mechanism by which any of the adopted text touches a carrier that never leaves Colorado.
One carve-out inside the financial responsibility section looks like it might help a freight operator and does not. MCS 6.4 opens by disapplying the financial responsibility and insurance provisions of the rules to commercial vehicles regulated by the public utilities commission under the motor carrier article of Title 40. But C.R.S. 40-10.1-105(1)(i) provides that the following transportation is not subject to regulation under that article: “Transportation of property, except transportation provided by a towing carrier or a mover”. General property carriage is outside the commission’s article, so an intrastate freight hot shot is not a commission-regulated vehicle and the carve-out does not relieve it.
The adopted financial responsibility range is enumerated rather than wholesale, and two of the enumerated exceptions are worth naming. MCS 6.4 adopts specific sections of the federal financial responsibility part “to the operation of commercial vehicles in Colorado with the following exceptions”, MCS 6.4.1 disapplies two lettered subsections of one of them, and MCS 6.4.2 confines one endorsement row to interstate and foreign commerce. Sections outside the enumerated range are not adopted by this rule at all.
The one Colorado obligation that is entirely about geography attaches at the same 16,001 pound line as everything else, and it is a real operating cost rather than a paperwork one.
MCS 7.1 provides that drivers must carry chains, consistent with the referenced traffic statute, when operating vehicles designed to carry sixteen or more passengers including the driver “or having a combined weight of 16,001 lbs. or more (except for mobile cranes)” on seven named highways between September 1st and May 31st.
The seven are listed in the rule: Interstate 70 west of milepost 259 in Morrison; Colorado Highway 9 from milepost 63 to milepost 97, between Frisco and Fairplay; US Route 40 west of milepost 256 in Empire; US Route 50 west of milepost 225 in Salida; US Route 160 west of milepost 304 in Walsenburg; US Route 285 west of milepost 250 in Morrison; and US Route 550 between mileposts 0 and 130.
Nine months of the year, on the corridors that connect the Front Range to the Western Slope and the southern mountain towns, a light combination over the line is carrying chains as a condition of being on the road. MCS 7.2 permits alternative traction devices — tire cables, auto socks or sanders — as each is defined and used consistently with the referenced rules.
The underwriting relevance is not the chains. It is what the corridor list tells an underwriter about the operation: sustained grades, winter closures, and a loss profile in which a physical damage claim and a cargo claim tend to arrive together. Where an operation actually runs in Colorado is a more informative answer than how far it runs, and physical damage deductibles are usually where that shows up first.
Nothing about this class is priced off a schedule, and a page that produced a figure would be making it up. Below is the order an underwriter works a Colorado submission in, heaviest factor first.
Combination rating comes first, because in Colorado it is a binary rather than a gradient. At 16,000 pounds of rating the state patrol’s rules do not reach the operation; at 16,001 the whole of 8 CCR 1507-1 attaches at once. The power unit’s own plate rarely decides that. What decides it is the trailer hooked up on any given week, and that is a purchasing decision rather than a design specification.
Plate type is second and is frequently overlooked. An apportioned plate makes a vehicle a commercial vehicle in Colorado at any weight, so a carrier that registered for multi-jurisdictional operation has removed the weight question from its own file permanently.
Cargo value is third, and the state’s own minimum is close to no help. Because MCS 6.4.4 requires the lower of ten thousand dollars and the value being transported, and because a written contract can reduce even that, the operative limit is whatever the shipper agreement demands and whatever the heaviest actual load is worth. The gap between an average load value and the worst-case load value is where cargo claims live in this class.
Fourth is where in Colorado the trucks run. The chain corridors, the elevation, and the winter months over which the requirement sits are read as an exposure description, not as a compliance item. An operation confined to the Front Range and an operation crossing the Continental Divide weekly are different risks with the same equipment.
Fifth is the paper. Running under a lease rather than on the operator’s own registration moves the first line of defense. Being added to a customer’s program as an insured moves it again; a clause forcing one policy to answer before any other and without sharing moves it a third time; and a recovery right handed over at onboarding removes something nobody costed. Not one of those alters a specification of the equipment. Operators assembling a first Colorado program will find the sequence on the first-year program page.
Sixth, and specific to Colorado, is administrative history. The intrastate number was supposed to exist before operations began; the declaration of knowledge is a signed document; and a compliance-review failure carries a registration cancellation. An account whose paperwork trails its operations is describing itself before an underwriter reads a single loss run.
The absences here were checked in the document rather than assumed, because 8 CCR 1507-1 is a single instrument and could be read whole.
Colorado has no air-mile provision of its own. The rule was read end to end, MCS 1 through MCS 12, and searched in full for “air mile”, “air-mile”, “short haul”, “short-haul”, “100 air” and “150 air”; every one of those searches returns zero hits. The federal short-haul provisions therefore apply to intrastate carriage as adopted at the October 1, 2025 edition and extended inward by MCS 6.1.
Colorado writes no hours-of-service variance for a general property carrier. MCS 6.9 amends the adopted hours part in five places and all five are class-specific: public transit agency carriers, drivers of Colorado government vehicles and tow trucks working an emergency, drivers towing at the request of a public officer, drivers transporting livestock and animal feed, and an agricultural planting-and-harvesting window that MCS 6.9.5 declares to run “from January 1 to December 31”. A sixth, definitional change at MCS 6.6.2 adds a local-emergency limb to the meaning of “emergency”. None of the six reaches paid general freight.
Colorado requires no operating authority for intrastate property carriage. The transportation not subject to the commission’s article expressly includes “Transportation of property, except transportation provided by a towing carrier or a mover”, which is why the safety track and the economic track are cleanly separated in this state: heavily regulated on safety above 16,001 pounds, economically unregulated at any weight.
And Colorado has no name for this work, no class that fits it, no table addressed to it and no endorsement it insists upon. What sets this state apart is not a provision drafted with light combinations in mind — it is that a number chosen for other reasons lands squarely in the middle of their range, and that the marking accommodation describes the arrangement in pounds without ever giving it a name.
The state minimum is a licensing threshold. The program an operator actually needs is built from these lines:
We write hot shot and expedited hauling as a named class rather than as an exception to general trucking, and we read each account against the weight and authority regime of the state it operates in. For a Colorado operator that means starting from the rating of the power unit and the trailer separately rather than from the combination, sizing cargo against the heaviest load actually carried rather than the average one, and treating the state line as a rating fact because a single crossing can change which driver file the operation owes.
If the operation also runs freight under separate authority, the Colorado trucking insurance page covers the state’s broader motor carrier picture, and the hot shot trucking insurance page covers the class mechanics that apply wherever the operator runs.
At 16,001 pounds of manufacturer’s gross vehicle weight rating or gross combination rating, used in commerce on public highways, under C.R.S. 42-4-235(1)(a)(I)(B). The rating runs across the combination, so a light pickup reaches the line by what is behind it. A vehicle bearing an apportioned plate is a commercial vehicle at any weight under limb (A). 8 CCR 1507-1 takes its entire scope from that definition at MCS 2, so every requirement in the state patrol’s rules attaches at the same place. Read August 31, 2026.
Not in force. C.R.S. 42-4-235(4)(a)(II) authorizes the chief of the state patrol to adopt rules for that band covering annual inspection, load securement and coupling devices, but the verb is “may”. The current 8 CCR 1507-1 was read end to end and the strings “10,001”, “10001” and “ten thousand one” appear nowhere in it. The discretion is unexercised rather than repealed, so it could be exercised at a future rulemaking without any legislative change.
Yes, inside a defined band. MCS 6.7.2.1 of 8 CCR 1507-1 permits intrastate carriers not carrying sixteen or more passengers or placarded hazardous materials, with a combination rating at or over 16,001 pounds but not more than 26,000 pounds, to meet the marking requirement “by marking the trailer or secondary unit, if the GVWR of the self-propelled unit itself is less than 16,001 lbs.” A heavier power unit defeats it, and it moves the marking rather than removing the number.
MCS 6.4.4 requires carriers subject to the rules to carry cargo liability coverage of $10,000 for loss or damage to property carried on any one motor vehicle “or an amount adequate to cover the value of the property being transported, whichever is less, unless the shipper and the property carrier otherwise agree by written contract to a lesser amount.” It is the lower of the two amounts, it is contractible downward in writing, and it is a carry requirement rather than a filing. It is a weak floor for loads that carry high value per pound.
Not under the state patrol’s own rule inside a defined band. MCS 6.12.1 provides that drivers of intrastate vehicles and combinations “having a GVWR or GCWR of not more than 26,000 lbs., not requiring a CDL to operate, are not subject to 49 CFR 391, Subpart E, Physical Qualifications and Examinations.” Both conditions must hold. Colorado’s medical waiver program at MCS 8 sits alongside it and, per MCS 8.4.1, an application may be denied where the applicant does not hold or is not pursuing a Colorado commercial driver’s license.
No. C.R.S. 40-10.1-105(1)(i) provides that “Transportation of property, except transportation provided by a towing carrier or a mover” is not subject to regulation under the public utilities commission’s motor carrier article. Colorado’s regulation of this work is entirely on the safety track under C.R.S. 42-4-235 and 8 CCR 1507-1. That also means the commission carve-out inside MCS 6.4 does not relieve a freight carrier of the financial responsibility provisions, because a freight carrier is not commission-regulated.
The edition effective October 1, 2025, stated at MCS 6 and repeated at MCS 4.2, MCS 4.3 and MCS 12.1.2 of 8 CCR 1507-1. The rule carrying that date is the current version effective April 1, 2026, adopted February 3, 2026. A second and later edition date sits in the same rule on a different instrument: MCS 4.1.1 and MCS 12.1.1 adopt the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance out-of-service criteria at an April 1, 2026 edition. The two should be checked separately.
MCS 7.1 requires drivers to carry chains when operating vehicles designed to carry sixteen or more passengers or “having a combined weight of 16,001 lbs. or more (except for mobile cranes)” on seven named highways between September 1st and May 31st: I-70 west of milepost 259 in Morrison, Colorado Highway 9 between Frisco and Fairplay, US 40 west of milepost 256, US 50 west of milepost 225, US 160 west of milepost 304, US 285 west of milepost 250, and US 550 between mileposts 0 and 130. MCS 7.2 permits defined alternative traction devices.
No schedule exists for this class, and quoting one from a web page would mean inventing it. Price follows where the loaded combination sits against the 16,001 pound line and whether any plate is apportioned; the worth of the most valuable load carried, measured against a state minimum that is the lower of two amounts and contractible below both; which Colorado corridors are run and in which months; whether the intrastate number preceded operations; who owns the operating authority; how long the drivers have been driving; and the insured-status, response-order and recovery terms buried in customer contracts.
Every figure on this page was read at the source below on August 31, 2026, with the effective date of the version read. Treat each as current as of that date rather than as permanent.
Send the power unit and trailer ratings separately, the radius distribution, and whether any dispatch crosses a state line. We will size the program against the work the trucks actually do rather than against a statutory floor.
