Motor carrier classes by state
Four New Hampshire chapters once governed motor carriers of property. Each one now returns a single line — the chapter is repealed. What replaced them is a safety regime that updates itself without a rulemaking, and one financial-responsibility rule whose scope is drawn on its own face rather than borrowed from the federal part it points at.
Much of what makes this work hard has nothing to do with which state the truck is in — it is the trade itself, and it behaves the same way on every road it uses. That material is covered once, for the class, on the hot shot trucking insurance page instead of here.
New Hampshire’s own material is unusual in that a great deal of it is absence, and the absences are documented rather than assumed. RSA ch. 375, Motor Carriers of Property; RSA ch. 375-A, Carriage of Household Goods for Hire by Motor Vehicle; RSA ch. 375-B, Motor Vehicles Carrying Property for Hire; and RSA ch. 376, Motor Carriers of Passengers, all sat under Title XXXIV, Public Utilities. Each chapter’s official table-of-contents page was fetched separately for this page, and each returns its chapter caption followed by the words “Chapter is repealed”.
What is left is a safety chapter administered by the Department of Safety and a statute that hands the commissioner an unusually wide adoption power. Neither of those is an economic regime, and this page is careful about the difference — including at the one point where it declines to answer a question rather than answer it from an inference.
Every figure and every quotation below was read at the New Hampshire General Court’s own hosts on August 31, 2026, and one of the readings was done specifically to test a claim that has gone wrong twice in this project at exactly this weight band.
Running expedited freight inside New Hampshire and told there is no state filing? That is close to right and the reason matters, because the same sentence that produces the zero puts a placarded load and every interstate mile back on the other side of the line.
Send the radius distribution, whether any load is ever placarded, and whether the drivers operate exclusively in-state. Those three answers decide which half of this state’s regime applies before any coverage question is reached.
New Hampshire’s motor carrier economics used to live in the public utilities title, and the shape of what was there is legible from the chapter captions alone. Chapter 375 was Motor Carriers of Property. Chapter 375-A was Carriage of Household Goods for Hire by Motor Vehicle. Chapter 375-B was Motor Vehicles Carrying Property for Hire. Chapter 376 was Motor Carriers of Passengers.
All four are repealed, and the way that was established for this page is worth stating because a repeal is exactly the kind of change that leaves no amendment event to find. Each chapter’s own table-of-contents page on the General Court’s host was fetched separately. Four distinct documents came back — four distinct checksums, not one document served four times — and each renders its caption followed by the words “Chapter is repealed” and nothing else.
That matters more than it sounds. A rule that lapses or is repealed produces no notice for a summary writer to catch. The citation still resolves, the chapter number still exists, the page still returns a status of two hundred, and a secondary source written before the repeal reads exactly as authoritative as one written after it. In this project a Connecticut air-mile rule repealed in 2013 was legible only in an effective-date block, and a New Jersey appendix repealed in 2018 the same way.
So a New Hampshire answer assembled from an older summary of the property-carrier chapters is describing a regime that is not there. The instruments that are there are a motor vehicle statute and a Department of Safety rule chapter, and both are in a different title from the ones that were repealed.
There is exactly one motor-carrier financial-responsibility rule in the New Hampshire administrative code, and it is short enough to read whole. Saf-C 908.01, inside Part Saf-C 908, captioned Federal Financial Responsibility Requirements, provides in full: “Every motor carrier operating motor vehicles transporting passengers or property in interstate commerce shall comply with the minimum levels of financial responsibility for carriers set forth in 49 CFR 387, and every motor carrier transporting hazardous materials interstate or intrastate, shall comply with the minimum levels of financial responsibility for carriers set forth in 49 CFR 387.9.”
Read that sentence for what it does rather than for what it cites. It has two limbs. The first imposes the Part 387 levels on carriage “in interstate commerce”, for passengers or property. The second imposes the § 387.9 levels on hazardous materials carriage “interstate or intrastate”. The word intrastate appears once, and it appears attached to hazardous materials.
So a New Hampshire carrier hauling non-hazardous general freight entirely inside the state is reached by neither limb. That is not an oversight in the drafting; it is the drafting. The rule states its own commerce scope in its own words instead of leaving the incorporated federal part’s scope to do the work.
The rule’s history block was read on the same page and is worth recording, because this is a chapter with expirations in its past. The provision’s source line runs #2705 effective May 9, 1984, substituted by #4824 effective June 1, 1990, by #4980 effective November 16, 1990, and by #6353 effective October 11, 1996, which then EXPIRED on October 11, 2004; a new interim rule #8247 effective January 4, 2005 itself expired July 3, 2005; and the current lineage runs from #8404 effective August 2, 2005, substituted by #10215 effective October 25, 2012 and by #13684 effective July 17, 2023. A rule chapter that has expired and been re-made twice is a rule chapter to check the effective date on rather than to cite from memory.
This section exists because the same conclusion has been reached in this project by the wrong route, in this exact weight band, more than once. Two state pages reported a zero state financial-responsibility requirement for a light combination, and in both cases the zero came from reading the incorporated federal part and inheriting an exclusion inside it rather than from anything the state itself had written.
The distinction is not academic. A zero that comes from an incorporated part’s internal exclusion is fragile: it moves when the federal text moves, it can be undone by a state that rewrites a single word of the incorporation, and it says nothing at all about the state’s intent. A zero that comes from the state’s own scoping sentence is a decision the state made and wrote down.
New Hampshire is the second kind and the sentence proves it. Saf-C 908.01 does not say “comply with 49 CFR 387” and stop. It says which carriers, in which commerce, and it says it before the citation. The intrastate general-freight carrier is outside the sentence because the sentence puts them outside it — not because a federal paragraph somewhere excludes a weight class.
This is also why the contrast with neighboring states is real rather than a difference in reporting. Delaware solves the same problem in the opposite direction, by amending the federal general-applicability section to insert the words “and intrastate”. Maryland incorporates the federal financial-responsibility part with no amendments or exemptions and leaves the incorporated text’s own scope in place. New Hampshire writes the scope itself. Three neighbors, three mechanisms, three different answers, and none of them can be inferred from another.
One thing this page will not do is convert that finding into a claim about what a New Hampshire intrastate operator’s liability floor actually is. A vehicle registered and operated in New Hampshire is subject to whatever the state’s ordinary motor vehicle financial responsibility law requires of any registered vehicle, and that is a different body of law from the motor carrier rules, reaching a private car owned by a non-carrier. It was not read for this page and no figure from it is stated here.
Send the radius distribution first — specifically how often a load crosses into Massachusetts, Vermont or Maine — then whether anything you haul is ever placarded, and the driver medical and road test documentation you hold. Those three settle which side of New Hampshire’s regime the account sits on.
The adoption power is the widest in this wave and it is worth quoting exactly. RSA 266:72-a, paragraph I, provides: “The commissioner may adopt as rules, under RSA 541-A, the current version of the federal motor carrier safety regulations promulgated by the U.S. Department of Transportation, Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration and Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, contained in 49 C.F.R. parts 107, 380, and 382-397. Notwithstanding the provisions of RSA 541-A, any amendments or additions by the respective federal agencies or their successor agencies shall also amend or supplement the rules adopted by the commissioner of safety without further action on the part of the commissioner.”
Two things in that paragraph are doing real work. The first is “the current version”, which forecloses a frozen edition. The second is the phrase beginning “Notwithstanding the provisions of RSA 541-A” — RSA 541-A being New Hampshire’s administrative procedure act. The statute is disapplying its own rulemaking process for this purpose. A federal amendment amends the New Hampshire rule by force of the statute, with no notice, no hearing and no filing.
That is genuinely different from a rolling adoption clause that simply says “as amended”. Here the legislature named the procedure it was setting aside. The practical consequence is that there is no New Hampshire document to check for the change: the state rule is different today from what it was, and nothing was published in New Hampshire to say so.
The same paragraph closes with a delegation that runs the other way, and it is easy to miss: “The commissioner shall be authorized to exempt vehicles and drivers operating exclusively in intrastate commerce from such rules which the commissioner determines impose an unnecessary regulatory burden without providing a corresponding safety benefit.” That is a standing power to carve intrastate operations out, exercisable by determination. Any current intrastate exemption is therefore a thing to confirm at the department rather than to derive from the statute.
Paragraph II of RSA 266:72-a builds an expiry mechanic into the adoption process, and it is the sort of provision that produces a rule change with no amendment event attached to it.
The text: “Whenever the commissioner finds that a motor carrier safety regulation in 49 C.F.R. sections 390-397, provides an equal or greater degree of safety the commissioner may, pursuant to RSA 260:5, adopt the federal regulation as a rule, and the rule shall take precedence over the conflicting provisions of this title. No person who is in compliance with the corresponding rule adopted by the commissioner shall be convicted of violating a conflicting provision of this title. The commissioner shall request the introduction, at the next annual session of the legislature following adoption of such a rule, of legislation amending or repealing the conflicting provision of this title and, if the legislation is not enacted, any rule so adopted shall be automatically repealed 60 days after the last day of the legislative session.”
Three consequences follow for anyone relying on a New Hampshire citation. First, a federal safety regulation can displace a conflicting provision of the state motor vehicle title, by the commissioner’s finding. Second, compliance with the adopted rule is an express defense to prosecution under the displaced provision. Third — and this is the part that bites — that displacement is temporary unless the legislature ratifies it, and if it does not, the rule repeals itself sixty days after the session ends.
An automatic repeal produces no repealing instrument. There is no amending order to find and no notice to read. The rule is simply gone at a date computed from a legislative calendar. That is the shape of change this project has been caught by before, and New Hampshire has written it into the statute as a standing mechanic rather than as a one-off sunset.
The practical discipline is to read effective-date and history blocks rather than rule text alone, and to prefer a current departmental answer over any citation more than a session or two old.
It would be easy to read the repealed chapters and the narrow financial-responsibility rule as a state with a light touch, and on the driver file that reading fails.
Paragraph III of RSA 266:72-a provides: “The drivers of all vehicles subject to the motor carrier rules who operate exclusively in intrastate commerce shall be subject to the medical examination, written tests, and road tests required by 49 C.F.R. sections 391.31-391.49, as amended, provided, however, that the commissioner may waive specific requirements or standards of the medical examination for any such driver who has a valid commercial driver’s license issued by this state on or after January 1, 1990, if it would not jeopardize public safety to grant such a waiver.”
That is an affirmative statement that the intrastate-only driver takes the medical examination, the written tests and the road tests. Several states in this wave carve exactly those requirements out for intrastate operation. New Hampshire states them in.
The waiver is real but conditional and administered rather than automatic. Its machinery is Part Saf-C 909, Intrastate Medical Waiver, which applies “to all drivers of commercial motor vehicles who operate exclusively within the state of New Hampshire” and excludes school bus drivers in home-to-school mode. Saf-C 909.02 makes a driver who is not physically qualified under 49 C.F.R. § 391.41(b)(1)-(13) eligible for authorization if the commissioner grants a waiver; Saf-C 909.03 requires the application to be submitted jointly by the driver and the employing motor carrier as co-applicant, unless the driver is self-employed or unemployed; Saf-C 909.08 requires a road skills evaluation on initial application, and again on renewal where the condition has degraded.
For a small operation the co-applicant requirement is the detail that shapes hiring. The employing carrier is on the application. A waiver is not a document a driver simply arrives holding, and the carrier’s name is on the paperwork that produced it.
Paragraph III-a removes state and political-subdivision transportation from paragraph III, while preserving a public employer’s ability to adopt the motor carrier safety rules for its own vehicles internally. That is not a for-hire carve-out and does not reach this operation.
New Hampshire writes exactly two intrastate exemptions from the adopted federal parts into the statute, and both are worth reading because both are frequently reported as broader than they are.
The first, at paragraph IV of RSA 266:72-a, is one sentence: “Utility service vehicle drivers providing intrastate service shall be exempt from the provisions of 49 C.F.R. 395 as adopted pursuant to this section.” That is an hours-of-service exemption for utility service vehicles. It is not a weight provision and it does not reach freight hauled for hire.
The second, at paragraph VI, is longer and it is the one that produces confusion because it does contain a weight. It exempts “[t]he driver of any vehicle operating intrastate and registered with New Hampshire farm or agricultural plates and with a gross vehicle weight, gross vehicle weight rating, or gross combination weight rating of 26,000 pounds or less; designed or used to transport fewer than 16 passengers, including the driver; and which does not transport materials required to be placarded pursuant to 49 C.F.R. part 172, subpart F” from parts 391, 392, 393, 395 and 396 — with stated exceptions that survive the exemption.
The first condition in that list is the one that settles it. The vehicle must be “registered with New Hampshire farm or agricultural plates”. A for-hire general-freight combination is not, and the weight figure in the paragraph therefore never becomes relevant to it. Quoting the weight without the plate condition would put a 26,000 pound line into New Hampshire law for a class of operator the paragraph does not reach.
Even for the vehicles it does reach, the exemption is holed. It expressly does not apply to 49 C.F.R. § 392.3, operating while fatigued or ill; § 392.4, use of illegal drugs or substances; § 392.5, driver use of alcohol; part 393 subpart C, brakes; and § 396.7, unsafe operations forbidden. The state kept the provisions that map most directly onto how a crash gets litigated.
The mechanism by which any of the federal text reaches a carrier that never leaves New Hampshire is set out in two short rules and it is worth understanding because it explains the scope of everything above.
Saf-C 901.01, quoted in full, provides: “These rules shall be applicable to all motor carriers and all drivers of commercial motor vehicles, in either intrastate or interstate commerce.” Saf-C 901.02(a) then supplies the incorporation: “Pursuant to RSA 266:72-a, the commissioner hereby incorporates 49 CFR 107, 382, and 385 through 397.” Subsection (b) closes the loop: the incorporated regulations “shall be applicable to all drivers and motor carriers set forth in Saf-C 901.01.”
Saf-C 901.03 then does the translation that makes an incorporated federal text operable as state law. Inside the incorporated regulations, “United States Department of Transportation also means the New Hampshire department of safety”; “Secretary of Transportation also means commissioner of the New Hampshire department of safety”; and any other reference to a federal agency where there is no comparable state agency is handled in the same way.
The definition that decides who is a commercial motor vehicle for these purposes is at Saf-C 902.02: “‘Commercial motor vehicle’ means ‘commercial motor vehicle’ as defined in 49 CFR 390.5 except for vehicles designed or used to transport less than 16 passengers, including the driver, and except for vehicles described in RSA 266:72-a, VI.”
That first exception is recorded here as it reads, with a caution. Taken in complete isolation the words “except for vehicles designed or used to transport less than 16 passengers” would sweep out any ordinary property truck, which carries far fewer than sixteen people. The evident sense is that it removes the passenger-capacity limb of the federal definition and leaves the property limb intact, which is how a property carrier is reached at all. The literal reading is flagged rather than relied on, because a rule that would exempt every truck in the state from the state’s truck rules is not a reading the rest of the chapter supports.
Whether New Hampshire requires intrastate operating authority of a property carrier is not answered here. It was not researched for this page and no conclusion is drawn from the material that was.
It would be easy to slide from the four repealed chapters into a confident negative, and that slide is exactly the error the discipline behind this page exists to prevent. Reading four chapters that no longer exist proves those four chapters no longer exist. It does not prove that no instrument anywhere else in New Hampshire law imposes an operating-authority duty on a property carrier, because that would require reading the places such a duty could live and finding it absent from each of them.
What can be said, from documents actually read, is narrower and still useful. The four Title XXXIV chapters that carried the motor carrier economics are repealed. The Department of Safety rule chapter is a safety chapter, and Saf-C 908.01 is its only financial-responsibility provision. Saf-C 500, the department’s motor vehicle regulations, carries a Part 505 captioned Motor Carrier Registration, and that part is plate-and-registration material rather than operating authority.
An operator who needs the authority question answered should get it from the state rather than from this page or from any summary, and should get it in writing. The difference between “no agency licenses this” and “nobody has checked” is the whole difference between a page worth reading and a page that reads well.
The same discipline applies to the intrastate liability floor. New Hampshire’s ordinary motor vehicle financial responsibility law reaches registered vehicles generally rather than motor carriers as such, was not read for this page, and no figure from it is stated here.
Premium here comes off no published schedule, and a bracket offered before anyone has looked at the operation is invention. What follows is the material an underwriter actually works from, put in the order this state’s own instruments create the exposure — geography first, because in New Hampshire geography decides almost everything else.
The state line is the first and largest input here, and in this state it is close to a binary. Saf-C 908.01 puts the Part 387 financial-responsibility obligation on carriage in interstate commerce. New Hampshire is small, sits inside a dense multi-state freight market, and shares borders with Massachusetts, Vermont and Maine. An expedited operator who describes the business as local is frequently describing an operation that crosses a line several times a week, and each of those movements is on the other side of that sentence.
Whether any load is ever placarded is the second, and it is a yes-or-no question with an outsized consequence. The hazardous-materials limb of Saf-C 908.01 reaches intrastate carriage expressly, and paragraph VI’s exemption is conditioned on not carrying placarded materials. A single placarded movement changes the posture for that load, and this class of freight is booked on availability rather than planned by commodity.
Driver file quality carries more weight here than in a state that thins it. Paragraph III of RSA 266:72-a subjects exclusively-intrastate drivers to the medical examination, written tests and road tests in 49 C.F.R. §§ 391.31 to 391.49, and the waiver route runs through a joint application with the employing carrier as co-applicant. A thin file is a harder file to defend in a state that affirmatively requires the contents.
What is on the deck decides the cargo limit, and no New Hampshire instrument read for this page names a figure to anchor it. The governing number will come out of a customer contract instead, which makes the working motor truck cargo limit a commercial negotiation rather than a regulatory floor. Build it around the single worst load the fleet could be carrying when something goes wrong, not around an ordinary Tuesday.
Two things sit under all of it. One is whose authority the freight moves on, since that decides in whose name the federal obligations sit. The other is the customer paperwork — demands that the policy add the shipper as an insured, answer first and without contribution, and abandon its rights of recovery. Those are signed at the loading dock and felt at the renewal.
Under its own working names the trade is nowhere in the surviving instruments. Nothing defines it, no permit class was opened for it, no table was drawn around it and no endorsement was written for it — the language operators use about this business simply does not occur in the material read for this page.
The absence of an air-mile variant here was established by reading rather than by assuming. The whole of N.H. Code Admin. R. ch. Saf-C 900 was retrieved and searched: the terms that would identify an hours-of-service variant do not appear in the rule text, and part 395 reaches an intrastate New Hampshire carrier only through the blanket incorporation at Saf-C 901.02(a), unmodified except by the two statutory carve-outs described above. Neither of those carve-outs is an air-mile provision and neither reaches for-hire freight.
The only occurrences of the word cargo in that whole chapter are in a roadside inspection duty — the officer may examine “[c]argo condition” and enter the cargo area to determine that “[t]he cargo is properly secured”, at RSA 266:72-a, paragraph V. That is physical cargo in an inspection power, not an insurance requirement, and it is the kind of hit that a keyword sweep would score as a cargo rule if nobody opened it.
What is left, then, is a state that reaches this operation through federal safety text it adopts and then updates without acting, that requires more of an intrastate driver’s file than several of its neighbors do, that imposes its financial-responsibility duty on interstate carriage and on hazardous materials rather than on intrastate general freight, and that repealed the four chapters where an economic regime would otherwise be found. Those are four separate instruments and none of them was written with this configuration in mind.
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 New Hampshire 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 New Hampshire 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.
Not through its motor carrier rules. Saf-C 908.01, the only financial-responsibility provision in the Motor Carrier Safety Rules, imposes the 49 CFR 387 levels on “[e]very motor carrier operating motor vehicles transporting passengers or property in interstate commerce”, and imposes the § 387.9 levels on hazardous materials carriage “interstate or intrastate”. A non-hazardous intrastate property carrier is outside both limbs. New Hampshire’s ordinary motor vehicle financial responsibility law reaches registered vehicles generally and was not read for this page.
No, and the difference decides how durable it is. Saf-C 908.01 states its own commerce scope before it cites the federal part — the limitation is New Hampshire’s sentence, not an exclusion inherited from inside the incorporated text. Neighboring states solve the same problem differently: Delaware amends the federal general-applicability section to add the words “and intrastate”, and Maryland incorporates the federal part with no amendments or exemptions and leaves its scope in place. None of the three can be inferred from another.
No. RSA chapters 375, 375-A, 375-B and 376 all sat under Title XXXIV, Public Utilities. Each chapter’s official table-of-contents page was fetched separately for this page — four distinct documents — and each renders its caption followed by the words “Chapter is repealed”. A repeal leaves no amendment event to find, so a summary written before it reads exactly as authoritative as one written after.
Yes, and the statute disapplies the rulemaking process to make it so. RSA 266:72-a, I authorizes adoption of “the current version” of the federal motor carrier safety regulations and provides that “[n]otwithstanding the provisions of RSA 541-A, any amendments or additions by the respective federal agencies or their successor agencies shall also amend or supplement the rules adopted by the commissioner of safety without further action on the part of the commissioner.” No New Hampshire document is issued when the federal text moves.
No. That figure appears in paragraph VI, whose first condition is that the vehicle be “registered with New Hampshire farm or agricultural plates”. A for-hire general-freight combination is not, so the weight never becomes relevant to it. Even for the vehicles the paragraph does reach, the exemption expressly does not apply to 49 C.F.R. § 392.3, § 392.4, § 392.5, part 393 subpart C, or § 396.7.
It does the opposite. RSA 266:72-a, III provides that drivers of vehicles subject to the motor carrier rules who operate exclusively in intrastate commerce “shall be subject to the medical examination, written tests, and road tests required by 49 C.F.R. sections 391.31-391.49, as amended”, with a discretionary commissioner waiver of specific medical requirements for a driver holding a state commercial driver’s license issued on or after January 1, 1990. The waiver route runs through Part Saf-C 909 and requires the employing motor carrier to be co-applicant unless the driver is self-employed or unemployed.
This page does not answer that, and says so rather than guessing. The question was not researched, and the fact that four repealed chapters once carried the motor carrier economics proves only that those four chapters are gone. Establishing a negative would require reading the places such a duty could live and finding it absent from each. An operator who needs that answer should get it from the state in writing.
Nothing is published, and a number offered sight-unseen would be manufactured. Six things decide it: the proportion of work that actually crosses into Massachusetts, Vermont or Maine; whether anything is ever placarded; the condition of the medical, written-test and road-test paperwork RSA 266:72-a, III affirmatively demands of exclusively-intrastate drivers; the replacement value of the single costliest shipment the trucks have run, with no state figure to measure it against; whose authority the loads move under; and what the customer paperwork asks the policy to promise.
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.
