Motor carrier classes by state
Florida reaches this equipment with a definition that starts at 10,000 pounds and a financial-responsibility ladder whose bottom rung is at 26,000 — so the ordinary hot shot rig sits inside the state’s idea of a commercial motor vehicle and below the state’s idea of one that has to be insured to a stated figure. Both of those are true at once. And the agency that once licensed intrastate for-hire carriage here no longer exists, in a chapter whose number now belongs to tow trucks.
The parts of light-combination freight that are the same in every state — the mixed securement duty, the way one high-value load outruns a limit set against an average one, the delivery window that is the whole product — belong to the class rather than to Florida, and they are set out on the hot shot trucking insurance page instead of being repeated here.
Florida’s contribution is a state that regulates this work almost entirely through safety and almost not at all through entry. There is no intrastate operating authority to obtain for general freight, no state agency that takes an insurance filing from this operator, and no cargo requirement anywhere in the statutes or the administrative code that reaches it. What Florida does have is a safety statute with an unusually precise partial exemption, a frozen adoption date, and a liability ladder built on a definition that does not describe this rig.
Two of those facts are commonly reported as the same fact and they are not. The definition of a commercial motor vehicle in the safety chapter begins at 10,000 pounds. The definition that gates the liability ladder is a different definition in a different chapter, and it begins at 26,001 pounds. An operator can be a commercial motor vehicle for one purpose and not for the other on the same day in the same truck.
The third fact takes a different kind of reading to establish, because it is an absence with a history rather than a silence. That history is set out below with the limits of the reading stated, including the one date this page could not pin down.
Running paid freight entirely inside Florida on a rig between 10,000 and 26,000 pounds? The state does not license you, does not take a filing from you, and sets no minimum limit for you — which means the contract and the exposure decide the number, with nothing underneath.
Send the gross vehicle weight, the gross vehicle weight rating and the gross combination weight rating as three separate figures, plus the axle count on the rig as it runs. In Florida those are four different tests in two different chapters.
Fla. Stat. § 316.003(14) defines a commercial motor vehicle, for the purposes of the state’s uniform traffic control chapter, as “Any self-propelled or towed vehicle used on the public highways in commerce to transport passengers or cargo, if such vehicle: (a) Has a gross vehicle weight rating of 10,000 pounds or more”, or is designed to transport more than fifteen passengers including the driver, or is used in the transportation of hazardous materials.
The precision matters and is worth stating because it is routinely reported one pound higher. The limb reads “10,000 pounds or more”. A vehicle rated at exactly 10,000 pounds is inside the definition, not outside it, and a summary that puts the line at 10,001 has moved it.
Two elements of the flush language reach further than the number does. The vehicle may be “self-propelled or towed”, so a trailer is not outside the definition by virtue of not having an engine. And the vehicle must be used “in commerce to transport passengers or cargo”, which is a use test rather than an equipment test — the same truck is inside or outside depending on what it is doing.
The subsection carries one carve-out that is pure Florida and worth knowing exists: a vehicle that occasionally transports personal property to and from a closed-course motorsport facility is not a commercial motor vehicle if it is not used for profit and corporate sponsorship is not involved. It is a narrow relief drawn around a specific recreational pattern, and the two conditions on it — no profit, no sponsorship — are what make it useless to a paid freight operation.
So the first Florida answer is that this equipment is inside the definition, comfortably, and by a margin. What happens next is decided by an exemption rather than by the definition.
Fla. Stat. § 316.302(2)(f) is the provision that governs this operator, and it is structurally different from a flat applicability gate. In full: “A person who operates a commercial motor vehicle having a gross vehicle weight, gross vehicle weight rating, and gross combined weight rating of less than 26,001 pounds solely in intrastate commerce and who is not transporting hazardous materials in amounts that require placarding pursuant to 49 C.F.R. part 172 is exempt from subsection (1). However, such person must comply with 49 C.F.R. parts 382, 392, and 393 and 49 C.F.R. ss. 396.3(a)(1) and 396.9.”
That “However” is the whole difference between Florida and a state that simply switches its rules off. The exemption removes the general adoption in subsection (1) and then names, individually, what survives: controlled substances and alcohol use and testing, the driving rules, the parts and accessories rules, one specific inspection-and-maintenance paragraph, and the roadside inspection-report provision.
For an operator that is a much more useful statement than a bare exemption, because it converts an open question into a short list. The drug and alcohol testing program stays. The driving conduct rules stay. The equipment condition rules stay. What comes off is the general adoption — the driver qualification file, the general inspection program, and the hours-of-service part, subject to what § 316.302(2)(a) through (d) separately require.
The residual is also notable for what is not in it. There is no financial-responsibility part named in that sentence, and no cargo provision of any kind. Whatever else the exemption leaves standing, it leaves nothing about insurance standing, because there was nothing about insurance in the adopted range to begin with.
One adjacent exemption is worth distinguishing so the two are not confused. Section 316.302(2)(e) exempts an operator from subsection (1) while transporting agricultural products from farm or harvest place to first processing, storage or market, with the same named residual — but it then adds an identification requirement for a vehicle or combination at 26,001 pounds or more, or with three or more axles on the power unit regardless of weight: the name of the owner or motor carrier and the municipality where the vehicle is based, on each side of the power unit, in contrasting letters readable from fifty feet.
The condition in § 316.302(2)(f) is a conjunction and every limb of it has to hold. The vehicle must have a gross vehicle weight, a gross vehicle weight rating, and a gross combined weight rating “of less than 26,001 pounds” — three separate quantities, each of which is an independent way to lose the exemption.
Two of those are ratings, which are fixed properties of equipment as built and rated. The third — gross vehicle weight — is what the vehicle actually weighs on a given day with a given load. That is a fact about the trip rather than about the truck, and it is the limb most likely to move without anyone deciding to move it.
For a combination the arithmetic is assembled rather than manufactured. The gross combined weight rating changes the moment a heavier trailer is hitched behind the same power unit, and an operator who was correctly inside the exemption in January can be outside it in March having bought a trailer, with nothing in the statute announcing the crossing.
The other two conditions behave differently and are worth separating. “Solely in intrastate commerce” is decided per operation — a single load crossing into Georgia or Alabama is outside the condition for that load, and this work is frequently dispatched on availability rather than planned by lane. The placarding condition is decided per load as well. Only the ratings sit still.
The practical discipline is to treat the exemption as a per-dispatch question rather than a per-truck status, and to know which of the three weights is closest to the line. An operator who can only quote one number for the rig cannot answer the question the statute asks.
Send the gross vehicle weight, the gross vehicle weight rating, the gross combination weight rating and the axle count as four separate answers, along with what you haul. In Florida those settle which chapter reaches the operation before any coverage question is asked.
Fla. Stat. § 316.302(1)(b) provides: “Except as otherwise provided in this section, all owners and drivers of commercial motor vehicles that are engaged in intrastate commerce are subject to the rules and regulations contained in 49 C.F.R. parts 382-386 and 390-397, as such rules and regulations existed on December 31, 2023.”
That is a static incorporation, not a rolling one. The federal text that governs an intrastate Florida carrier is the text as it stood on that date, and a later amendment in Washington does not reach this chapter on its own. Paragraph (1)(a), which governs interstate operation, carries no date at all — the two paragraphs sit one line apart and run on different clocks by design.
The opening hedge is doing work too and travels with every citation on this page. “Except as otherwise provided in this section” subordinates the whole adoption to the carve-outs later in the section, including the sub-26,001 pound exemption above. The adoption is the default, not the answer.
The adopted ranges are worth reading as ranges rather than as a list, because of what falls between them. Parts 382 through 386, then parts 390 through 397. The federal financial-responsibility part sits in the gap between those two ranges and is not adopted for intrastate commerce at all. Florida’s intrastate regime is a safety adoption, end to end, and there was never a place in it for an insurance requirement to live.
One more paragraph in the same subsection sets the chapter’s internal hierarchy: § 316.302(1)(d) provides that, except for the rear overhang lighting and flagging requirements in § 316.228 for intrastate operations, “the requirements of this section supersede all other safety requirements of this chapter for commercial motor vehicles.” Section 316.302 is the whole of the intrastate safety answer, and other safety provisions in the chapter give way to it.
Florida does set minimum liability figures for commercial vehicles, in the insurance code rather than the traffic code, and the bottom of the ladder is the thing to notice. Fla. Stat. § 627.7415 requires commercial motor vehicles as defined in § 320.01 and qualified motor vehicles as defined in § 207.002 to be insured “with the following minimum levels of combined bodily liability insurance and property damage liability insurance in addition to any other insurance requirements”, and then sets three rungs: fifty thousand dollars per occurrence at a gross vehicle weight of 26,000 pounds or more but less than 35,000; one hundred thousand at 35,000 or more but less than 44,000; three hundred thousand at 44,000 or more.
A rig running between 10,000 and 26,000 pounds sits below the first rung. Not at a lower figure — below the ladder entirely, because the section’s lowest tier begins at 26,000 pounds and the section reaches only vehicles that satisfy the § 320.01 definition in the first place.
The flush language carries a hedge that has to be read for what it does and does not do. “In addition to any other insurance requirements” preserves whatever else Florida law requires; it does not create anything. The reading behind this page went looking for such other requirements in the chapters where one would live and found none reaching this operator.
Subsection (4) is the one part of the section a hot shot operator will hear quoted at them, and its three limits should be read together. It provides that all commercial and qualified motor vehicles “subject to regulations of the United States Department of Transportation, 49 C.F.R. part 387, subparts A and B, and as may be hereinafter amended, must be insured in an amount equivalent to the minimum levels of financial responsibility as set forth in such regulations.” It reaches only vehicles already subject to federal regulation, it names only two subparts, and its rolling amendment clause attaches to those subparts alone. It is a Florida statute pointing at a federal duty that already exists rather than a Florida duty imposed on an intrastate carrier.
The section closes with its own enforcement weight, which is lighter than most operators assume: “A violation of this section is a noncriminal traffic infraction, punishable as a nonmoving violation as provided in chapter 318.” The section was last touched by s. 46, ch. 2026-39.
The ladder above is gated by a definition in a different chapter, and that definition is where the genuinely unresolved question in the Florida material sits. Fla. Stat. § 320.01(25) provides that a “commercial motor vehicle” means “any vehicle which is not owned or operated by a governmental entity, which uses special fuel or motor fuel on the public highways, and which has a gross vehicle weight of 26,001 pounds or more, or has three or more axles regardless of weight, or is used in combination when the weight of such combination exceeds 26,001 pounds gross vehicle weight.”
Three limbs joined by “or”. The first and third are weight tests at 26,001 pounds. The second is not a weight test at all: “has three or more axles regardless of weight”, with the last three words placed there specifically to detach it from the others.
What the statute does not say is whether a trailer’s axles count toward that number when a two-axle power unit is pulling one. The subject of the sentence is “any vehicle”; the third limb speaks separately about a vehicle “used in combination”, which suggests the drafters distinguished the two situations; and the second limb sits between them without saying which it belongs to. This page does not resolve it, because the text does not, and a page that picked the convenient reading would be inventing an answer rather than reporting one.
It is worth flagging rather than skipping because the stakes are asymmetric. If the axle limb reaches a combination, then a rig well under 26,001 pounds pulling a tandem-axle trailer is a commercial motor vehicle for § 627.7415, and the fifty thousand dollar rung applies to it despite the weight — a figure that is a statutory floor and nothing like an adequate limit for this work. If the limb does not reach a combination, the operator is outside the section entirely. Both readings are available on the words as served.
There is a further mismatch of measures between the two chapters that compounds it. Section 627.7415 rungs are expressed in gross vehicle weight — a scale reading. Section 316.302(2)(f) requires gross vehicle weight, gross vehicle weight rating and gross combined weight rating all to be under the line. The two provisions are not measuring the same thing, and an operator who has confirmed one has not confirmed the other.
Florida’s answer to “what operating authority do I need for intrastate freight” is that there is none, and the reason is a repeal rather than a policy of restraint. This is the kind of history that has to be read out of what is missing, because Florida left no marker where the chapter used to be.
The official 1997 Florida Statutes — the earliest compilation the Legislature publishes online — serves a Title XXIII index listing chapters 316, 318, 319, 320, 321, 322, 324 and 325. Chapter 323 is not on that list. The 2026 index for the same title serves chapters 316 through 324 and includes a chapter 323, captioned “WRECKER OPERATORS”. The chapter contains exactly two sections, and the history note to § 323.001 begins “s. 2, ch. 98-324” — the number was re-occupied by a 1998 act.
On the rule side the shells survive with their titles intact. The Department of State’s chapter page for Fla. Admin. Code chapter 25-5, titled “MOTOR CARRIERS”, reports “View Chapter: No Chapter File.” and “No Rules were found.” Chapter 25-16, “FREIGHT FORWARDERS”, does the same. And chapter 350 of the statutes, which is the Public Service Commission’s own chapter, contains zero occurrences of “motor carrier”, “motor transportation”, “auto transportation” or “cargo”.
The date is bounded rather than pinpointed, and the boundary is stated plainly because the alternative would be guessing. The repeal happened on or before the 1997 compilation, and the number was re-used in 1998. The repealing session law itself is not established from an allowed primary source: the Legislature’s and the Senate’s statute archives both begin at 1997, and the Laws of Florida archive begins there too. The 1986 volume was retrieved and fully text-extracted — 67,557 lines — and contains zero occurrences of “chapter 323” or “323.01”, which excludes 1986 and disproves the obvious candidate, since the act that created § 627.7415 confined itself to the financial-responsibility chapter.
This is the shape a repeal takes when nobody records it, and it is worth naming because of how it misleads. Some states leave a page reading “Chapter is repealed”; Florida leaves nothing and then re-uses the number. A reader searching for “Florida chapter 323” today lands on a live tow-truck chapter and can quite reasonably conclude that a motor carrier chapter survives.
The negative on this axis is the strongest claim on the page, so the reading behind it is set out rather than asserted. Whole-chapter documents were read as served: chapter 316 (State Uniform Traffic Control), where all eighteen occurrences of “cargo” are vehicle-configuration, hazardous-materials, railroad-crossing or backhaul references and none is an insurance provision; chapter 320 (Motor Vehicle Licenses), where the five “cargo” occurrences are rental-vehicle, wrecker-fee and seaport references; chapter 323 in full, both sections; chapter 324 (Financial Responsibility); chapter 350 (Public Service Commission); chapter 507 (Household Moving Services) in full; chapter 627 (Insurance Rates and Contracts), with §§ 627.7415 and 627.742 read section-complete; and chapter 207 (Motor Fuel Use Tax), which contains zero occurrences of either “cargo” or “insurance”.
On the rule side, the complete chapter inventory of the Department of Transportation was enumerated across all of its divisions, together with the complete inventory of the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles and of the Public Service Commission. Not one chapter title in any of them is a motor carrier insurance or insurance-filing chapter.
There is a structural argument that closes what an enumeration cannot. Under Fla. Stat. §§ 120.52 and 120.536, a Florida rule requires statutory rulemaking authority and a law implemented. No Florida statute grants any agency power to compel a cargo-insurance filing from an intrastate general-freight carrier — the only cargo-coverage grant in the statutes runs to the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services over household-goods movers. A rule doing this would have nothing to stand on.
One limit on the negative is named rather than hidden, because a negative without its boundary is worth less than it looks. The administrative-code side rests on a complete enumeration of chapter titles plus targeted full reads of the chapters that could plausibly carry the duty — not on a full-text sweep of every rule in the Florida Administrative Code. The state rule portal’s advanced search proved unusable for that purpose: a query for “cargo insurance” returns relevance-ranked rulemaking notices topped by liquefied-petroleum-gas forms and prison grievance rules, so it is a metadata search and a null result from it would have been worthless.
The practical consequence for an operator is the same either way. A one-ton pickup pulling a gooseneck at 10,000 to 26,000 pounds, hauling general freight for compensation entirely inside Florida, files nothing with any Florida agency for cargo, and any cargo cover it carries is there because a shipper, a broker or a lender asked for it.
Florida does impose a cargo-style coverage duty with a filing attached, and it is the single most likely thing to be quoted at a general-freight operator by someone who has half-read the statutes. It lives in Fla. Stat. chapter 507, Household Moving Services.
Section 507.04(1)(a) requires each mover operating in the state to “maintain current and valid liability insurance coverage of at least $10,000 per shipment for the loss or damage of household goods resulting from the negligence of the mover or its employees or agents”, and to provide the department with evidence of that coverage before being registered, with the coverage remaining in effect throughout the registration period. That is coverage plus a filing, which is exactly the shape an operator is looking for when they search.
What excludes a general-freight hot shot is the commodity line, not the size of the business — and the reason to be precise about that is that the fleet-size escape in the same section is hot-shot sized. Section 507.04(1)(b) permits a mover operating two or fewer vehicles to substitute a fifty thousand dollar performance bond or a fifty thousand dollar certificate of deposit for the insurance. An operator who reads that and recognizes their own fleet has recognized the wrong thing.
The scope line is § 507.02(2): “This chapter applies to the operations of any mover or moving broker engaged in the intrastate transportation or shipment of household goods originating in this state and terminating in this state.” And § 507.01(9) defines a mover as a person who, for compensation, contracts for or engages in the loading, transportation or shipment, or unloading, of household goods as part of a household move. Freight for a shipper is not a household move, and no amount of fleet-size resemblance changes that.
There is one further cargo-adjacent provision in the statutes and it is not a requirement at all. Section 323.002(2)(c), in the tow-truck chapter, requires an unauthorized wrecker operator to disclose in writing “whether he or she has in effect an insurance policy providing at least $300,000 of liability insurance and at least $50,000 of on-hook cargo insurance”. The operative word is “whether”. It is a disclosure of a fact, not a mandate to carry, and it belongs to a class of operation this page is not about.
Buried at the end of the safety statute, where nobody looking for contract law would think to check, is a provision that changes what a broker agreement is worth in Florida. Fla. Stat. § 316.302(13)(a) provides that, notwithstanding any provision of law to the contrary, a provision “contained in, collateral to, or affecting a motor carrier transportation contract that purports to indemnify, defend, or hold harmless, or has the effect of indemnifying, defending, or holding harmless, the promisee from or against any liability for loss or damage resulting from the negligence or intentional acts or omissions of the promisee is against the public policy of this state and is void and unenforceable.”
Three phrases in that sentence widen it beyond the obvious case. “Contained in, collateral to, or affecting” reaches side agreements and not only the four corners of the haul contract. “Or has the effect of” reaches a clause drafted to achieve indemnity without using the word. And “defend” is named alongside indemnify and hold harmless, so a duty-to-defend obligation is inside the prohibition rather than beside it.
Subsection (13)(b) defines who is protected and who is not, and the carve-out at the end is the part that matters to an owner-operator. “Promisee” means the contract’s promisee and its agents, employees, servants and independent contractors directly responsible to it, “except that the term does not include motor carriers which are party to a motor carrier transportation contract with the contract’s promisee, including such motor carrier’s agents, employees, servants, or independent contractors directly responsible to such motor carrier.” The protection runs against the party asking for indemnity, not in favor of a carrier seeking it from another carrier.
Subsection (13)(c) sets the date: the subsection “only applies to motor carrier transportation contracts entered into or renewed on or after July 1, 2010.” Renewal counts, which means an old agreement rolled forward is inside the provision even though the original signature predates it.
For a class of operator who signs broker agreements as offered and negotiates none of them, this is one of the few provisions in Florida law that improves a contract without the operator doing anything. It does not fix a bad agreement. It removes one specific term from the parts of it Florida will enforce.
Florida writes its roadside enforcement into the same section as its adoption, and the mechanics are worth knowing before meeting them. Fla. Stat. § 316.302(9) authorizes a law enforcement officer of the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, or a duly appointed agent holding a current safety inspector certification from the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, to require the driver of any commercial vehicle to stop and submit to an inspection of the vehicle or the driver’s records.
The branch after that is the operationally important part. If the vehicle or driver is found operating in an unsafe condition, or a required part is missing or out of adjustment, and continued operation would present an unduly hazardous condition, the vehicle or driver may be placed out of service until corrected. If continued operation would not present an unduly hazardous condition, the officer “may give written notice requiring correction of the condition within 15 days.”
Paragraph (9)(a) extends the enforcement reach beyond the department: any member of the Florida Highway Patrol, or any law enforcement officer employed by a sheriff’s office or municipal police department authorized to enforce the traffic laws, who has reason to believe a vehicle or driver is operating in an unsafe condition may enforce the section. This is not a specialist-only regime.
Two records duties sit alongside it and both have short clocks. Under § 316.302(2)(c), on request of the department a motor carrier must furnish time records or other written verification so the department can determine compliance with the hours limits, and “These time records must be furnished to the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles within 2 days after receipt of that department’s request”, with falsification subject to a civil penalty. Two days is not enough time to build a record that does not already exist.
The hours limits those records answer to are Florida’s own. Under § 316.302(2)(b), a person operating solely in intrastate commerce without placarded hazardous materials may not drive more than twelve hours following ten consecutive hours off duty, or for any period after the end of the sixteenth hour after coming on duty. Under (2)(c), the weekly limit is seventy hours in seven consecutive days, or eighty in eight if the motor carrier operates every day of the week, with thirty-four consecutive hours off duty ending the period. Section 316.302(2)(a) separately relieves that operator from the federal minimum-age and driving-limit provisions the state names.
There is no table to quote for this class, and any number offered without seeing the operation would be invented. What follows is not a rate; it is what actually decides one in a state that has removed itself from the question.
The first thing that moves a Florida file is that nothing underneath it is fixed. With no operating authority to hold, no state insurance filing for this operator, no cargo requirement and a liability ladder that begins above the rig, every limit on the policy is there because a shipper, a broker, a lender or the operator’s own judgment put it there. That is a larger practical difference than it sounds: in a filing state, the minimum is a floor everyone in the lane is standing on, and in Florida there is no floor to stand on.
The weights come next, and there are four of them rather than one. Gross vehicle weight, gross vehicle weight rating and gross combined weight rating all have to be under 26,001 pounds for the § 316.302(2)(f) exemption; gross vehicle weight alone is what § 627.7415 rungs are expressed in; and the axle count on the rig is a live question under § 320.01(25). An operator who sends one number for the truck has answered none of those cleanly.
Commodity is third and it carries unusual weight here because there is no state schedule pushing against it. Light-combination freight skews toward high value per pound — components and replacement parts bought at a premium precisely because a machine has stopped — and a cargo limit set against the average load fails against exactly the load that produces the claim. In Florida that limit is negotiated, not prescribed.
The contract stack is fourth and is where most of the real requirements come from. Additional-insured wording, primary-and-non-contributory wording, waivers of subrogation and contractual cargo limits are all imposed by the counterparty rather than by the state — sitting on top of § 316.302(13), which removes one specific class of indemnity term from what Florida will enforce for contracts entered into or renewed on or after July 1, 2010.
Radius and the state line close it out, and in Florida they are the same question as the exemption. “Solely in intrastate commerce” is a condition on the sub-26,001 pound relief, so a dispatch into Georgia or Alabama changes the safety posture for that load. The honest answer to how far the operation runs is a distribution rather than a maximum, and the distribution is what gets read.
No Florida statute or rule read for this page names this work. There is no defined term for it, no permit class, no filing schedule and no endorsement the state mandates for it by name. That is an established absence rather than an unfinished search, and it sits on top of a second and more unusual absence — an entire regulatory regime that used to exist and does not.
The two absences are different in kind and should not be reported as one. Florida never wrote a rule for light combinations, in the same way no state has. Florida did once regulate the entry of intrastate for-hire motor carriage and stopped, and the stopping is legible only through a chapter missing from a 1997 index, a number re-used in 1998, and two administrative-code chapters that keep their titles and hold no rules.
What this page does not establish is the instrument that did it. The repealing session law is earlier than the online reach of the sources that count, and rather than name a plausible candidate it is recorded as a gap. The 1986 volume was read in full and excluded; a year-by-year sweep of the intervening volumes at several hundred megabytes each was judged disproportionate to what it would add.
One further question is left open on the face of the statute rather than resolved: whether the “three or more axles regardless of weight” limb of § 320.01(25) reaches a two-axle power unit pulling a multi-axle trailer. Both readings are available on the words as served, the consequence differs materially, and this page reports the ambiguity instead of choosing.
The assembly an operator is left with is four instruments in three chapters that were not written together: a definition in § 316.003(14), a safety adoption and its exemptions in § 316.302, a liability ladder in § 627.7415, and the definition in § 320.01(25) that gates it. None of them cross-references the others in terms an operator would search for, and the one that would have tied them together was repealed before the state started publishing its statutes online.
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 Florida 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 Florida 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.
No. There is no Florida agency that licenses entry into intrastate for-hire general freight carriage, and the reason is a repeal. Chapter 323 of the Florida Statutes, the Title XXIII chapter that carried economic regulation of for-hire motor carriage, is absent from the official 1997 compilation; the number was re-used by ch. 98-324 and today captions “WRECKER OPERATORS”. The Public Service Commission’s implementing rule chapter, Fla. Admin. Code ch. 25-5 “MOTOR CARRIERS”, survives as a titled shell reporting “No Chapter File.” and “No Rules were found.”, and Fla. Stat. ch. 350 contains no occurrence of “motor carrier”.
Two different definitions apply for two different purposes. For the safety chapter, Fla. Stat. § 316.003(14)(a) reaches a self-propelled or towed vehicle used in commerce to transport passengers or cargo with a gross vehicle weight rating of 10,000 pounds or more — “or more”, so a vehicle rated at exactly 10,000 pounds is inside. For the liability minimums in § 627.7415, the gate is Fla. Stat. § 320.01(25), which reaches a vehicle with a gross vehicle weight of 26,001 pounds or more, or three or more axles regardless of weight, or used in combination where the combination exceeds 26,001 pounds.
Partly, and the exemption names what survives. Fla. Stat. § 316.302(2)(f) exempts from subsection (1) a person operating a commercial motor vehicle whose gross vehicle weight, gross vehicle weight rating and gross combined weight rating are all less than 26,001 pounds, solely in intrastate commerce, not carrying placarded hazardous materials. It then provides: “However, such person must comply with 49 C.F.R. parts 382, 392, and 393 and 49 C.F.R. ss. 396.3(a)(1) and 396.9.” All three weights have to be under the line at once, and the intrastate and placarding conditions are decided per load.
For a rig between 10,000 and 26,000 pounds, none under Fla. Stat. § 627.7415. That section’s lowest rung is fifty thousand dollars per occurrence at a gross vehicle weight of 26,000 pounds or more but less than 35,000, rising to one hundred thousand at 35,000 and three hundred thousand at 44,000, and it reaches only vehicles meeting the § 320.01(25) definition. Subsection (4) reaches vehicles already “subject to regulations of the United States Department of Transportation” and names only two subparts of the federal financial-responsibility part, so it does not impose a Florida duty on a purely intrastate carrier.
Not for an intrastate general-freight carrier. Fla. Stat. § 316.302(1)(b) adopts 49 C.F.R. parts 382-386 and 390-397 for intrastate commerce, a pair of ranges that skips the federal financial-responsibility part entirely, so no federal cargo concept enters Florida intrastate law. The statutes and the relevant administrative-code inventories were read, and the only Florida instrument pairing cargo with insurance is the household-goods scheme in Fla. Stat. § 507.04, which runs to movers of household goods. That reading rests on complete chapter-title enumerations plus targeted full reads rather than a full-text sweep of every rule in the administrative code, and that limit is stated on the page.
The edition in force on December 31, 2023. Fla. Stat. § 316.302(1)(b) subjects intrastate owners and drivers to 49 C.F.R. parts 382-386 and 390-397 “as such rules and regulations existed on December 31, 2023” — a static incorporation. Paragraph (1)(a), which governs interstate operation, carries no date at all, so the two paragraphs run on different clocks. The adoption is also expressly subject to the carve-outs later in the section, including the sub-26,001 pound exemption.
Fla. Stat. § 316.302(2)(b) allows a person operating solely in intrastate commerce without placarded hazardous materials to drive up to twelve hours following ten consecutive hours off duty, and bars driving after the end of the sixteenth hour on duty. Paragraph (2)(c) sets seventy hours in seven consecutive days, or eighty in eight if the carrier operates every day of the week, with a thirty-four hour restart, and requires time records to be furnished to the department within two days of a request. Paragraph (2)(d) writes Florida’s own 150 air-mile intrastate relief from two federal recordkeeping provisions.
Not in a motor carrier transportation contract entered into or renewed on or after July 1, 2010. Fla. Stat. § 316.302(13)(a) makes void and unenforceable any provision “contained in, collateral to, or affecting” such a contract that purports to indemnify, defend or hold harmless the promisee, or has that effect, against liability for loss or damage resulting from the promisee’s own negligence or intentional acts. Subsection (13)(b) excludes motor carriers who are party to the contract from the definition of “promisee”, so the protection runs against the party demanding indemnity.
There is no table to quote from, and any figure offered without seeing the operation would be invented. Florida is unusual in that no state instrument sets a floor for this operator at all, so the limits come from the shipper or broker agreement and from the exposure. What sets the price is the three weights and the axle count, the commodity mix and the value of the heaviest load carried, the radius distribution and how often a dispatch leaves the state, driver ages and tenure and what hours records exist, and the additional-insured, primary-and-non-contributory and waiver terms flowing down from contracts.
Every figure on this page was read at the source below on September 1, 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.
