Motor carrier classes by state
Kansas writes a relief that lands exactly on the weight band a truck and gooseneck occupy, and then withdraws it in the same paragraph from anyone carrying property for money. A private fleet in that band drops most of the federal safety package and keeps three named things. A for-hire operation in the identical rig keeps all of it. The difference is not the equipment; it is whether somebody paid.
The parts of this work that are the same in every state — the tight window, the securement duty across mixed freight, the mismatch between a cargo limit written for an average load and the load that actually produces a claim — belong to the class rather than to Kansas, and they sit on the hot shot trucking insurance page instead of being repeated here.
Kansas’s own contribution is a two-sentence structure in one statutory paragraph, and reading only the first sentence produces exactly the wrong answer. K.S.A. 66-1,129(c)(3) takes the federal safety parts off a defined class of vehicle in a defined weight band. The next sentence names three categories the relief does not reach, and one of them is intrastate public for-hire motor carriers of property.
A second Kansas feature works in the same direction and is much easier to miss. The mandatory intrastate liability policy that the commission requires as a condition of the license expressly does not cover the freight. The exclusion is written into the regulation in words, not left to the market, and since a rule change some years ago nothing requires the carrier to insure the load at all.
Every figure below is attributed to the instrument that sets it and was re-read on the date shown. Where Kansas adopts federal text it does so part by part with a different date on each part, so this page reports four dates rather than one.
Hauling for hire in Kansas on a rig between ten and twenty-six thousand pounds and told the state has a carve-out at that weight? It does. The sentence after it says the carve-out does not apply to intrastate for-hire carriers of property.
Tell us whether the operation is for hire or moves the operator’s own property, and send the power unit and trailer ratings separately. In Kansas the first answer changes the whole regime and the second only changes the arithmetic.
K.S.A. 66-1,129(c) opens with a chapeau that carries its own scope limit: “The provisions of 49 C.F.R. parts 390-399 adopted by reference in the rules and regulations of the commission shall not apply to the following, while engaged in the carriage of intrastate commerce.” The words “while engaged in the carriage of intrastate commerce” are a condition on the relief and not decoration — the relief is available for the intrastate operation only, and does not travel with the vehicle.
Paragraph (c)(3) then describes the class: “Private motor carriers domiciled in Kansas operating commercial motor vehicles (CMV) with a gross vehicle weight (GVW), gross vehicle weight rating (GVWR), gross combination weight (GCW), or gross combination weight rating (GCWR) of 10,001 to 26,000 pounds and registered pursuant to K.S.A. 8-126 et seq., and amendments thereto.”
Read what that paragraph requires before anyone celebrates it. The carrier must be private. It must be domiciled in Kansas. The vehicle must sit inside the band on any of four measures. And it must be registered under the state registration act, with the phrase “and amendments thereto” carrying the registration reference forward as that act changes.
Then the withdrawal, verbatim: “This exception does not apply to commercial motor vehicles, regardless of weight, which are designed or used to transport 16 or more passengers, including the driver, or intrastate public (for hire) motor carriers of property or passengers, or any motor vehicles which are used in the transportation of hazardous materials and required to be placarded pursuant to 49 C.F.R. part 172, subpart F.”
The phrase “regardless of weight” at the front of that sentence is the tell. Kansas is not narrowing the band; it is removing three categories from the relief entirely, at any weight, and the middle category is precisely a for-hire property carrier operating intrastate. A light combination hauling somebody else’s freight for money in Kansas is outside the carve-out on the face of the paragraph that creates it.
The net position is stark and worth stating plainly because it is the opposite of what most operators expect from a state with a stated band: for a for-hire property carrier in Kansas there is no weight relief anywhere between the bottom of the band and the top of it.
The paragraph that grants the relief also carves obligations back out of it, which is unusual and tells you what Kansas thought was too important to drop.
K.S.A. 66-1,129(c)(3), continuing: “Such carriers shall comply with 49 C.F.R. part 393, subpart I (load securement) and subpart F (coupling devices), as adopted by K.A.R. 82-4-3i; and 49 C.F.R. part 396.17 (annual inspection), as adopted by K.A.R. 82-4-3j.”
Load securement, coupling devices and the annual inspection. Those are three duties about the physical connection between a truck, a trailer and a load, and Kansas kept every one of them for a class it otherwise released. The choice is legible: the legislature was willing to drop process requirements for a private fleet in that band and unwilling to drop the requirements that keep a trailer attached and a load on it.
For a for-hire operation the point is comparative rather than operative — none of the relief applies in the first place — but it is worth knowing when reading how Kansas thinks about this equipment class. The state’s stated minimum for a released private carrier is a securement standard, a coupling standard and an annual inspection, which is a reasonable description of the three things most likely to go wrong on a gooseneck.
There is one further weight in the section, and it runs the other way. K.S.A. 66-1,129(b) provides that “no rules and regulations adopted by the commission pursuant to this section shall require the operator of any motor vehicle having a gross vehicle weight rating or gross combination weight rating of not more than 10,000 pounds to submit to a physical examination, unless required by federal laws or regulations.”
That is a limit on the commission’s own rulemaking power rather than an exemption for a carrier, and it carries a hedge that gives most of it back: “unless required by federal laws or regulations.” The commission may not impose a physical examination on the operator of a vehicle at or below that figure by its own rule, and federal law is expressly left free to do so. It is a boundary on the agency, not a promise to the operator.
This is the question most worth resolving about Kansas, because the operative sentence and the answer are in different places.
K.S.A. 66-1,111, verbatim and in full: “No public motor carrier of property or passengers or private motor carrier of property shall operate any motor vehicle for the transportation of either persons or property on any public highway in this state except in accordance with the provisions of this act, and amendments thereto, and other applicable laws.” There is no weight in that sentence, and a reader stopping there would conclude that Kansas binds every for-hire operator at any size.
The weight is one definition away. K.S.A. 66-1,108(e) defines the bound class: “‘public motor carrier of property’ means any person who undertakes for hire to transport by commercial motor vehicle, from place to place, the property other than household goods of others who may choose to employ or contract with the motor carrier.” The operative words are “by commercial motor vehicle.”
And that term is not defined in the definitions section. K.S.A. 66-1,108 defines five terms — the commission, household goods, public motor carrier of household goods, public motor carrier of passengers and public motor carrier of property — and “commercial motor vehicle” is not among them. It is not defined in the commission’s own definitions regulation either; K.A.R. 82-4-1 defines a substantial list of motor carrier terms and that phrase is not on it.
Where the meaning does come from is the adoption. K.A.R. 82-4-3f(a) adopts 49 C.F.R. Part 390 by reference, and the commercial-motor-vehicle definition travels in with it. So the weight enters the Kansas authority duty through the definitional chain rather than through the sentence that imposes the duty.
The practical consequence is worth stating carefully because it cuts both ways. A reader who quotes only 66-1,111 will overstate the reach of Kansas authority. A reader who quotes only the weight will understate how the sentence is written and will miss that the state’s own drafting has no floor in it. The accurate description is that Kansas’s licensing duty is written without a weight and acquires one from a defined term the act does not itself define — which is a fragile way to carry a threshold, and a reason to check the definitional chain rather than a headline number when a Kansas answer matters.
The insurance side confirms the shape rather than complicating it. K.S.A. 66-1,128(a) provides that “no certificate, permit, or license shall be issued by the commission to any public motor carrier of property, household goods or passengers or private motor carrier of property, until the applicant has filed with the commission a liability insurance policy approved by the commission.” The instrument and the policy are conditions of each other, and both are keyed to the same defined classes.
Tell us whether the operation is for hire or private, whether the commission’s license and approved liability policy are current, and what the heaviest routine load is worth. Those three answers settle a Kansas submission before any coverage question is reached.
Kansas puts its liability minimum in statute and then delegates upward. K.S.A. 66-1,128(a) directs that the policy be in “such reasonable amounts as the commission determines by rules and regulations is necessary to adequately protect the interest of the public,” and then fixes the bottom: the amounts “shall not be less than $100,000 for personal injury or death to any one person in any one accident, $300,000 for injury or death to two or more persons in any one accident and $50,000 for loss to property of others in any one accident.”
Two things follow. The commission’s discretion runs one way — it may determine higher amounts as necessary, and it may not set a lower figure than the statute states. And the statutory figures are a floor for the license rather than an assessment of adequacy for any particular operation; they were not written against the value of a modern light-combination load and nothing suggests they were meant to be.
There is a separate adoption of the federal financial-responsibility part at K.A.R. 82-4-3n, which the commission lists under the heading of minimum levels of financial responsibility for motor carriers. That sits above the statutory floor rather than replacing it, and it is a different instrument with a different scope.
The gap between a statutory floor and a defensible limit is the single most consequential thing on this page for an operator’s actual exposure, and it has nothing to do with weight. A combination that is entirely lawful at the statutory minimum can be catastrophically underinsured against one occurrence involving a passenger vehicle, and Kansas’s statute does not pretend otherwise — it says “not be less than,” which is language that anticipates being exceeded.
Kansas does not leave cargo to the market by omission. It writes the exclusion into the mandatory policy.
K.A.R. 82-4-22(a)(3) provides that the insurance policy shall bind the obligors to pay compensation for “(A) Injuries or death to persons, except injury to the insured’s employees while engaged in the course of their employment; and (B) loss of, or damage to, property of others, not including property usually designated as cargo, resulting from the negligent operation of the carrier.”
The words are “not including property usually designated as cargo.” The policy a Kansas carrier must file to get its license is, by regulation, a policy that does not respond to the freight on the deck. That is not an insurer’s exclusion an operator might negotiate; it is the shape of the instrument the state requires.
The same regulation identifies who has to file it. K.A.R. 82-4-22(a)(1) provides that before the commission issues a certificate, permit or license, the following applicant carriers shall obtain and keep in force a public liability and property damage insurance policy: public motor carriers of property, household goods or passengers, and private motor carriers of property.
So the mandatory filing is liability only, and it is defined against the cargo. An operator who assumed the state-required policy covered the load has assumed something the regulation contradicts by name, and the point at which that assumption fails is a loss rather than an audit.
Kansas used to require cargo insurance for intrastate carriage and does not any longer, and the way the change is legible in the code is instructive.
The current standard-forms regulation names the instruments the commission uses: the liability certificate, the interstate forms, and the cancellation form. It does not name a cargo certificate. The earlier version of that regulation did — it designated a uniform motor carrier cargo certificate of insurance for intrastate common and contract carriers — and that subsection is gone from the current text.
The requirement itself is gone the same way. The earlier version of the intrastate insurance regulation required each public and contract motor carrier of property and household goods conducting intrastate business to keep in force a cargo insurance policy in a stated minimum amount and to file proof of it. That subsection does not appear in the current rule.
What survives is an orphan. K.A.R. 82-4-25a, the endorsements regulation, still provides that the uniform motor carrier cargo insurance endorsement shall be form I. The form designation outlived both the requirement to carry cargo insurance and the certificate that used to prove it. A designation with nothing left to designate is exactly the kind of residue that misleads a reader working backwards from a form number.
The timing is a range rather than a date, and this page says so rather than picking one. The current regulation’s history line adds two events after the period in which the cargo provisions were present — an October 2010 amendment and a July 2019 amendment. The deletion happened at one of those two, and which one was not established. Stating a specific year here would be a guess presented as a citation.
The practical answer for an operator is unambiguous even though the history is not. There is no Kansas intrastate cargo filing today; the mandatory liability policy excludes the cargo by name; and cargo cover is therefore a commercial decision driven by shipper contracts and by the value of what is actually on the deck, not by a state rule.
Kansas does not adopt the federal safety text as a block with one date on it. The commission adopts part by part, and each regulation carries its own edition.
The general safety part is adopted at K.A.R. 82-4-3f(a) in these words: “With the following exceptions, 49 C.F.R. Part 390, as in effect on October 1, 2018, is hereby adopted by reference.” The exceptions that follow are extensive — definitional revisions, deletions of named sections, and replacements pointing at Kansas regulations in place of federal ones.
The testing-procedures part and the controlled-substances part are adopted on the same October 1, 2018 edition, with the controlled-substances adoption carrying an additional Federal Register amendment. The hours part is adopted on a later edition, October 1, 2019, again with a named Federal Register amendment attached.
That arrangement has one clear practical consequence. There is no single date at which a reader can say “Kansas is current to here.” A federal amendment can reach one adopted part and not another, and the only way to know which is to read the adopting regulation for the part in question rather than any summary of the state.
The commission also adopts an inspection standard on its own clock. K.A.R. 82-4-1 adopts the North American standard out-of-service criteria by reference with a stated revision date; the codified text read for this page carries a revision date of April 1, 2024. That is the standard by which an inspector decides whether a vehicle or driver comes off the road, and it moves independently of everything above it.
The authority line under the general safety regulation names its own statutory parents and its own history, and it was read: the regulation is authorized by and implements the commission’s general motor carrier powers together with the safety section discussed above, was originally effective in 2005, and was most recently amended in February 2023. A Kansas answer written before that amendment is describing a different regulation.
Two questions about Kansas were left open and it is more useful to say so than to fill them.
The first is the direction of the hours variance. The statute delegates it in plain terms: K.S.A. 66-1,129(a)(4) provides that “hours of service for operators of all motor carriers to which this act applies shall be fixed by the commission.” The commission’s regulation adopts the federal hours part on the October 1, 2019 edition “with the following exceptions,” and then makes textual deletions rather than substitutions of numbers. The document available in research was a commission rulemaking redline rather than the codified regulation, and no Kansas driving-hour figure different from the adopted federal one was isolated. This page therefore states that Kansas has legislated on hours and does not state a Kansas hours figure.
The second is the air-mile question. Nothing read established a Kansas-authored air-mile construction, and nothing read established its absence either. An accurate denominator is not the same as having read the content, and a negative claim about a regulation that was only seen in redline is not a claim this page is entitled to make.
Both gaps are named here because they change what an operator should do rather than merely what this page can say. If an hours question is load-bearing for a Kansas account — because a driver runs long days inside the state, or because a shipper contract turns on duty status — the answer should be obtained from the commission’s codified regulation for that part rather than from any summary, and the answer should be dated.
What this page does state about hours is structural and was read: the delegation is statutory, the adoption is part-specific and dated, and the exceptions in the adopting regulation operate by deleting federal text rather than by writing Kansas numbers over it.
There is no rate table for this class and no way to quote one from a page. What follows is what gets read before a number exists, and in Kansas the first question is not about the truck.
For hire or not for hire is first, and in this state it is decisive rather than merely relevant. It decides whether the 10,001 to 26,000 pound relief is available at all. Every other question is asked differently depending on that answer, and an account that describes itself loosely — hauling “mostly our own material, sometimes for a customer” — is describing two different regulatory positions and needs to be pinned before anything else happens.
Whether the operation holds the commission’s instrument is second, because K.S.A. 66-1,128(a) makes the approved liability policy a precondition of issuing it. The license and the policy are conditioned on each other, so a lapse in one is a problem in the other by design.
Cargo is third and it is unusually important here because the state has removed itself from the question twice — once by deleting the filing requirement and once by excluding cargo from the mandatory policy in words. Nothing in Kansas law sets a cargo limit for this operator. The limit therefore has to come from the shipper contracts and from the value of the heaviest load actually carried, and “the average load” is not the number that matters.
Gross combination weight rating is fourth. It settles which side of the band a private operation sits on, and for a for-hire operation it settles nothing about the relief but everything about the equipment questions that the securement and coupling standards address.
Radius is fifth and should be given as a distribution rather than a maximum. Kansas is a state where a long intrastate lane is entirely ordinary, and the shape of the distribution tells an underwriter more about the exposure than its endpoint does.
Underneath all of it sits the contract stack: own authority or somebody else’s, additional-insured and primary-and-non-contributory requirements flowing down from shippers, and whether a waiver of subrogation has been given. Those change the program without changing anything about the truck.
No Kansas instrument read for this page names this trade. There is no defined term for it, no dedicated class of license, no weight band drawn around it, and no separate insurance table keyed to it. Kansas reaches it through a definition of a for-hire property carrier and through a safety section drawn for motor carriage generally.
The insurance group of the commission’s motor carrier article was read in full in research — the requiring rule, the intrastate requirements rule, the general intrastate requirements rule, the two revoked numbers, the standard forms rule and the endorsements rule — together with the article’s complete index, in order to establish that no separate cargo regulation exists anywhere else in the article. Three of those rules were re-read this pass. That is what licenses the statement that the only two cargo-related provisions in the article today are the exclusion in the mandatory policy and the orphaned form designation.
On the statutory side, the definitions section, the authority section, the insurance section and the safety section were re-read this pass in full. The definitions section contains five defined terms and “commercial motor vehicle” is not one of them, which is the finding that resolves the state’s threshold question.
What was not read is stated too. The codified hours regulation was not obtained; the historical intermediate versions that would pin the cargo deletion to a single amendment were not obtained, and the state host served identical error documents for two different requests in research, which is the kind of failure that can be mistaken for a read if nobody checks the bytes.
The general shape of Kansas, then, is a state that draws a band that looks made for this equipment and then withholds it from this business, and that has quietly stepped out of the cargo question altogether. Neither of those is visible from the weight figure alone, which is why the weight figure is the least useful thing to know about this state.
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 Kansas 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 Kansas 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.
It has one, and a for-hire property carrier cannot use it. K.S.A. 66-1,129(c)(3) removes 49 C.F.R. parts 390 through 399 from private motor carriers domiciled in Kansas operating in that band and registered under the state registration act, and then provides that “this exception does not apply to commercial motor vehicles, regardless of weight, which are designed or used to transport 16 or more passengers, including the driver, or intrastate public (for hire) motor carriers of property or passengers, or any motor vehicles which are used in the transportation of hazardous materials and required to be placarded.”
The adopted federal parts, with no weight relief between the bottom of the band and the top of it. The relief in K.S.A. 66-1,129(c)(3) is the only weight-based relief in the section and it is withdrawn from intrastate for-hire property carriers by the sentence that follows it, at any weight. The practical answer is that a paid load and a private load in the identical rig produce different regimes in this state.
Three things, named in the same paragraph: “Such carriers shall comply with 49 C.F.R. part 393, subpart I (load securement) and subpart F (coupling devices), as adopted by K.A.R. 82-4-3i; and 49 C.F.R. part 396.17 (annual inspection), as adopted by K.A.R. 82-4-3j.” Load securement, coupling devices and the annual inspection survive the relief that removes everything else.
The sentence does not, and the duty still has one. K.S.A. 66-1,111 provides that no public motor carrier of property or passengers or private motor carrier of property shall operate any motor vehicle for the transportation of persons or property on any public highway in the state except in accordance with the act. The weight arrives through the definition: K.S.A. 66-1,108(e) defines a public motor carrier of property as one who undertakes for hire to transport “by commercial motor vehicle,” and that term is not defined in the definitions section or in the commission’s definitions regulation — it comes in with the adopted federal part at K.A.R. 82-4-3f.
K.S.A. 66-1,128(a) sets a statutory floor of not less than $100,000 for personal injury or death to any one person in any one accident, $300,000 for injury or death to two or more persons in any one accident, and $50,000 for loss to property of others in any one accident, with the actual amounts to be set by the commission “in such reasonable amounts as the commission determines by rules and regulations is necessary to adequately protect the interest of the public.” The commission may go above the floor; it may not go below it.
No, and the regulation says so. K.A.R. 82-4-22(a)(3) requires the policy to bind the obligors to pay for injuries or death to persons, other than the insured’s employees in the course of their employment, and for “loss of, or damage to, property of others, not including property usually designated as cargo, resulting from the negligent operation of the carrier.” The exclusion is written into the instrument the state requires rather than added by an insurer.
Not any more. The earlier version of the intrastate insurance regulation required a cargo policy and proof of it, and the earlier version of the standard-forms regulation designated a cargo certificate for intrastate common and contract carriers. Neither subsection appears in the current text. What survives is the endorsement designation at K.A.R. 82-4-25a, which still names form I for the uniform motor carrier cargo insurance endorsement — a form designation that outlived the requirement it served.
The answer is a range rather than a date and this page does not narrow it further than the record allows. The cargo provisions were present in the earlier text and are absent from the current text, and the current regulation’s history adds exactly two later events, an October 2010 amendment and a July 2019 amendment. Which of the two carried the deletion was not established, and the intermediate versions could not be retrieved.
It depends which part. The general safety part is adopted at K.A.R. 82-4-3f(a) “as in effect on October 1, 2018”; the testing-procedures and controlled-substances parts are adopted on the same edition, the latter with a further Federal Register amendment; the hours part is adopted on the October 1, 2019 edition with its own Federal Register amendment. There is no single Kansas currency date, so an answer that matters should be taken from the regulation adopting the specific part.
This page does not state a Kansas driving-hour figure, because none was established at codified source. What is established is that the legislature delegated the question — K.S.A. 66-1,129(a)(4) provides that hours of service for operators of all motor carriers to which the act applies “shall be fixed by the commission” — and that the commission’s regulation adopts the federal hours part on a dated edition with exceptions that operate by deleting federal text. An operator with a live hours question should obtain the codified regulation for that part and date the answer.
No. Nothing read for this page names the trade, defines it, or gives it a license class, weight band or insurance table of its own. Kansas reaches the work through the definition of a for-hire property carrier and through a safety section written for motor carriage generally. What makes Kansas distinctive is that the one weight band it does draw sits exactly where this equipment sits and is expressly unavailable to this business.
No table exists, and any figure offered without seeing the operation would be invented. What an underwriter reads is whether the work is for hire or private, whether the commission’s instrument and its approved liability policy are current, the cargo limit measured against the heaviest load actually carried rather than the average one, the gross combination weight rating on the heaviest trailer used, securement and coupling practice, radius expressed as a distribution, and the additional-insured and waiver terms flowing down from shipper agreements.
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.
