Motor carrier classes by state
Massachusetts keeps a statutory chapter titled Carriers of Property by Motor Vehicle, a 2014-vintage regulation on motor carriers and brokers with live freight-tariff machinery in it, and a definition of commercial motor vehicle that carries no weight floor at all. Read the books and you would conclude a light combination needs a state certificate and has to prove cargo insurance to get one. That conclusion is wrong, and nothing in the Massachusetts text tells you so.
What does not change from one jurisdiction to the next about this work — an hours-long delivery promise, a deck rebuilt load by load, a shipment worth more than the equipment carrying it — is handled at hot shot trucking insurance.
Massachusetts is distinctive for a reason that has nothing to do with a threshold. It runs two separate regimes over the same truck, and only one of them is what it appears to be. The safety regime, at 540 CMR 14.00, is live, clearly drafted, and states its intrastate reach in the incorporation clause itself. The economic regime, at M.G.L. c. 159B and 220 CMR 260.00, is fully in force on its face and does not reach general freight — and the reason it does not is a federal statute that appears nowhere in the Massachusetts text.
That gap is the most useful thing an operator can be told about this state. Massachusetts never amended c. 159B to take property out of it. Sections 3 and 4 stand unrepealed and unnarrowed, the chapter’s only exemption section contains no weight floor and no small-carrier relief, and the implementing regulation was re-promulgated as recently as December 5, 2014 — after the preemption — still speaking of certificates for the common carriage of property and of freight rate tariffs filed before operations begin.
Every citation below carries the date of the version read and the register or session that produced it. The safety chapter bears a March 9, 2018 register stamp; the economic regulation is effective December 5, 2014; the statute still names an agency that changed its name in 2007. Treating them as one dated regime would misdescribe all three.
Told you need Massachusetts operating authority to haul freight intrastate? The chapter that says so is still on the books and still reads that way — and it has not reached general property carriage for decades. Knowing which of the two Massachusetts regimes is actually live saves an application that would never be processed.
Send the combination rating, whether any dispatch crosses into Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire or New York, and what the heaviest load you actually haul is worth. Massachusetts sets no cargo figure, so the third answer is the whole of that decision.
Massachusetts uses the term “commercial motor vehicle” in two chapters administered by two agencies, and the two definitions do not agree. Which one applies decides whether a light combination is in scope, and the answer is different on each track.
On the safety track, 540 CMR 14.02(2)(a) provides that as used in that chapter, commercial motor vehicle means “1. a motor vehicle with a gross vehicle weight rating or gross combination weight rating of 10,001 pounds or more used for the transportation of property; 2. a motor vehicle designed to transport more than 15 passengers, including the driver; or 3. a motor vehicle used in the transportation of hazardous materials in a quantity requiring placarding”. The property limb counts the combination, so a light truck reaches it by what is behind it.
On the economic track, M.G.L. c. 159B, § 2 defines the same phrase with no weight at all: “‘Commercial motor vehicle’, any vehicle, machine, tractor, trailer or semi-trailer propelled or drawn by mechanical power and used upon ways in the transportation of property; but not including any vehicle, locomotive or car operated exclusively on a rail or rails. Wherever the term ‘motor vehicle’ appears in this chapter, it will be deemed to mean a commercial motor vehicle.”
Any vehicle used upon ways in the transportation of property. That definition reaches a cargo van, a pickup, a trailer taken on its own. On the face of the Massachusetts statute book, the economic chapter is the broader of the two — and it is the one that turns out not to be operative.
The safety chapter also settles what happens if its own definition drifts from the federal one it borrows. 540 CMR 14.02(2)(b) provides that the term is intended to have the same meaning as in the corresponding federal definition, “and, to the extent there is a conflict between the two at any time, the definition in 49 CFR Part 390.5 shall control.” So on the safety side Massachusetts has pre-committed to the federal reading, permanently and in either direction.
The chapter’s scope section reaches wider than vehicles alone. 540 CMR 14.02(1) applies the chapter to motor carriers and their drivers, to carriers and shippers transporting hazardous materials, and to “common and contract carriers by motor vehicle, and private carriers of property and passengers by motor vehicle.” Private carriage of property is named, so an operator hauling its own material on a qualifying combination is inside the safety chapter on the same terms.
Most states extend federal safety text inward to intrastate operation somewhere other than the adoption sentence, which is why the extension is often the hardest thing to verify. Massachusetts puts it in the sentence.
540 CMR 14.03 opens: “Subject only to the specific exceptions and limitations expressly provided in 540 CMR 14.00, the following are incorporated as the regulations of the Registry of Motor Vehicles governing motor carrier safety and the transportation of hazardous materials upon the ways of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in both intrastate and interstate commerce:” and then lists the incorporated parts by number and caption — compliance with noise emissions standards, the carrier safety assistance program, controlled substances and alcohol testing, commercial driver license standards, minimum levels of financial responsibility, general safety regulations, driver qualification, driving, parts and accessories, hours of service, inspection and repair, hazardous materials driving and parking rules, and named hazardous materials subparts.
The purpose section says the same thing a second time. 540 CMR 14.01 states that the chapter was adopted to govern the use and operation of certain motor vehicles, trailers and commercial motor vehicles, the auditing of records of commercial motor carriers, and motor carrier safety and hazardous materials transportation “in both intrastate and interstate commerce upon the public ways of the Commonwealth”.
The opening qualifier is load-bearing and travels with everything below: “Subject only to the specific exceptions and limitations expressly provided in 540 CMR 14.00”. The adoption is whole except where the chapter itself carves out, and there is exactly one carve-out section, described further below.
The compliance obligations are also stated as reaching intrastate carriers by name. 540 CMR 14.04(1) requires “Every motor carrier operating in intrastate or interstate commerce, or both, upon the public ways of the Commonwealth” to comply with the incorporated federal regulations and with named provisions of the state’s motor vehicle and highway statutes, and 540 CMR 14.04(3) requires a motor carrier, “whether engaging in intrastate or interstate operation”, to maintain a listed set of records in the regular course of business.
That records list is worth reading as an operational checklist, because it is the clearest statement in Massachusetts law of what a state officer expects to see. It runs to financial responsibility records, driver qualification files including all required forms, drug and alcohol testing records, hours of service, driver vehicle inspection reports and vehicle maintenance records, hazardous materials records where applicable, and accident registers together with copies of accident reports required by any governmental entity or insurer.
States usually do one of two things with a federal edition: freeze it at a stated date, or adopt it as amended from time to time. Massachusetts does neither in words, and the absence was checked rather than assumed.
The full text of 540 CMR 14.00 was searched for the phrases a rolling or fixed incorporation would use. “As may be revised” returns zero hits. “As appearing” returns zero. “As amended” returns zero. “Revised as of” returns zero. No CFR edition, revision date or “as in effect on” language appears anywhere in the chapter’s eight sections.
That is worth naming because widely circulated secondary summaries quote this rule as adopting the federal parts “as appearing or as may be revised” in the Code of Federal Regulations. That phrase is not in the current published text. Whatever it once described, a page relying on it today would be citing something the Registry’s own official document does not say.
What the chapter does carry is a promulgation stamp, on every page: “Mass. Register #1360 (3/9/18)”. Its regulatory authority line reads “540 CMR 14.00: M.G.L. c. 90, § 31.” So the chapter itself dates from March 9, 2018, and the federal text it points at is undated in both directions.
One incorporated citation shows how far back some of the drafting reaches. 540 CMR 14.02(2)(a)3 defines the hazardous materials limb by reference to the Federal Hazardous Materials Transportation Act at an appendix citation of the federal code that was superseded by recodification years before this chapter was promulgated. It is a stale pointer inside a current rule, and it is recorded here for accuracy rather than because it changes the outcome.
There are two further dangling internal references in the published text, and they are noted for the same reason. 540 CMR 14.05(1)(c) repeatedly cross-refers to a paragraph of 540 CMR 14.04(1) that does not carry the content it describes, and 540 CMR 14.06(1) opens “Subject to 540 CMR 14.05(2)” where 14.05 as published contains only a paragraph (1). Neither is load-bearing on anything stated here, and both are the kind of defect that a reader working from a summary would never encounter.
Send the combination rating, the share of dispatches that stay inside Massachusetts, and what your heaviest actual load is worth. And if anyone has told you to apply for state operating authority to haul freight here, send that too — it is worth settling before it costs a filing fee.
540 CMR 14.05 is captioned “State Exemptions Applicable Only to Intrastate Commerce”. It is the dedicated place a Massachusetts intrastate variance would live, and it was read word for word. It contains three items, all of them driver-qualification relief.
The first is age: drivers of vehicles engaged only in intrastate commerce in the Commonwealth are exempt from the twenty-one-years-of-age requirement in the incorporated driver-qualification part. The relief carries no weight condition, no placarding condition and no commodity condition — only the intrastate one.
The second is unusual enough that it should be quoted rather than paraphrased. The same drivers are exempt from “the ability to read and speak the English language contained in 49 CFR § 391.11(b)(2), except that this exemption shall not be applicable to initial permits or initial commercial driver licenses issued after March 9, 2018; and except further, that this exemption does not apply to any person operating a motor vehicle used for the transportation of hazardous material”. It is a date-limited grandfather: drivers whose initial credential predates March 9, 2018 hold the exemption, and the class has been closed since the day the chapter took effect.
The third is medical, and Massachusetts substitutes its own standards rather than simply removing the federal ones. Intrastate drivers are exempt from the federal physical-defect waiver requirements, and the Registrar issues intrastate waivers instead against criteria set out in the rule — a vision waiver requiring a combined horizontal peripheral field of not less than 120 degrees together with distant visual acuity of at least 20/40 in either eye and the ability to distinguish red, green and amber; a diabetic waiver on a physician’s written statement giving specific reasons the applicant is not or is no longer at risk of hypoglycemic episodes and recommending a reevaluation date; a cardiovascular waiver where the applicant has no implanted cardiac defibrillator and no Class III or Class IV heart disease on the American Heart Association functional guidelines; and a limb loss or impairment waiver where the condition is not likely to interfere with safe operation. Intrastate waivers are not available for school bus operator certificates, and a preserved class of existing waiver holders may renew against stated criteria.
What 14.05 does not contain is the finding. The section was searched for the hours-of-service part and returns zero hits, and the whole chapter was searched for “air mile”, “air-mile”, “150”, “short haul” and “short-haul” — every one of those returns zero hits across all eight sections. So the incorporated hours part, including its short-haul provisions, applies to Massachusetts intrastate carriage exactly as written, with no altered radius and no altered hours.
That is a clean negative supported by reading the whole instrument rather than by not finding something. Massachusetts wrote one intrastate exemption section, put three driver-qualification items in it, and put nothing else there.
Two short sections at the end of the safety chapter change how everything above should be read, and both were quoted in full because their brevity hides their reach.
540 CMR 14.07 provides: “540 CMR 14.00 establishes minimum standards for motor carrier safety and hazardous materials transportation. Motor carriers, drivers, shippers and any other persons subject to 540 CMR 14.00 must comply with the laws and regulations of the Commonwealth, and in the event of a conflict between 540 CMR 14.00 and any other regulation or law of the Commonwealth, the stricter, more stringent standard shall apply.”
That is a one-way ratchet toward the stricter rule, and it means the safety chapter is a floor rather than a ceiling. A more stringent Massachusetts provision found in another chapter displaces the incorporated federal text, which is why an operator cannot treat 540 CMR 14.00 as a closed answer to what Massachusetts requires. It is also why the hours position stated above was checked against the economic chapter as well: the only hours provision in c. 159B is its section on drivers’ hours, and it carries no radius.
540 CMR 14.08 restricts who may enforce the chapter: it “shall be enforced only by police officers of the Commonwealth who have satisfactorily completed a course of instruction in Federal Motor Carrier Safety regulations, safety inspection procedures, and out-of-service criteria, as prescribed by the U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration”, with annual recertification.
The enforcement tail is also worth knowing because it reaches registrations rather than only citations. 540 CMR 14.04(4) provides that where a carrier fails or refuses without good cause to make documents available for a compliance review, and the State Police so inform the Registrar in writing, the Registrar may initiate immediate action to revoke all motor vehicle and trailer registrations issued to the carrier, or may limit the revocation to the vehicles relating to the withheld documents. And 540 CMR 14.04(5) requires the State Police, on determining through a compliance review that a carrier engaged only in intrastate commerce is in violation, to report the noncompliance to the Registrar with a copy to the federal agency — so an intrastate-only finding does not stay inside Massachusetts.
This is the part of the Massachusetts material that a reader working from the state’s own text will get wrong, and it is worth walking through in the order the books present it.
M.G.L. c. 159B, § 3 opens: “No person shall engage in the business of a common carrier by motor vehicle upon any way unless there is in effect with respect to such carrier a certificate issued by the department authorizing the operations to be performed by such person.” Section 3(a) sets the standard for issuance — the applicant must be found “fit, willing and able properly to perform the services proposed”, and the service must be “required by the present or future public convenience and necessity; otherwise, such application shall be denied” — and section 3(b) requires notice and a public hearing.
The chapter’s own definition of who that reaches is broad and expressly includes irregular-route work. Section 2 defines a common carrier by motor vehicle as any person who transports property “for the general public by motor vehicle, for compensation, upon ways, over regular or irregular routes”. Section 4 imposes a parallel permit requirement on contract carriers, opening with a policy declaration that “the business of contract carriage is affected with the public interest”.
There is no way out of it inside the chapter. Section 13 is the only exemption section and it is short enough to quote whole in substance: vehicles owned by the Commonwealth or its political subdivisions and vehicles transporting non-hazardous waste materials are subject to one named section and exempt from the rest; vehicles engaged exclusively in delivering United States mail or other work directly under the United States are exempt from all provisions except that same section. No weight floor. No small-carrier relief. No irregular-route carve-out.
The instrument that resolves it is federal and is printed nowhere in the Massachusetts books. 49 U.S.C. § 14501(c)(1) provides that except as stated in two following paragraphs, a State “may not enact or enforce a law, regulation, or other provision having the force and effect of law related to a price, route, or service of any motor carrier … or any motor private carrier, broker, or freight forwarder with respect to the transportation of property.”
What paragraph (2) preserves is a short and specific list, and general freight entry is not on it. Subparagraph (A) preserves state safety regulatory authority over motor vehicles, state authority to impose highway route controls or limitations based on size, weight or the hazardous nature of the cargo, and state authority “to regulate motor carriers with regard to minimum amounts of financial responsibility relating to insurance requirements and self-insurance authorization”. Subparagraph (B) provides that paragraph (1) “does not apply to the intrastate transportation of household goods.” Subparagraph (C) preserves state authority over tow truck operations performed without the owner’s consent.
Section 20 of c. 159B fits the same shape from the state side: “Nothing in this chapter shall lessen or affect the authority or powers of the department of highways or of the registrar of motor vehicles under chapter ninety.” The safety layer — which is the layer 540 CMR 14.00 sits in — is expressly preserved and untouched by anything in the economic chapter.
If the statute alone produced the false reading, the regulation makes it worse, because it is recent and it is detailed and it describes a working process.
220 CMR 260.00, captioned “Motor Carriers and Brokers”, has two sections: “General” and “Rules Governing the Filing of Freight Rate Tariffs”. Its regulatory authority line cites section 16 of c. 159B, and the Department’s index gives it an effective date of December 5, 2014.
The insurance provision is the one that matters for this class, and its caption tells you what kind of provision it is. Under the heading “Condition of Issuance of Certificate”, 220 CMR 260.01(1) provides: “No certificate shall be issued to any person or corporation to operate as a common carrier unless the Department is satisfied that the applicant is adequately insured for the loss of or damage to property transported by the applicant.” It is not a standing filing duty and it is not an amount. It is a satisfaction test applied at the moment a certificate is issued.
The related paragraph is conditional on its own face. 220 CMR 260.01(3) provides: “When insurance is required by the Department, the insurance policy shall contain a provision to the effect that said policy shall not expire nor be cancelled except upon 20 days prior notice in writing by the insurance company to the Department.” When required — so it creates no independent obligation either.
The tariff machinery in the same regulation is the part that reads most convincingly as live. 220 CMR 260.01(4) requires any person granted a certificate for the common carriage of property for hire to file acceptable tariffs before beginning operations, within thirty days of the Department’s decision, and provides that “no certificate will be issued until such filing is made” and that failure to file is cause for revocation. Section 260.02 then runs through tariff content, mileage-based rates and a named mileage guide to resolve disputes, a limit of three supplements to any tariff at one time, powers of attorney and concurrences with sixty days’ notice to revoke, public posting of tariffs, and applications to change rates on less than thirty days’ notice.
All of that is rate regulation, which is squarely inside the field the federal statute quoted above forecloses for property carriage. So an operator reading 220 CMR 260.00 in 2026 is reading a detailed, recently re-promulgated description of a process that a general-freight carrier will never enter — and there is nothing in the document to indicate it.
One number sweep is worth reporting because it changes what a search would tell you. The full text of 220 CMR 260.00 was searched: the word “cargo” appears zero times in it, and the word “insurance” appears five times. This is the only cargo-insurance provision in Massachusetts law reaching a property carrier, and it does not use the word.
Two conclusions follow from the sections above, and both are stated carefully because both are places a page could easily overreach.
The first is about how Massachusetts arrived here. Some states responded to the federal preemption by amending their own text — cutting general property out of the certificate statute and leaving a narrowed class of passengers, household goods and hazardous waste behind. Massachusetts did not. Sections 3 and 4 stand as originally drafted, section 2 still defines a floorless commercial motor vehicle, section 13 still exempts only governments, non-hazardous waste and the mail, and the implementing regulation was re-promulgated in 2014 with its tariff machinery intact. The narrowing here is entirely external, and it is invisible in the Massachusetts books.
That is not a technicality for an operator. It means a broker, a shipper, a competitor or an insurer working from the Massachusetts statute will read a certificate requirement that appears to apply, and the rebuttal is a federal statute rather than a state amendment note. It also means the position is more stable than a state amendment would be, since restoring it would require Congress rather than the General Court.
The second conclusion is about financial responsibility, and here the honest answer is a structural one. 540 CMR 14.03 incorporates the federal financial responsibility part expressly “in both intrastate and interstate commerce”, and 540 CMR 14.04(3)(a) requires a motor carrier, whether intrastate or interstate, to maintain records complying with that part “relating to minimum levels of financial responsibility for a motor carrier engaged in interstate or foreign commerce or intrastate commerce”. So the incorporation and the record-keeping duty both plainly reach intrastate carriage.
What does not follow is a Massachusetts dollar figure. The incorporated part carries its own scope provisions, which are written in terms of interstate carriage and which include a weight-based exclusion at the bottom of the range, and 540 CMR 14.00 contains no provision rewriting references to interstate commerce as including intrastate commerce. Some states supply exactly such a sentence; Massachusetts does not. This page therefore reports the incorporation and its express intrastate reach, and does not assert a resulting Massachusetts intrastate minimum, because asserting one would require a bridging provision the chapter does not contain.
The federal preemption statute makes the shape of that gap slightly poignant. Financial responsibility minimums are one of the few property-side powers subparagraph (2)(A) expressly leaves with the states. Massachusetts is free to set an intrastate figure, and the way it has used that freedom is to point outward at a federal part rather than to write one — which is a choice, and a defensible one, and it leaves the reader without a number to quote.
Nothing here comes off a schedule, and a number produced without the operation in front of you would be invented. Below is the order an underwriter works a Massachusetts submission in.
Cargo value comes first, and it comes first because the state supplies nothing at all. The only Massachusetts cargo-insurance provision is a satisfaction test attached to a certificate that a general-freight carrier will never hold, no Massachusetts instrument states a cargo amount, and the word “cargo” does not appear in the regulation containing that provision. The limit is set by the customer’s contract, and tested by whichever deck the operation loads at the highest value. Since one deck here routinely carries more than the truck under it is worth, that is the whole of the decision, and motor truck cargo is a negotiated line rather than a regulated one.
Radius and the state line come second, and in Massachusetts the geography makes them acute. The state’s intrastate driver-qualification exemptions are all conditioned on operating only in intrastate commerce, and Boston is closer to Providence, Nashua, Hartford and Portsmouth than many single-state runs elsewhere in the country. An operation that describes itself as intrastate and dispatches on availability will cross a line, and the honest answer is a distribution rather than a policy.
The combination rating is third. It decides whether the safety chapter reaches the operation at all, and the relevant number is the one produced by the trailer hooked up rather than the one printed on the power unit. The day it changes is the day a heavier deck is bought, and nobody is notified.
Driver profile is fourth and is unusually live in this state. Massachusetts has moved its intrastate age floor, keeps a closed-class language exemption tied to a 2018 date, and issues its own medical waivers against its own criteria. None of that binds an insurer. Age loadings, experience minimums and named-driver restrictions all sit on the underwriting side and are set against loss experience, so the distance between what Massachusetts permits and what a program will accept is wider here than in states that adopt the federal driver rules whole.
Records discipline is fifth, and Massachusetts effectively publishes the checklist. The 540 CMR 14.04(3) list is what a compliance review looks for, refusal to produce can reach the Registrar and the registrations themselves, and an intrastate-only violation is reported onward to the federal agency. An account whose files match that list is a materially different submission from one that has to reconstruct them.
Underneath all of it sits the contract, and Massachusetts leaves more to it than most states do. Whether the operator holds its own authority or works under somebody else’s changes who is answering first. Whether a shipper has required insured status, whether it has demanded that one policy respond ahead of every other without contribution, and whether a recovery right was signed away at onboarding are the three questions that reprice an account without a single specification of the equipment changing. Those terms usually arrive together, and the general freight and first-year underwriting pages describe the shape they take.
The absences here were established by reading complete instruments, which is what licenses stating them at this strength.
Massachusetts writes no air-mile or short-haul provision of its own. 540 CMR 14.00 was read in full, all eight sections, and swept for “air mile”, “air-mile”, “150”, “short haul” and “short-haul”: zero hits on every term. The hours part is incorporated and reaches intrastate carriage on the federal terms, and 540 CMR 14.05, the only intrastate exemption section, returns zero hits for that part.
Massachusetts writes no cargo amount and no cargo filing. 220 CMR 260.00 was read in full and contains the word “cargo” zero times; its single relevant provision is an adequacy judgment made as a condition of issuing a certificate, with no dollar figure anywhere in the regulation.
Massachusetts states no intrastate financial responsibility figure of its own, which is why none appears on this page. It incorporates a federal part expressly for intrastate commerce and supplies no bridging provision to carry that part’s interstate scope inward, and this page reports that structure rather than resolving it into a number.
And Massachusetts has never written a term for this work, never opened a class for it, never printed a schedule against it and never mandated an endorsement peculiar to it. What makes Massachusetts worth reading closely is not a threshold written for light combinations. It is that the state has kept a complete and recently maintained economic regime on the books over a class of carriage it no longer reaches, so that the most confident-looking answer available in the Massachusetts text is the wrong one.
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 Massachusetts 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 Massachusetts 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, though the Massachusetts books read as if it does. M.G.L. c. 159B, § 3 still requires a certificate of any common carrier of property by motor vehicle over regular or irregular routes, § 4 still requires a contract carrier permit, and § 13, the chapter’s only exemption section, contains no weight floor and no small-carrier relief. What removes general freight is federal: 49 U.S.C. § 14501(c)(1) bars state regulation related to a price, route or service of a motor carrier with respect to the transportation of property, and the carve-outs preserve only safety, size and weight route controls, minimum financial responsibility, intrastate household goods and non-consensual towing.
Because it never repealed them. 220 CMR 260.00, effective December 5, 2014, is captioned “Motor Carriers and Brokers” and its second section is “Rules Governing the Filing of Freight Rate Tariffs”, running through tariff content, mileage-based rates and a named mileage guide, supplements, powers of attorney and concurrences, public posting, and short-notice rate changes. All of it is rate regulation of property carriage, which is inside the field the federal statute forecloses. Nothing in the document indicates that, which is why the Massachusetts books read as a false positive.
None from a general-freight carrier, and no amount from anyone. Massachusetts has exactly one cargo-insurance provision, 220 CMR 260.01(1), under the caption “Condition of Issuance of Certificate”: “No certificate shall be issued to any person or corporation to operate as a common carrier unless the Department is satisfied that the applicant is adequately insured for the loss of or damage to property transported by the applicant.” It is an adequacy test applied at issuance, not a standing filing, and the regulation containing it states no dollar figure — the word “cargo” appears in it zero times.
540 CMR 14.02(2)(a)1 defines the covered property vehicle as “a motor vehicle with a gross vehicle weight rating or gross combination weight rating of 10,001 pounds or more used for the transportation of property”, and 540 CMR 14.03 incorporates the federal safety parts “in both intrastate and interstate commerce”. The rating counts the combination. Note that M.G.L. c. 159B, § 2 defines the same phrase for the economic chapter with no weight floor at all — two definitions, two agencies, and only the safety one is operative for a freight carrier.
No, and the negative rests on reading the whole chapter. 540 CMR 14.05, captioned “State Exemptions Applicable Only to Intrastate Commerce”, is the only place a variance could live and contains three driver-qualification items and nothing else; a search of that section for the hours part returns zero hits. A sweep of all eight sections of 540 CMR 14.00 for “air mile”, “air-mile”, “150”, “short haul” and “short-haul” returns zero hits on every term. The incorporated hours part applies intrastate as written.
Yes as a matter of state regulation. 540 CMR 14.05(1)(a) exempts drivers of vehicles engaged only in intrastate commerce within the Commonwealth from the twenty-one-years-of-age requirement in the incorporated driver-qualification part, with no weight, commodity or placarding condition attached. Whether a program will write the driver is decided elsewhere, on loss experience, and the exemption is lost for any dispatch that leaves the state.
It closes a class. 540 CMR 14.05(1)(b) exempts intrastate drivers from the English-language requirement in the incorporated driver-qualification part, “except that this exemption shall not be applicable to initial permits or initial commercial driver licenses issued after March 9, 2018; and except further, that this exemption does not apply to any person operating a motor vehicle used for the transportation of hazardous material.” March 9, 2018 is also the register date stamped on every page of the chapter, so the exemption closed on the day the rule took effect.
Massachusetts states none of its own, and none is published here. 540 CMR 14.03 incorporates the federal financial responsibility part expressly “in both intrastate and interstate commerce”, and 540 CMR 14.04(3)(a) makes maintaining records under that part an intrastate duty. But the incorporated part carries its own interstate scope provisions and its own weight-based exclusion, and 540 CMR 14.00 contains no provision reading references to interstate commerce as including intrastate commerce. The incorporation is reported; a resulting Massachusetts dollar minimum is not asserted.
No schedule prices this class and no honest number can come off a page. It turns on how much the operation’s most valuable deck is worth, since Massachusetts states no cargo amount at all; the spread of dispatch distances and how often one crosses into a neighboring state, which every intrastate exemption depends on; the rating the trailer in service produces; driver ages, credential dates and any Registrar-issued medical waiver; whether the records at 540 CMR 14.04(3) are genuinely maintained; whose name is on the operating authority; and any insurance condition a shipper contract imposes.
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.
