Motor carrier classes by state
Maine is one of the few states that took its intrastate freight regime apart on purpose and left the wreckage legible. The operating authority license for hauling freight inside the state was narrowed in 2009 and repealed outright in 2010, and what governs a light combination today is a safety rule that turns on how far the truck runs from its yard — not on what the truck weighs.
Everything that is true of a truck-and-trailer freight operation wherever it runs — how the work is dispatched, how a mixed load is secured, how quickly a cargo limit gets outrun — belongs on the hot shot trucking insurance page and is dealt with there. Four Maine instruments are the subject here, and two of them no longer exist.
No Maine statute and no Maine rule read for this page uses the words this trade uses for itself. There is no defined term, no permit class and no filing table written for it. Maine reaches the work the way it reaches all motor carriage: through a weight definition in a safety rule, through the fact of carrying for compensation, and through the registration of the vehicle. Naming that plainly matters, because the three do not meet at the same number and two of them no longer exist.
What makes Maine worth reading closely is the demolition. 29-A M.R.S. §552, the operating authority license, is marked REPEALED on the Revisor’s own page, and so are §§553, 554, 559 and 562 around it. The economic regulation of intrastate freight in Maine is gone. What replaced it is not a lighter version of the same thing — it is a different instrument, kept by a different agency, keyed to a different fact about the operation.
Each number on this page carries the instrument it came from. Maine’s safety rule and Maine’s insurance statute live in different titles, were last touched eleven years apart, and run on separate clocks. Describing them as a single regime would describe something Maine does not have.
Running freight inside Maine and trying to work out which license you need? For general property the answer is now none — and the questions that replaced it are how far you run from your yard, and what your combination is rated at.
Send the power unit and trailer ratings separately, and tell us the furthest point you dispatch to from your regular place of business. Those two facts settle which Maine instruments are in play, and they settle it before coverage is discussed at all.
The repeal is worth reading in sequence because each step did something different. PL 2009, c. 435, §6, signed June 18, 2009, amended 29-A M.R.S. §552(1) by striking the words “freight, merchandise, household goods or” from the license requirement. What survived that cut reached only a person “transporting … passengers by motor vehicle for hire”. Freight was out of the licensing statute a year before the statute itself died.
PL 2009, c. 598, §9, signed April 2, 2010, then repealed §552 outright. The Revisor’s served section page now reads, in its entirety, “§552. Operating authority license required (REPEALED)”, followed by a section history that records the 2009 amendment and the 2010 repeal in order. There is no successor section and no replacement chapter.
The machinery around it went the same way. §553, the identification device, was repealed by PL 2009, c. 435, §7. §554, lapse of license, by PL 2009, c. 435, §8. §559, agents for service of process, by PL 2009, c. 598, §23. §562, the Motor Carrier Review Board, by PL 2019, c. 634, §4. Subchapter 2 of chapter 5 is titled MOTOR CARRIER REGISTRATION and more than a third of its sections are now marked repealed.
What did not survive with them is any economic regulator for freight. The Maine Public Utilities Commission has no motor carrier jurisdiction; the phrase does not appear anywhere in the served text of Title 35-A, which was swept in full for this page. So there is no certificate of public convenience and necessity to apply for, no rate filing, no protest hearing and no territory to be authorized for. A carrier hauling general freight for compensation entirely inside Maine holds no state operating authority because Maine no longer issues one.
One duty did survive, and it is permissive rather than mandatory. 29-A M.R.S. §555-A provides that the Bureau of State Police “may require a motor carrier to have and display a United States Department of Transportation census number” and may adopt rules to administer the section. The word is “may”, and the rule written under it, 29-250 CMR c. 168, defines the vehicles it reaches by a 26,000 pound threshold — above where this equipment sits.
The practical effect for an operator is that the compliance question in Maine is not “what license do I hold”. It is “which of the surviving instruments has my configuration inside it”, and that question is answered by two numbers that do not agree with each other.
Maine has a definition of “commercial motor vehicle” in its motor carrier safety rule and another in its motor vehicle code, and they are 16,000 pounds apart. Both are live. Which one governs depends on which instrument you are reading, and nothing in either text warns you that the other exists.
The safety rule is the low one. 16-222 CMR c. 4, §1(A) defines a commercial motor vehicle as any self-propelled or towed motor vehicle used on a highway in interstate or intrastate commerce to transport passengers or property when the vehicle “Has a gross vehicle weight rating or gross combination weight rating, or gross vehicle weight or gross combination weight, of 4,536 kg (10,001 pounds) or more, whichever is greater”. Note the four-way test and the closing phrase: a rating will do it, and so will an actual scaled weight.
The statutory one is the high one. 29-A M.R.S. §101(17) defines the same term as a motor vehicle or combination used in commerce to transport passengers or property if it “Has a gross combination weight rating of 26,001 or more pounds inclusive of a towed unit or units with a gross weight rating of more than 10,000 pounds”, or is a bus, or carries placarded hazardous material, or “Has a gross vehicle weight rating or gross vehicle weight of 26,001 or more pounds”.
For a truck and gooseneck the towed-unit rider in paragraph A is the detail that gets missed. It is not enough for the combination to reach 26,001 pounds; the towed unit itself has to be rated above 10,000 pounds for that paragraph to bite. A combination assembled from a heavy power unit and a light trailer can clear the combination figure and still fail the rider — which means paragraph A does not reach it, and paragraph D then has to be tested against the power unit alone.
The two definitions do different work. The safety rule’s 10,001 pound line decides whether the adopted federal safety parts apply to the operation at all. The statute’s 26,001 pound line decides, among other things, which tier of Maine’s insurance ladder the vehicle sits in. An operator who found one number and assumed it was Maine’s number has answered a question the state did not ask.
Section 2 of the safety rule compounds the trap by looking universal on its own. It reads, in full: “This regulation applies to any interstate or intrastate common, contract, and private motor carrier that transports passengers or property in Maine.” There is no weight in that sentence. The weight enters only through the §1(A) definition, one section earlier, and a reader who starts at the applicability section will conclude the chapter reaches everything.
Maine’s most consequential intrastate provision for this work is not a weight rule at all. It is a radius rule, and it does two separate jobs from the same 100 air mile pivot.
The first job is the driver file. 16-222 CMR c. 4, §4(C)(1) provides that intrastate motor carriers, vehicles and drivers to whom the chapter applies “that operate less than 100 air miles from their regular place of business are only subject to” an enumerated list of nine provisions of the federal driver-qualification part — §§391.13, 391.15, 391.23(a), 391.23(a)(1), 391.25(a), 391.25(b), 391.27(a), 391.27(b), and 391.41(b)(12)(i). The same paragraph adds a retention rule: documents and records obtained from those inquiries “must be maintained on file by the motor carrier for a period of two years”.
That is an enumerated subset, not a discount. Everything the list does not name is off, inside the radius, as a matter of Maine’s own rule. An operator who runs entirely within 100 air miles of the yard therefore holds a materially thinner qualification file than an identical operator running 120, and both are compliant.
The second job is hours. §4(D)(1) provides that intrastate motor carriers, vehicles and drivers operating less than 100 air miles from their regular place of business “are exempt from 49 C.F.R. Pt. 395”. Not a logging shortcut and not a short-haul exception with conditions — the whole part, off, inside the radius, for intrastate operation.
And then §4(C)(2) runs the same pivot in the other direction, which is the paragraph most people miss because it appears to reward the longer haul. Intrastate carriers and drivers operating more than 100 air miles from their regular place of business “are exempt from 49 C.F.R. §391.11(b)(1)”, and the same paragraph substitutes a floor of its own: those drivers “must be at least 18 years old”. Read together with §4(C)(1), which never picks up §391.11 in the first place, the net result is that Maine’s intrastate minimum driving age is 18 on both sides of the line — reached by two different routes.
A fourth provision runs off the weight band rather than the radius and is worth knowing because it removes paperwork rather than adding it. §4(B-1)(1) provides that “Intrastate vehicles to which this chapter applies that have a gross vehicle weight rating of 10,000 lbs. to 26,000 lbs., and that neither meet the definition of a ‘bus’ nor transport hazardous materials, are exempt from 49 C.F.R. §§ 390.19 and 390.21” — the motor carrier identification report and the vehicle marking rule. That band is where a medium-duty truck pulling a loaded gooseneck ordinarily lands.
None of this is stable against the way the work is actually dispatched. Light-combination freight is sold on availability, and a driver who takes a load 130 air miles out has moved the operation across the pivot for that dispatch. The radius is not a property of the carrier; it is a property of the day.
Tell us the furthest point you dispatch to from your yard, the power unit and trailer ratings separately, and whether any load leaves Maine. Those three answers settle which Maine instruments are live before a single coverage question is reached.
Maine’s carrier-specific insurance requirement is in the vehicle code rather than in the safety chapter, and it attaches to registration rather than to authority. 29-A M.R.S. §1611(1) puts it in a single sentence: “The Secretary of State may not register any motor vehicle for rent, lease, hire or livery and a person may not operate or cause to be operated on any public way in the State such a motor vehicle until the owner or owners of that vehicle procure insurance or a bond covering the operation of that vehicle”, in one of four listed forms.
The amount for this operator is in paragraph (2)(A), and it reads in full: “Except as provided in paragraph E, there is a $350,000 combined single limit for emergency vehicles and for-hire transportation vehicles for transporting freight or merchandise but not passengers in intrastate-exempt service or service exempted by the federal Department of Transportation, Surface Transportation Board.” The paragraph was last amended by PL 2011, c. 78, §1.
Two qualifiers in that sentence travel with the figure and neither should be smoothed away. The first is the opening exception: paragraph E carves out rental trucks with a registered gross weight of 26,000 pounds or less rented or leased for fewer than 30 days, and gives them $125,000 combined single or a $50,000 / $100,000 / $25,000 split instead. The second is the phrase “in intrastate-exempt service”, which Maine uses to scope the whole requirement and then does not define anywhere in Title 29-A. It is carried here unresolved rather than paraphrased into something tidier.
The 2025 addition is the figure most likely to be misapplied to this equipment, so it is worth stating what it does and does not reach. Paragraph (2)(G), added by PL 2025, c. 107, §1, provides in full: “For intrastate commercial motor vehicles, there is a combined single limit of $750,000.” It uses the statutory term, which means it inherits §101(17)’s 26,001 pound definition and its towed-unit rider. A combination that stays under those figures is not an intrastate commercial motor vehicle for this purpose and is not reached by paragraph (2)(G). The Revisor’s page also annotates the paragraph with an applicability marker pointing at PL 2025, c. 107, §2, which is a separate provision and is not characterized here.
There is a lower universal figure in the same chapter and it is not a carrier rule. 29-A M.R.S. §1605(1)(C) sets Maine’s ordinary compulsory motor vehicle limits for every registered vehicle, including a private car owned by someone who carries nothing for anyone. It is out of scope as a motor carrier requirement and is named here only so that it is not mistaken for one.
Maintenance and cancellation sit in §1611(3), and the consequence is registration rather than a fine. The owner “shall maintain at all times the required amount of insurance or bond during the term of the vehicle’s registration”; the insurer “must provide at least 30 days’ notice of cancellation of insurance to the Secretary of State”, notwithstanding §1606; and the Secretary of State “shall immediately suspend or revoke … the registration certificate and registration plates of any vehicle for which the insurance or bond in the amounts required is not maintained”. The plates and certificate then have to be returned. A lapse in Maine does not produce a citation waiting to happen — it produces an unregistered truck.
Maine imposes no cargo insurance filing on a motor carrier, at any weight, in any commerce. That is a negative claim, so it is worth being explicit about how it was established and why it is not simply an absence of evidence.
The reason is a limit on the agency’s own power. 29-A M.R.S. §555(2) enumerates exactly which federal parts the Bureau of State Police may incorporate by reference: “The bureau may adopt a rule to incorporate by reference federal regulations in 49 Code of Federal Regulations, Parts 40, 382, 383, 385, 390, 391, 392, 393, 395 and 396, and appendices, as amended, and may adopt amendments to those federal regulations.” The federal financial-responsibility part is not on that list. The safety agency therefore could not build a carrier financial-responsibility or cargo filing rule on this authority even if it wanted to, and it did not.
The rule confirms it. 16-222 CMR c. 4 has eight sections and all eight were read for this page. §3 adopts Parts 40, 382, 390, 393 and 396 plus appendices, and Part 392 in two named slices. §4 adopts Parts 383, 391 and 395 with state amendments. §5 adds Part 385. The financial-responsibility part appears in none of them, and the word “cargo” appears nowhere in the chapter.
The one place the word does appear in Maine’s motor carrier rule corpus is an exclusion, not a requirement. 29-250 CMR c. 153 §8(A) describes the insurer’s undertaking on a liability filing as reaching bodily injury and property damage of others while “excluding injury to or death of the Insured’s employees while in the course of their employment and loss of or damage or property of the Insured and property transported by the Insured designated as cargo”. That is a chapter about passengers for hire, and its own status is the subject of the next section.
What follows commercially is straightforward and is the part that matters to a hot shot. Because no Maine agency takes a cargo filing, no Maine agency sets a cargo limit. The number is set by whoever is shipping — the broker’s certificate requirement, the shipper agreement’s insurance schedule, or nothing at all if neither says. That is a contract negotiation rather than a compliance threshold, and it is the negotiation most often lost by an operator who assumed a state minimum existed to fall back on.
It also means the cargo limit is the coverage most likely to be set once and never revisited. A figure chosen for the average load holds through years of ordinary freight and then fails on the one dispatch that was worth taking: a machine component, a temperature-controlled consignment, a part whose price stopped mattering the moment production halted. Read the motor truck cargo limit against the heaviest-value load actually carried, not the typical one, because Maine will not do it for you.
29-250 CMR c. 153 is a reading trap, and an operator or an agent searching Maine’s rules for motor carrier insurance will land on it. It is worth naming precisely so that it can be recognized and set aside.
The chapter is captioned “The Operation of Motor Intrastate Carriers of Passengers For-Hire”. Its summary states that it “establishes requirements for the operation of motor carriers of passengers for-hire as provided in Title 29-A section 552”. Section 552 is the operating authority license repealed in 2010. The rule rests on a statute that no longer exists.
Worse for a reader in a hurry, its §1 preamble still carries a property residue under that passengers-only caption: “In the regulation of motor carriers transporting property for-hire in the State of Maine over the public highways, the following words, terms and phrases shall have the meaning herein defined”. Every operative definition that follows is confined to passengers — “intrastate carrier” means a person engaged in the business of transporting passengers for hire. The preamble says property; the body does not.
The rule was last amended July 4, 2000 and has since carried only non-substantive conversions and accessibility checks. It names the liability filing forms still cited in Maine’s rule corpus. None of that makes it a source of obligation for a freight carrier, and its §8(A) excludes cargo on its face in any event.
The general lesson is one to carry into any state, not just this one. A rule can outlive its enabling statute by more than a decade, keep an out-of-date preamble, and go on being served as current text. An instrument’s presence on a state’s rule index is not evidence that it still reaches anyone. The test is what the enabling section says today.
Maine does not freeze the federal text it adopts. 16-222 CMR c. 4 §3 adopts its parts “as amended”, §4 does the same, and §5 does the same again. A federal amendment reaches an intrastate Maine carrier through this chapter without any state action, which is the opposite of what a static incorporation does.
The state keeps three controls over that. §555(1) reserves to the Bureau of State Police the power to “modify or decline to adopt any of the federal regulations or amendments referenced in this section”, and states expressly that the authority “includes the right to make rules related to the length of duty of drivers”. §555(2)(A-1) makes the adoption a major substantive rule — the category that goes to the Legislature — if it substantively changes a Maine amendment or adopts an amendment to a federal regulation. And §555(2)(A-2) forbids the bureau from adopting any rule that exempts placarded hazardous material carriage from an adopted federal regulation, which is why the rule’s own §4(A)(1) states flatly that “There are no exemptions for motor carriers, vehicles, or drivers transporting hazardous materials” of a placarded type or quantity.
The chapter’s effective-date block records more than forty filings back to August 1, 1982, including a run of emergency adoptions in the 1990s and 2000s that expired on their own terms. The last substantive amendments are recorded as July 5, 2014 and June 19, 2015, both final adoptions of major substantive rules.
One entry in that block is worth reading for its own sake because it is a warning about served text generally. Under the heading CORRECTION, dated May 15, 2014, the chapter records that language was “inserted into §4(C)(1), this language, ‘and 391.41(B)(12)(i)’, which was present in the paper filing but missing from the Secretary of State’s e-version”. For some period the electronic rule and the filed rule said different things about which driver-qualification provisions a short-radius intrastate carrier was subject to. Maine caught it and wrote the catch into the history block.
The practical discipline is to check the clock on each instrument separately. The safety rule was last amended in 2015 and adopts federal text on a rolling basis. The insurance section was amended in 2011 and again in 2025. The licensing statute was repealed in 2010. A change to any one of them leaves the others exactly where they were.
Nothing in Maine law fixes a premium and nobody can name one from a distance. The list below is not a rate. It is the sequence of facts a market asks for, and Maine reorders that sequence, because the state’s own hinge is a radius rather than a weight.
Radius comes first, and in Maine it is not a proxy for anything — it is the operative fact. An operation that stays inside 100 air miles of its regular place of business is out of the hours-of-service part entirely and holds an enumerated nine-provision driver file. One that regularly crosses that line carries the full qualification part and full hours compliance. Those are different operations with different loss exposures and different records available after a claim, and they are priced differently. The honest answer to how far you run is a distribution, and the distribution is what gets read.
Gross combination weight rating is second, and in Maine it decides which of the two competing definitions the equipment sits inside. Neither plate answers it alone. The operative figure is what the combination reaches once the heaviest trailer in the yard is behind the truck — a fact about equipment purchasing rather than about specification, and one that moves without any rule being amended.
Cargo is third and it carries more weight here than in a state that sets a filing figure. Maine sets none, so the limit is entirely contractual, and an underwriter looking at a Maine account has no statutory floor to anchor to. The mix of commodities, the worth of the dearest load actually run, and the securement practice that goes with it are what the limit is set against.
Authority type and the freight contract sit underneath everything. Running on your own USDOT registration is a different posture from running leased on, and the certificate a broker demands can add named insureds, dictate the order in which policies respond, and strip a recovery right — none of which alters anything about the equipment. Those obligations travel with the load rather than with the state, which is exactly why a Maine operator carrying no state filing duty can still end up holding limits chosen by a broker three states away.
Driver profile closes it. Maine reaches an intrastate minimum age of 18 by two separate routes, and a market reaches its own conclusion about a young or newly hired driver from claims data rather than from the statute book. Permission to operate and willingness to insure are decided in different buildings.
There is no entry for this trade. Maine’s motor vehicle title, its safety rule and its rule index define nothing by that name, license nothing by that name and tabulate no filing under it. An operator can read the whole corpus and never meet the vocabulary the work is sold in.
That silence is ordinary and it is not a research failure. Thresholds drawn for motor carriage at large are what catch this configuration, here as everywhere. Maine stands out for three other reasons: it deleted the license this class would once have needed, it kept a safety rule hinged on distance rather than mass, and it left two live definitions of one phrase sitting in adjacent instruments.
The consequence for an operator is that the answer has to be assembled rather than looked up: a repealed licensing subchapter, a safety chapter with a 100 air mile hinge, an insurance section keyed to registration, and a rule corpus with no cargo filing anywhere in it. Four instruments, written at four different times, that do not cross-reference one another.
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 Maine 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 Maine 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. The operating authority license at 29-A M.R.S. §552 was amended by PL 2009, c. 435, §6 to strike freight, merchandise and household goods, leaving passengers only, and was then repealed outright by PL 2009, c. 598, §9. The Revisor’s page for §552 now reads simply REPEALED. Sections 553, 554, 559 and 562 were repealed alongside it, and the Public Utilities Commission has no motor carrier jurisdiction. Maine issues no state operating authority for general property.
Both, for different purposes. 16-222 CMR c. 4 §1(A) uses 10,001 pounds on a four-way test — rating or actual weight, gross vehicle or gross combination, whichever is greater — and that decides whether the adopted federal safety parts reach the operation. 29-A M.R.S. §101(17) uses 26,001 pounds, and its combination limb additionally requires a towed unit rated above 10,000 pounds. That statutory figure decides which insurance tier the vehicle sits in. They are two live definitions of the same phrase in adjacent instruments.
Two things, in opposite directions. Under 16-222 CMR c. 4 §4(C)(1), an intrastate carrier operating less than 100 air miles from its regular place of business is only subject to nine enumerated provisions of the federal driver-qualification part, with inquiry records kept two years, and under §4(D)(1) it is exempt from the hours-of-service part altogether. Under §4(C)(2), a carrier operating more than 100 air miles out is instead exempt from §391.11(b)(1) and its drivers must be at least 18. The pivot is a property of the dispatch, not of the carrier.
No, and the reason is structural. 29-A M.R.S. §555(2) lists the federal parts the Bureau of State Police may incorporate — Parts 40, 382, 383, 385, 390, 391, 392, 393, 395 and 396 — and the financial-responsibility part is not among them, so no cargo or carrier financial-responsibility rule could be built on that authority. All eight sections of 16-222 CMR c. 4 were read and the word cargo appears in none of them. Your cargo limit in Maine is set by your shipper and broker agreements, not by the state.
29-A M.R.S. §1611(2)(A) sets a $350,000 combined single limit for for-hire transportation vehicles carrying freight or merchandise but not passengers, in the words of the statute, in intrastate-exempt service or service exempted by the federal Surface Transportation Board. Two qualifiers travel with it: the paragraph opens except as provided in paragraph E, the rental-truck carve-out, and Maine does not define intrastate-exempt service anywhere in Title 29-A. The requirement is gated by §1611(1), which reaches a vehicle registered for rent, lease, hire or livery.
Not on this profile. 29-A M.R.S. §1611(2)(G), added by PL 2025, c. 107, §1, sets a $750,000 combined single limit for intrastate commercial motor vehicles, and that term takes its meaning from §101(17) — 26,001 pounds gross vehicle or gross combination, with the combination limb requiring a towed unit rated above 10,000 pounds. A combination under those figures is not reached by paragraph (2)(G). The Revisor’s page carries a separate applicability marker for that public law, which is not characterized here.
Because it is an orphan. 29-250 CMR c. 153 is captioned as a rule for intrastate carriers of passengers for hire, its summary cites 29-A M.R.S. §552 as its authority, and §552 was repealed in 2010. Its §1 preamble still opens with language about regulating motor carriers transporting property for hire, while every definition that follows is confined to passengers. It was last amended July 4, 2000. It is served as current text and it is not a source of obligation for a freight carrier.
Maine sets no price and nobody can name one at a distance. The largest single input here is radius, because the 100 air mile pivot changes both the driver file and hours compliance. After that: gross combination weight rating against both Maine definitions, the commodity profile and what the most valuable single consignment is worth, whether the operation runs on its own registration or leased on, driver ages and tenure, and whatever the broker’s certificate demands of the policy.
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.
