Motor carrier classes by state
Most states set a weight and let the rules attach above it. New Mexico does something stranger and more far-reaching: it adopts federal terms and then instructs the reader to strip the weight limits out of them. Nothing in the rule says twenty-six thousand pounds, or sixteen thousand, or ten. And on the licensing side there is no number at all — a warrant is required to transport property, and the section that requires it never mentions a scale.
What this equipment does in every state — the short window, the shipper-loaded deck, the load whose value has nothing to do with what it weighs — belongs to the class rather than to New Mexico, and it is set out on the hot shot trucking insurance page instead of being restated here.
New Mexico’s contribution is a drafting choice that almost no other state makes. Rather than write a broad definition of its own, the state adopts federal safety text wholesale and then substitutes terms inside it, and one of those substitutions expressly removes the weight and seating limits that the federal terms carry. The result is that the state’s own safety rule reaches a light combination on exactly the same footing as a tractor-trailer, at least at the level of the terms.
Reaching that conclusion honestly requires reading further than the substitution, because the rule set the substitution feeds into is organized by driver license class rather than by vehicle weight. Some of it applies to every driver. Some of it applies only to drivers who hold a commercial driver’s license. A light combination whose driver needs no such license lands in a different part of the rule than the one operators expect, and this page says which.
Three New Mexico parts do the work and they were read in full: Part 2 Operating Authorities, Part 3 Financial Responsibility, and Part 4 Safety Requirements, all in Title 18 Chapter 3 of the administrative code. Where one of them points at a statute this page could not obtain, that is said out loud rather than quietly filled in.
Hauling for money inside New Mexico on a truck and trailer of any size? The warrant requirement in Part 2 has no weight in it, and the filings that condition the warrant are made by your insurer rather than by you.
Tell us the service types you actually offer, whether any of them is towing or household goods, and who your insurer is — because in this state the insurance company files directly with the department and a copy from you does not count.
18.3.4.9 NMAC is captioned “SUBSTITUTION OF TERMS ADOPTED FROM FEDERAL LAW” and opens: “Wherever the following terms appear in a part or section of title 49 of the code of federal regulations (CFR), for purposes of this rule and as adopted by reference in this rule, these federal terms shall be read as if substituted by the terms provided below.”
Three substitutions follow. Subsection A: “for the terms ‘commerce’ and ‘interstate commerce’, substitute ‘intrastate commerce,’ as it is defined in 49 CFR Section 390.5”. Subsection C: “for the abbreviation ‘FMCSA’ (federal motor carrier safety administration), substitute ‘department of transportation’ or ‘DOT’”. Between them sits the one that changes everything.
Subsection B reads: “for the terms ‘commercial motor vehicle’, ‘bus’, ‘truck’, and ‘truck tractor’, substitute ‘motor vehicle,’ as defined in Section 65-2A-3 NMSA 1978, except for when these terms are used in 49 CFR Section 391.21(b)(11). For purposes of this rule, the term ‘motor vehicle’ shall not be understood to include any limitations based on gross combination weight rating, gross vehicle weight rating, or passenger seating capacity”.
That final sentence is the mechanism. Wherever an adopted federal provision would have applied only to a vehicle above some rating, New Mexico has instructed the reader that the substituted term carries no such limitation. The state did not write a lower threshold; it removed the concept of a threshold from the vocabulary the rule uses. That is a different move from the one every neighboring state makes, and it produces a rule set with no weight in it anywhere.
Subsection A deserves its own line, because it runs in the opposite direction from what a casual reader expects. The federal parts are written about interstate commerce. New Mexico substitutes intrastate commerce for those terms throughout, which is the mechanism by which any of the adopted material reaches a carrier that never leaves the state. Without that substitution the rest of the rule would be about somebody else’s operation.
Subsection B substitutes “motor vehicle, as defined in Section 65-2A-3 NMSA 1978.” That statutory definition is not reproduced anywhere in the administrative code, and it could not be obtained for this page.
The attempt is recorded rather than buried. The New Mexico statutory database at nmonesource.com returned HTTP 200 for the item that indexes to the article, but the served document’s own breadcrumb title block read “Current New Mexico Statutes Annotated 1978 > Chapter 24 - Health and Safety” — the wrong chapter entirely. That result was reproduced on re-probe this run. A commercial reproduction at law.justia.com returned HTTP 403 to a desktop browser user agent. An HTTP 200 is a liveness test, not an identity test, and a body that names the wrong chapter is not the statute regardless of its status code.
So the statutory text of 65-2A-3 is not quoted on this page, and no claim on this page rests on it. What is quoted is the sentence the rule itself supplies, which is the operative one for weight purposes: “the term ‘motor vehicle’ shall not be understood to include any limitations based on gross combination weight rating, gross vehicle weight rating, or passenger seating capacity”. That instruction is in the rule, is complete on its own terms, and does not require the statutory definition to be read in order to be applied.
The same reading discipline covers the rest of Chapter 3. The administrative code’s own definitions section, 18.3.1.7 NMAC, was read in full: it defines twelve terms — department, facilities, FMCSA, inspection or investigation, limousine service, non-emergency medical transport service, principal place of business, red tag or cease and desist order, stationing point, these rules, tour and sightseeing service, and volunteer driver. It does not define “motor carrier.” Every part of Chapter 3 is scoped to “motor carriers subject to the jurisdiction of the department,” and the term that sets that jurisdiction lives outside the rules that use it.
New Mexico does license intrastate freight, which puts it in a minority of states, and the licensing instrument is not a certificate. 18.3.2.8 NMAC, captioned “OPERATING AUTHORITY REQUIRED,” opens: “An operating authority is required for each type of service offered. An operating authority issued for one service will not serve as authorization for another service.”
Subsection A then divides the world. “Warrants. A warrant is required for each of the following service types: (1) charter services; (2) towing services, including for repossessions; and (3) transportation of property, excluding household good services for which a certificate is required, and cadaver transports regulated under the Funeral Services Act, Chapter 61, Article 32 NMSA 1978.” Subsection B lists the service types that need a certificate instead, and every one of them is a passenger service or household goods.
General freight is therefore a warrant service. There is no weight element in the paragraph, no rating band, no equipment description — the trigger is offering transportation of property as a service type. And because 18.3.2.8 opens by saying an authority is required for each type of service offered, an operator who adds towing to a freight book has not extended an existing warrant; they need a second one.
The scope sentence above it is equally short. 18.3.2.2 NMAC reads: “This rule applies to all motor carriers in New Mexico subject to the jurisdiction of the department.” The department is the New Mexico Department of Transportation, named at 18.3.2.1 as the issuing agency.
This is the axis on which New Mexico’s answer really turns. The safety analysis is interesting and it is genuinely unusual, but a carrier can argue about which parts of the safety rule reach a non-CDL driver. Nobody can argue about the warrant. It is required to transport property, it is required before operations rather than after, and there is no weight below which it stops being required.
Send the service types you offer, the stationing points you run from, your exact legal and doing-business-as names, and who files your Form E and Form H. In New Mexico those four answers decide whether the authority is sound before any coverage question is reached.
This is the cross-read that keeps the no-weight-floor finding honest, and it cuts both ways.
18.3.4.10 NMAC is captioned “REQUIREMENTS APPLICABLE TO ALL DRIVERS” and opens: “Motor carriers shall require and ensure that all drivers in their service, including themselves, comply with the duties and prohibitions of these rules.” Three subsections follow. Subsection A adopts 49 CFR Part 40 in its entirety and 49 CFR Part 382 except for sections 382.117 and 382.119 — drug and alcohol programs and testing. Subsection B covers hours of service. Subsection C requires, before hiring or contracting with a driver, “a nationwide criminal record report and a nationwide motor vehicle report (MVR)” to review “that candidate’s prior record for any relevant public safety violations,” with an additional criminal background report for household goods employees entering private dwellings.
Note the phrase “including themselves.” An owner-operator who drives the truck is inside subsection A’s testing program and inside subsection C’s pre-employment screening as applied to their own record. That is not the usual drafting, and it removes the argument that a one-truck operation is somehow outside the driver rules.
18.3.4.11 NMAC is captioned “REQUIREMENTS APPLICABLE ONLY TO CDL DRIVERS,” and it is that section — not the general one — which adopts 49 CFR Part 391 (with three changes), Part 392, Part 393, Part 396 and Part 397. The rule’s own definitions section, 18.3.4.7.A, defines a CDL driver as “a driver who is required by 49 CFR 383.3 or Section 66-5-59 NMSA 1978 to have a commercial driver’s license.”
For a light combination whose driver holds no commercial license, that is a real limit on what the substitution reaches in practice. The weight limits are gone from the terms, but the sections that adopt the driver-qualification, equipment and inspection parts are addressed to a class of driver defined by license rather than by weight. 18.3.4.12, the companion section for non-CDL drivers, is written overwhelmingly around passenger and transportation-service operations — driver applications, background checks, sex-offender registry screening, a twenty-one year age floor for transportation-service drivers — rather than around property carriage. This page records that as measured, and flags the practical consequence for property carriage below the licensing line as unresolved on the face of the rule.
One change inside 18.3.4.11 is worth naming even though it is CDL-scoped, because it runs the opposite way from the age rules in most states. Subsection B(1) amends 49 CFR 391.11(b)(1) to add: “or is 18 years old and drives only in intrastate commerce motor vehicles that are not required to be placarded for hazardous materials.” Subsection B(2) declines to adopt section 391.15 at all, and B(3) amends 391.49(a) to recognize a waiver granted by the director of the motor vehicle division under 18.19.5.33 NMAC.
New Mexico’s hours-of-service position is not a wholesale adoption and it is not a wholesale departure. It is a single graft, and it sits in the section that reaches every driver.
18.3.4.10.B(2) NMAC provides: “all other drivers, this rule adopts by reference 49 CFR Part 395, except that section 395.1(e)(1) is amended to add: ‘or operates in intrastate commerce within a 150 air-mile radius of the normal work reporting location.’”
The effect is to extend the short-haul relief in that federal paragraph to intrastate operations on the strength of radius alone, without the vehicle-class conditions the federal provision otherwise carries. For a light combination working out of a single yard, that is the most commercially significant sentence in the whole safety part — it changes what has to be recorded, and it changes it by reference to a circle drawn around the reporting location rather than by reference to the truck.
The phrase “all other drivers” is doing work, because the subsection opens with two other regimes. Ambulance services “shall adopt and enforce a policy governing hours of service for their drivers” — not Part 395, a policy of their own. And drivers operating for taxicab services, non-emergency medical transportation services, specialized passenger services and intrastate shuttle service with a passenger capacity of fifteen or less “shall not drive the service vehicle for more than 12 hours out of any 24 hour period.” Property carriage is in neither, so it falls to paragraph (2) and the graft.
One consequence for a fleet: the radius is measured from the normal work reporting location, and a carrier that operates from more than one yard has more than one circle. Adding a second stationing point does not extend the first radius; it creates a second one, and drivers assigned to it are measured from there.
Most states that adopt federal safety text pin it to a date. New Mexico does not, and the absence is legible in the section where a date would have gone.
18.3.4.8 NMAC is captioned “AVAILABILITY OF CITED MATERIAL” and reads, in full: “The sections of the code of federal regulations cited in this rule may be found on the government printing office website at http://www.gpoaccess.gov/cfr/.” That is where an edition, a revision date or a “no later amendments” clause would live in a rule that had one. There is none, and none appears in the adopting subsections either — 18.3.4.10 and 18.3.4.11 adopt parts and sections by number without qualifying which text of them is meant.
So the federal text is pinned to nothing on the face of this rule. It is not expressly frozen, and it is not expressly rolling with a review mechanism attached. Both of the usual answers are absent, which is a third position and the one an operator has to plan against.
The rule does carry a date of its own, and it comes with a hedge that travels with it. 18.3.4.5 NMAC reads: “EFFECTIVE DATE: July 1, 2024, unless a later date is cited at the end of a section.” Every section in the part then carries its own bracketed history line, and those lines are where a later date would appear. The financial responsibility part carries the same July 1, 2024 replacement date at 18.3.3.5, and its sections carry the same style of history line.
The practical discipline is to check the section rather than the part. A rule whose effective date is stated as a default subject to per-section override is a rule where the part-level date tells you the least interesting thing about when a given sentence started operating.
New Mexico takes filings, it takes two different ones, and it will not accept them from the carrier. 18.3.3.8 NMAC, captioned “PROOF OF FINANCIAL RESPONSIBILITY,” opens: “Every motor carrier must ensure that the minimum required financial responsibility is on file with the department during all periods of operation. The insurance policy must be in the exact legal and ‘doing business as’ name of the motor carrier and be endorsed with the expiration date of ‘until canceled’. Insurance companies are required to submit the uniform filing forms directly to the department.”
Three obligations are stacked in that opening and each fails independently. The coverage has to be on file during all periods of operation — a duty of continuous filing, not of one-time filing. The policy has to be issued in the exact legal name and the exact doing-business-as name, which is a common point of failure for an operator whose registration, insurance application and shipper contracts use three slightly different versions of the same business name. And the policy has to be endorsed to expire “until canceled,” which is a specific endorsement and not merely a long term.
Subsection A lists what will satisfy the bodily injury and property damage requirement: “a uniform filing ‘form E’ submitted to the department by an insurance company authorized to transact insurance business in New Mexico; or a uniform filing ‘form G’ for a surety bond issued by a company authorized to do surety business in New Mexico; or a copy of the motor carrier’s self-insured policy.” Subsection B covers the other side: “Cargo liability coverage: A uniform filing ‘form H’ submitted to the department by a company authorized to transact insurance business in New Mexico.”
A cargo filing for general property carriage is genuinely differentiating. It is not something federal law asks of a general-freight carrier, and most states do not ask it either. In New Mexico it is a condition of holding the warrant that lets you operate at all.
18.3.3.9 NMAC then closes the workaround: “Insurance companies are required to timely submit all uniform filing forms to the department directly. Copies of coverage submitted by the motor carrier will not serve as proof of coverage.” A certificate emailed by the carrier is not a filing. The section also points an aggrieved carrier at the office of superintendent of insurance if the insurance company is the one that failed to file.
The requirement is clear and the amount is not, and the reason is a defect in the rule’s own citation. This page reports the defect rather than repairing it.
18.3.3.10(B) NMAC, captioned “MINIMUM INSURANCE COVERAGE,” reads: “Property services: Towing services, household goods movers, and motor carriers of property (including hazardous materials) must maintain the minimum levels of coverage, as required by 49 CFR 387.9 and 49 CFR 303(b)(2).”
There is no Part 303 in title 49 of the Code of Federal Regulations. The evident referent is 49 CFR 387.303(b)(2), the federal cargo table — the digits line up and the subject matter fits — but that is an inference about which provision the drafter meant, not something the cited text says. Because the per-vehicle and aggregate cargo dollar figures reach New Mexico law only through that citation, they cannot be stated here with any confidence about which numbers the rule actually incorporated. Naming the gap is better than publishing a figure that cannot be defended if it is ever tested.
What is established, and what an operator can plan against, is the structure rather than the amount: a cargo filing is required for motor carriers of property, it is made on Form H, it must come from the insurer, and its amount is fixed by incorporating a federal provision rather than by any figure New Mexico wrote itself. The liability side of the same sentence points at 49 CFR 387.9, which is a live provision — so the property minimum enters New Mexico law by adoption of a federal schedule rather than by a state dollar figure.
Two cargo figures in the same section are stated in New Mexico’s own words and are therefore quotable. Paragraph (B)(2): “Household goods carriers must maintain fifty thousand dollars ($50,000) cargo liability insurance per shipper for loss or damage to cargo of the shipper.” Note the unit — per shipper, not per vehicle and not per occurrence, which is an unusual measure and does not transfer to general freight. Paragraph (B)(1): “Towing services must maintain fifty thousand dollars ($50,000) of both on-the-hook and garage-keepers’ liability insurance.” Neither reaches a general property warrant holder, and both are recorded so a reader does not borrow them.
Subsection (A) of the same section carries a passenger provision with an expiry date built into it, which is worth noticing as an example of how New Mexico rules move: a taxicab exception to the passenger minimum is stated to expire on June 30, 2025, with the rule adding that taxicab services failing to comply on or before July 1, 2025 “will be subject to penalties as provided by law, to include immediate suspension.” Rules here lapse on their own dates without an amendment event to find.
The consequence of a lapse is set out in two sentences that distinguish between a suspension and a revocation, and the difference between them is time.
18.3.3.9(A) NMAC: “Immediate suspension: A motor carrier’s operating authority is subject to immediate suspension for lack of financial responsibility if, for any reason, its current coverage is not on file with the department or does not meet the minimum requirements.” Subsection (B): “Warrant revocation: A warrant holder’s operating authority is subject to immediate revocation if, for any reason, its coverage is not on file with the department for a period of four consecutive months.”
The phrase “for any reason” appears in both, and it is doing real work. It removes the argument that the carrier paid its premium and the insurer failed to file. A carrier can be current on coverage and suspended on filing, and the rule does not distinguish between the two on the face of the text — it distinguishes only in where it sends the aggrieved carrier to complain.
Four months is short. On a small operation where a policy is replaced at renewal and the new insurer’s filing lags, the interval between one Form E cancelling and the next arriving is exactly the interval this clock is measuring. And because the warrant is the thing revoked rather than merely suspended, the recovery is not a re-filing — it is a new operating authority application.
One more limit on coverage design sits nearby and it is unusual. 18.3.3.11 NMAC provides: “No insurance policy shall have a deductible in excess of five thousand dollars ($5,000), unless the department approves a higher deductible for a motor carrier that provides: A. a surety bond in an amount equal to the difference between five thousand dollars ($5,000) and the amount of the higher deductible; or B. a copy of the motor carrier’s self-insured policy coverage for an amount equal to or greater than the amount of the higher deductible.” A New Mexico warrant holder cannot simply buy a cheaper policy by taking a larger retention; above five thousand dollars, the retention has to be collateralized.
There is no rate table for this class and nothing on this page is a price. What follows is the set of facts that decide one, and in New Mexico most of them are already written down — because the state collects them on the warrant application.
18.3.2.9 NMAC sets out the general application requirements for every operating authority, and the list reads like an underwriting submission. Applicant name, phone and email. A designated agent for service of process with a mailing and email address. All trade and doing-business-as names. A mailing and physical address for the principal place of business in New Mexico “where all required records are maintained for review.” Physical addresses of every facility, office or storage yard used in motor carrier operations. A combined reporting system number from the taxation and revenue department. “A U.S. department of transportation safety rating, if one exists.” A certificate of workers’ compensation insurance or a certificate of exemption. And the required forms and amounts of financial responsibility.
That last one links the two halves. The financial-responsibility filings are not a follow-up to the warrant; they are part of what the warrant is granted on, which is why the four-month revocation clock in Part 3 reaches an authority granted under Part 2.
Radius is the first commercial input, and here it has a specific meaning rather than a general one. The hundred and fifty air mile intrastate graft in 18.3.4.10.B(2) is measured from the normal work reporting location, so what an underwriter needs is not a maximum distance but the geometry of the operation: how many stationing points, where they are, and what fraction of dispatches stay inside each circle.
Service type is second, and it is second because New Mexico prices it structurally. A warrant authorizes one service type. An operator who hauls freight and also tows has two authorities, two sets of filings, and — under 18.3.3.10(B)(1) — a fifty thousand dollar on-hook and garage-keepers’ requirement attached to the towing half that does not exist on the freight half.
Commodity is third, and it moves the cargo side more than the liability side. Because the cargo amount enters New Mexico law through a citation that cannot be read cleanly, the number a carrier actually buys is a commercial decision rather than a compliance one, and it should be set against the value of the heaviest load actually carried rather than the average. Light-combination work skews high in value per pound, and a limit chosen against a typical load fails against exactly the load that generates a claim.
Authority type and the contract stack finish it. Whether the operation holds its own New Mexico warrant or moves freight under somebody else’s changes who is filing what, and whether a lapse anywhere in the chain reaches this operator. Additional-insured wording, primary and non-contributory language and waivers of subrogation flowing down from shipper agreements change the program without changing anything about the truck. And the five thousand dollar deductible ceiling in 18.3.3.11 removes one of the usual levers for managing premium, which pushes the conversation back onto limits and terms.
No New Mexico statute or rule read for this page names this work. There is no defined term for it, no dedicated service type on the warrant list, no separate filing table and no endorsement the state requires by name. The state reaches it as it reaches motor carriage generally — through a service type in Part 2 and a set of adopted federal parts in Part 4 that have had their weight limits removed.
Three limits on this page’s reach are stated so a reader can see them. NMSA 65-2A-3 was not obtained; the definition it supplies is not quoted and nothing here rests on it. The cargo dollar figure in 18.3.3.10(B) is not stated, because the rule reaches it through a citation to a Part of 49 CFR that does not exist. And the practical effect of the CDL gating in 18.3.4.11 on property carriage below the licensing line is flagged as unresolved on the face of the rule rather than answered.
What is established rests on parts read end to end. Part 3, Financial Responsibility, has twelve numbered sections and they were read in the served document, with 18.3.3.8 through 18.3.3.11 read verbatim. Part 2, Operating Authorities, was enumerated and its first nine sections read verbatim, including the whole of the operating-authority-required provision. Part 4, Safety Requirements, was read verbatim through 18.3.4.12. Part 1 was read for the definitions section. All five parts of Title 18 Chapter 3 were located and four were read.
The result an operator has to work with is that no single New Mexico instrument answers the question. The answer is assembled from a substitution rule that deletes weight from the vocabulary, a service-type list that never mentions weight at all, and a filing regime whose amounts arrive from a federal code by a citation that is right in one half and wrong in the other.
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 Mexico 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 Mexico 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 in the terms the rule uses. 18.3.4.9.B NMAC substitutes “motor vehicle” for “commercial motor vehicle”, “bus”, “truck” and “truck tractor” throughout the adopted federal parts, and adds that “the term ‘motor vehicle’ shall not be understood to include any limitations based on gross combination weight rating, gross vehicle weight rating, or passenger seating capacity”. The weight limits are removed from the vocabulary rather than lowered. The rule set those terms feed into is then organized by driver license class, which is a separate question.
Yes, and it is a warrant rather than a certificate. 18.3.2.8.A NMAC requires a warrant for charter services, towing services including repossessions, and “transportation of property, excluding household good services for which a certificate is required” and cadaver transports. There is no weight element in the paragraph. The section also provides that an authority is required for each type of service offered and that one will not authorize another.
Yes. 18.3.3.8.B NMAC requires “a uniform filing ‘form H’ submitted to the department by a company authorized to transact insurance business in New Mexico” for cargo liability coverage, alongside the Form E, Form G or self-insured policy accepted for bodily injury and property damage. A cargo filing for general property carriage is unusual — federal law does not require one of a general-freight carrier, and most states do not either.
The rule does not state one that can be quoted. 18.3.3.10(B) NMAC fixes property minimums “as required by 49 CFR 387.9 and 49 CFR 303(b)(2)”, and there is no Part 303 in 49 CFR. The likely referent is 49 CFR 387.303(b)(2), but that is an inference about intent rather than something the cited text says, so no figure is asserted here. The one cargo amount stated in New Mexico’s own words is a household goods figure of fifty thousand dollars per shipper, which does not reach general freight.
No. 18.3.3.9 NMAC provides that insurance companies must submit all uniform filing forms directly and that “Copies of coverage submitted by the motor carrier will not serve as proof of coverage.” The policy must also be in the exact legal and doing-business-as name of the carrier and endorsed with an expiration date of “until canceled”. If an insurer fails to file, the rule points the carrier at the office of superintendent of insurance.
Suspension is immediate; revocation takes four months. 18.3.3.9.A NMAC makes operating authority subject to immediate suspension if current coverage is not on file “for any reason” or does not meet the minimums. 18.3.3.9.B makes a warrant holder’s authority subject to immediate revocation if coverage is not on file “for a period of four consecutive months”. A revoked warrant is not restored by filing; it is replaced by a new application.
Yes, by adding to it. 18.3.4.10.B(2) NMAC adopts 49 CFR Part 395 “except that section 395.1(e)(1) is amended to add: ‘or operates in intrastate commerce within a 150 air-mile radius of the normal work reporting location.’” The relief is extended to intrastate operation on radius alone. It is measured from the normal work reporting location, so a carrier operating from two yards has two radii rather than one larger one.
Yes. 18.3.3.11 NMAC provides that no insurance policy shall have a deductible in excess of five thousand dollars unless the department approves a higher one, and approval requires either a surety bond for the difference or a copy of self-insured coverage for at least the amount of the higher deductible. Taking a large retention to reduce premium is therefore a collateralized decision here rather than a free one.
There is no table to quote and any figure offered without seeing the operation would be invented. What moves it is the number of service types on the authority, the stationing points and how much of the work stays inside the hundred and fifty air mile radius, the commodity mix and the value of the heaviest load actually carried, whether the operation holds its own warrant or runs under another carrier’s, the deductible design given the five thousand dollar ceiling, and the additional-insured and waiver terms in the shipper contracts.
Every figure on this page was read at the source below on September 1, 2026, with the effective date of the version read. Treat each as current as of that date rather than as permanent.
Send the power unit and trailer ratings separately, the radius distribution, and whether any dispatch crosses a state line. We will size the program against the work the trucks actually do rather than against a statutory floor.
