Motor carrier classes by state
Utah writes its intrastate threshold twice in the same subsection, and the thing that moves it is not the truck. At twenty-six thousand and one pounds the state’s rules attach where the driver is eighteen or older. At sixteen thousand and one pounds they attach where the driver is under eighteen. Ten thousand pounds of regulatory reach turn on a date of birth, and almost every summary of Utah law reports only the first number.
The parts of light-combination hauling that are the same everywhere — the short lead time, the shipper-loaded deck, the mismatch between what a load weighs and what it is worth — belong to the class rather than to Utah, and they are set out on the hot shot trucking insurance page instead of being repeated here.
Utah’s own material is a definition with two prongs and a chain of consequences hanging off it. The state defines an intrastate commercial vehicle, then defines a commercial vehicle to include one, then defines a motor carrier as somebody who transports by a commercial vehicle. Fall out of the first definition and you fall out of all three, and with them out of the chapter and out of the rule that adopts federal safety text.
That produces an unusual and slightly uncomfortable result for a for-hire operator running under the line: Utah imposes no intrastate financial-responsibility minimum on the operation through its motor carrier rule, and no cargo requirement of any kind. Both of those are stated here with the reading that establishes them, because a zero that is asserted rather than demonstrated is worth nothing.
It also produces one exposure that runs in the opposite direction. Utah imposes full-actual-loss liability on a motor carrier for intrastate freight and forbids contracting out of it — an uncapped duty sitting alongside a state that requires no cargo insurance to answer for it.
Running Utah intrastate with a driver under twenty-one, or under eighteen? The state’s own threshold drops by ten thousand pounds for a driver under eighteen, which pulls the whole adopted federal package onto equipment that would otherwise sit below it.
Send the manufacturer’s ratings for the truck and the trailer together with the ages of everyone who drives them. In Utah those two facts have to be read against each other before anything else can be answered.
Utah Code 72-9-102(3), effective May 6, 2026, provides: “‘Intrastate commercial vehicle’ means a motor vehicle, vehicle, trailer, or semitrailer used or maintained for business, compensation, or profit to transport passengers or property on a highway only within the boundaries of this state if the commercial vehicle: (a)(i) has a manufacturer’s gross vehicle weight rating or gross vehicle weight, or gross combination weight rating or gross combination weight of 26,001 or more pounds, whichever is greater, and is operated by an individual who is 18 years old or older; or (ii) has a manufacturer’s gross vehicle weight rating or gross combination weight rating of 16,001 or more pounds and is operated by an individual who is under 18 years old”.
Read the two prongs as a pair rather than as a rule with a footnote. Neither is a default. The subsection does not set a threshold and then carve out young drivers; it sets two thresholds and assigns each one to an age band. A combination rated at eighteen thousand pounds is an intrastate commercial vehicle when a seventeen-year-old is at the wheel and is not one when a twenty-five-year-old is. Same truck, same trailer, same load, same road.
This is a genuine state variance rather than a restatement of anything federal. Nothing in the federal safety rules lowers a weight threshold on the basis of driver age. Utah has taken its own intrastate line down by ten thousand pounds for a single class of driver, and it has done so inside the definition rather than by writing an exception somewhere else in the chapter.
The measurement bases differ between the two prongs, which is easy to miss and matters on a combination. The eighteen-and-over prong reads a rating or an actual weight, single vehicle or combination, “whichever is greater” — four measures, and the largest of them governs. The under-eighteen prong reads only manufacturer’s ratings: gross vehicle weight rating or gross combination weight rating. So an under-eighteen driver is measured against what the equipment is rated to do, and an older driver can be pulled in by what the equipment actually weighed on the day.
For a fleet that hires young the practical consequence is not a paperwork question. It is that assigning a driver changes which regulatory package applies to the vehicle they were assigned to, and the assignment is usually made by a dispatcher rather than by anyone reading the code.
The two prongs above are not the end of the analysis; they are the top of a chain, and everything downstream depends on them.
Utah Code 72-9-102(1)(a) provides that “‘Commercial vehicle’ includes: (i) an interstate commercial vehicle; (ii) an intrastate commercial vehicle; and (iii) a tow truck.” Subsection (4) then provides that “‘Motor carrier’ means a person engaged in or transacting the business of transporting passengers, freight, merchandise, or other property by a commercial vehicle on a highway within this state and includes a tow truck business.” The section opens “As used in this chapter,” so the chain runs through the whole of the Motor Carrier Safety Act.
Follow it downward for a purely intrastate for-hire combination under the line with a driver of eighteen or over. It is not an intrastate commercial vehicle under (3). It is therefore not a commercial vehicle under (1)(a). Its operator is therefore not, in respect of that operation, a motor carrier under (4). And 72-9-104 — “A motor carrier may not operate any commercial vehicle for the transportation of persons or property on any public highway in this state except in accordance with this chapter, and rules and orders of the department” — is a duty on a person the chain has already put outside it.
The rule follows the same chain deliberately. Utah Admin. Code R909-1-2 reads, in its entirety: “‘Intrastate commercial vehicle’ means the same as that term is defined in Section 72-9-102.” R909-1-3(1) then applies the incorporated federal parts to “a motor carrier as defined in 49 CFR Part 390.5, and intrastate commercial motor carriers as defined in Subsection 72-9-102(3).” The second limb is the state one, and it is keyed to the same two prongs.
One carve-out in R909-1-3(1) is worth naming so it is not misread as relief for freight. The incorporation excludes “passenger vehicles designed to transport 12 or fewer passengers, including the driver, and have a manufacturer’s gross vehicle weight rating or gross combination weight rating of less than 13,000 pounds.” That is a passenger carve-out. It does not reach property carriage, and it neither contradicts nor softens anything above.
The chain also has an exclusion list at its top. 72-9-102(1)(b) removes from “commercial vehicle,” for purposes of the chapter, Department of Defense equipment driven by specified military personnel, firefighting and emergency vehicles other than commercial tow trucks, “recreational vehicles that are driven solely as family or personal conveyances for noncommercial purposes,” and vehicles owned by the state or a local government. None of the four reaches a for-hire operator.
For an operation that is inside the definition, what applies is a large block of federal text pinned to a date, with four stated departures.
Utah Admin. Code R909-1-3(1) provides: “Safety Regulations for Motor Carriers, 49 CFR Parts 350 through 384, Part 385.4, Parts 387 through 399, and Part 40, as amended by the Federal Register through June 22, 2023, are incorporated by reference, except for 49 CFR Parts 391.11(b)(1) and 391.49 as they apply to intrastate drivers only.”
That is a static incorporation with an unusually wide span. Parts 350 through 384 and 387 through 399 is most of the federal safety corpus, plus the testing procedures in Part 40, all frozen at a Federal Register date now some years old. A federal amendment published after June 22, 2023 does not reach a Utah intrastate carrier through this rule on its own force.
Two provisions come off, and both are driver provisions. Section 391.11(b)(1) is the minimum age requirement. Section 391.49 concerns the skill performance evaluation certificate. The exclusion is expressly limited — “as they apply to intrastate drivers only” — so an interstate operation is unaffected.
Utah then writes its own age rule in place of the one it removed. R909-1-3(4): “A driver involved wholly in intrastate commerce shall be at least 18 years old, unless they are transporting placarded amounts of hazardous materials or carrying 16 or more passengers, including the driver, in which case they must be at least 21 years old.” Read that against 72-9-102(3)(a)(ii) and the two provisions describe the same population from opposite directions: the rule permits an eighteen-year-old intrastate driver, and the statute drops the vehicle threshold by ten thousand pounds for anyone younger than that.
The remaining two departures are narrow and named for completeness. R909-1-3(2) relieves “an intrastate trucking operation in which the carriers operate double trailer combinations only” from 49 CFR Part 380.203(a)(2). R909-1-3(3) routes physical qualification exceptions to the Department of Public Safety’s Driver License Division under Section 53-3-303.5 and Rule R708-34. Neither reaches general freight on a single trailer.
The rule’s own currency is on its face. R909-1 carries a Date of Last Change of June 23, 2026 and a Notice of Continuation of July 6, 2026, and its authorizing and implemented sections are listed as 72-9-101, 72-9-103, 72-9-104, 72-9-301, 72-9-303, 72-9-701 and 72-9-703.
Send the driver roster with ages, the manufacturer’s ratings for the truck and the trailer, the heaviest configuration you actually run, and whether any listed material ever rides on the deck. In Utah those four answers decide which prong applies before a coverage question is reached.
Utah does state an intrastate insurance minimum in its own words, and the definition attached to it is the thing to read first.
Utah Admin. Code R909-1-4 is captioned “Insurance for Private Intrastate or Interstate Motor Carriers.” Subsection (1) supplies the definition: “‘Private Motor Carrier’ means a person who provides transportation of property or passengers by commercial motor vehicle and is not a for-hire motor carrier.” Subsection (2) then states the figure: “Each intrastate private motor carrier must have a minimum amount of $750,000 liability.”
The words “and is not a for-hire motor carrier” are the whole of it. An operator hauling other people’s freight for money is a for-hire carrier and is outside that definition, so the only intrastate property figure Utah writes in its own words is written for somebody else. A private fleet moving its own materials on a gooseneck is inside it; a carrier moving a customer’s machine parts is not.
For the for-hire side, Utah does not write a figure. It reaches financial responsibility by incorporation — R909-1-3(1) sweeps in “Parts 387 through 399,” which includes the federal financial-responsibility part — and applies that incorporation to “intrastate commercial motor carriers as defined in Subsection 72-9-102(3).” The consequence follows the chain: a for-hire combination that is not an intrastate commercial vehicle under either prong is not reached by the incorporation, and Utah’s motor carrier rule imposes no intrastate minimum on it.
That result is stated carefully and it should be read carefully. It is a conclusion about what Utah’s Motor Carrier Safety Act and the R909 rules require, established by reading them; it says nothing about what federal law requires of an interstate operation, nothing about the compulsory motor vehicle insurance every registered vehicle in the state carries, and nothing about what a shipper contract requires. It also does not survive a driver under eighteen, or a placarded load, or a combination that crosses the line on any of the four measures.
R909-1-3(5) confirms that the incorporated financial-responsibility part is otherwise live, by carving one class out of it: “A licensed childcare provider operating a passenger vehicle with a seating capacity of not more than 30 passengers, wholly in intrastate commerce, is exempt from 49 CFR Part 387 Subpart B but is subject to the minimum coverage requirements in Section 72-9-103.” Utah Code 72-9-103(2) states the same carve-out at statute and supplies the substitute figures — one million dollars for a vehicle seating up to twenty passengers, one and a half million for up to thirty. Neither reaches freight, and both are recorded so a reader does not borrow them.
There is one Utah provision on this page with no weight in it, no for-hire limit and no intrastate limit, and it is the one an operator is most likely to trip over by accident.
Utah Admin. Code R909-1-4(3): “Each interstate and intrastate for-hire and private motor carriers transporting any quantities of oil listed in 49 CFR 172.101; hazardous waste, hazardous material, and hazardous substances defined in 49 CFR 171.8, must have a $1,000,000 minimum level of financial responsibility, and an MCS-90 endorsement maintained at the principal place of business.”
Every limiting word that appears elsewhere in R909-1 is absent here. It reaches interstate and intrastate. It reaches for-hire and private. And it reaches “any quantities,” which removes the placarding threshold that does most of the work in the rest of the chapter. For a carrier that occasionally moves drummed product, a listed substance in a crate, or equipment with residue, the state’s entire weight analysis stops being relevant to that load.
The endorsement requirement is separate from the limit and is stated as a location rather than as a filing: the MCS-90 endorsement must be “maintained at the principal place of business.” That is a records duty an inspector can check without any state office holding a copy.
The chain from the definition does not obviously rescue an operator here either. The subsection is written to “motor carriers” without the qualifier that ties the rest of R909-1 to 72-9-102(3), and it names for-hire carriers expressly, which the definition-dependent provisions do not. This page reads it as the broad provision it appears to be, and flags that the interaction between it and the 72-9-102(3) chain is not addressed anywhere in the rule.
The practical discipline for a light-combination operator is to decide in advance whether the operation touches any listed material at all, and to price the answer rather than discover it. One drum on one load is enough to engage a provision written without a weight in it.
Utah requires no cargo insurance and imposes an uncapped cargo liability. Those two facts sit in the same chapter and they are the most commercially important pairing on this page.
Utah Code 72-9-401(1)(a) requires a motor carrier receiving property for transportation from one point in the state to another to issue a receipt or bill of lading and makes it “liable to the lawful holder of the property for any loss, damage, or injury to the property caused by the motor carrier, or by any motor carrier to which the property may be delivered or over whose line or lines the property may pass within this state when transported on a through bill of lading.” Subsection (1)(b) then forecloses the usual escape: “A contract, receipt, rule, regulation, or other limitation of any character whatsoever may not exempt the motor carrier from this liability.”
Subsection (2) states the measure — “the full actual loss, damage or injury to the property” — and subsection (3)(a) provides that it applies “notwithstanding any limitation of liability or of the amount of recovery, or any representation or agreement as to the value of the property in any receipt or bill of lading or in any contract, rule, or regulation.” Subsection (3)(b) declares any limitation of liability unlawful and void, with a narrow released-value exception that operates only where the carrier expressly authorizes or requires rates dependent on a declared value “by order of the commission,” and (3)(c) confines the effect of any such declaration to limiting recovery to the declared amount.
For a class of freight whose value has almost no relationship to its weight, that is a large exposure. A deck carrying replacement parts bought at a premium because a production line has stopped is carrying a full-actual-loss liability that no bill of lading term will cut down, in a state that requires no cargo insurance and prescribes no cargo minimum.
The reading behind that second half is worth stating, because it is a negative. The complete R909 rule program — five rules, R909-1 Safety Regulations for Motor Carriers, R909-2 Utah Size and Weight Rule, R909-3 Standards for Advertisement on Utah School Buses, R909-4 Motor Carrier, Enforcement, Penalties, and R909-19 Safety Regulations for Tow Truck Operations — was enumerated from the Office of Administrative Rules index and read. No cargo insurance rule appears in any of them. A full-text search of the entire current Utah Administrative Code for “cargo” returns rules on air quality, petroleum storage tanks, hazardous waste, surplus property, heavy vehicle inspections, special fuel tax, size and weight, and adverse weather traction — and no insurance filing rule. A search for “household goods” across the whole code returns two rules, neither of them transportation.
The one cargo figure reachable from Utah law arrives through the incorporation of the federal financial-responsibility part, and it is a household goods provision whose filing runs to a federal agency rather than to Utah. It is recorded here so a general-freight operator does not mistake it for a state requirement, and it does not reach general freight in any event.
One further limit runs alongside 72-9-401 and belongs in the same conversation. Utah Code 72-9-402 sets limits of time for presenting claims and bringing suit, and 72-9-403 addresses contribution between connecting motor carriers. A carrier moving freight for another carrier under a through bill of lading is inside a statutory allocation regime, not merely a contractual one.
Utah issues no intrastate operating authority to a for-hire property carrier. That is a negative, so here is the reading.
Title 72 Chapter 9, the Motor Carrier Safety Act, was read in full for this page — the whole chapter document, twenty-seven pages, all thirty-three sections across seven parts: General Provisions, Motor Carrier Advisory Board, Department Duties, Motor Carrier Liability, Ports-of-Entry, Tow Truck Provisions, and Penalties, Fines, and Fees. No section creates a certificate, a permit, a license or an application for the right to haul freight for money inside the state. The words “operating authority,” “certificate of public convenience” and “permit to operate” do not appear anywhere in the chapter.
What the chapter does instead is impose duties directly. 72-9-104 requires a motor carrier to operate in accordance with the chapter and the department’s rules and orders. 72-9-303 gives the department cease and desist orders and registration sanctions. 72-9-301 sets the department’s duties, enforcement powers, audits and rights of entry. Those are enforcement tools applied to somebody already operating, not a gate they had to pass through first.
Utah does license one thing in this chapter, and it is not freight. Part 6 creates authorized towing certificates for tow truck motor carriers, with equipment requirements, inspections, certification and a certificate-by-endorsement route at 72-9-602.5. The existence of a real certificate regime a few sections away is itself evidence about the freight side: the Legislature knew how to write one and did not write one for property carriage.
The limit on this negative should be stated. What was read end to end is the Motor Carrier Safety Act and the whole of the R909 rule program. Both are safety and enforcement instruments. This page does not claim to have read every title of the Utah Code, so what is established is that neither the chapter that governs motor carriers nor the rules made under it creates an intrastate operating authority for a property carrier — which is where such a regime would live if one existed.
The administering agency’s own published position is consistent with that. The Utah Department of Transportation’s motor carrier operating authority material describes federal registration — the federal application, the process agent designation, and proof of liability or cargo insurance filed federally — rather than any Utah instrument, and its insurance page names only the federal schedules and Utah Admin. Code R909-1-4.
One Utah requirement is concrete, cheap and easy to fail, and it is written in feet rather than in pounds.
Utah Code 72-9-105(1) provides that, except under subsection (4), “a motor carrier shall have lettered on both sides of any vehicle used for transportation of persons or property the name of the motor carrier company.” Subsection (2): “The motor carrier shall ensure that the lettering is free from obstruction and legible from a distance of at least 50 feet.”
Two details make that more than housekeeping. The duty reaches “any vehicle used for transportation of persons or property,” not merely a power unit, and the legibility standard is a stated distance rather than a size. A magnetic panel on a dusty door, or a name obscured by a headache rack or a bed rail, is a failure against a measurable standard rather than a matter of opinion.
Subsection (3) adds that the department may require display of an identification number it assigns, and may issue one in conjunction with the federal agency to support a motor carrier safety enforcement program. Subsection (4) exempts an intrastate commercial vehicle primarily used by a farmer for the production of agricultural products, and that is the only exemption in the section.
Like almost everything else in this chapter, the duty is owed by a “motor carrier,” which routes back through the definition chain at 72-9-102. An operator sitting below both prongs is outside it, which is another reason the two prongs are worth checking against the actual driver roster rather than against an assumption about it.
Nothing here is a price and there is no table to quote one from. What follows is the order the facts actually get read on a Utah submission, and the order is unusual because the first question is about people rather than equipment.
Driver ages come first, and they come first because in Utah they move the threshold rather than merely the rate. A roster with anyone under eighteen puts the sixteen thousand and one pound prong in play, and that prong is measured on manufacturer’s ratings — so it can be answered from a door jamb and a birth date without weighing anything. A roster with anyone under twenty-one closes off placarded work under R909-1-3(4). Both are facts a dispatcher changes without telling anybody.
Ratings and actual weights come second, and both are needed rather than either. The eighteen-and-over prong reads the greater of four measures — two ratings and two actual weights — so an operation can be under the line on paper and over it on a scale. On a combination that is assembled rather than manufactured, the gross combination weight rating moves the day a heavier trailer is hitched, and nothing announces the crossing.
Commodity is third, and in Utah it can override the first two entirely. R909-1-4(3) reaches any quantity of listed oil, hazardous waste, hazardous material or hazardous substance, for-hire or private, interstate or intrastate, with no weight element and a million-dollar minimum plus an endorsement kept at the principal place of business. An operator who takes such a load occasionally has a different answer for those loads than for the rest of the book.
Cargo limit is fourth, and it is fourth only because the state says nothing about it. With no Utah cargo requirement and full-actual-loss liability that a contract may not limit, the limit an operator buys is a commercial decision made against an uncapped exposure. Setting it against the average load value is setting it against the wrong load; the number that matters is the value of the heaviest single load actually carried, and on this class that number is frequently a multiple of what the freight weighs.
Radius and the state line come fifth. Utah is a state where a great deal of freight moves along one corridor and where three state lines sit within a short drive of the population center. A dispatch that crosses one moves the operation out of the intrastate definition and into a different regulatory posture for that load, and the honest answer to how far an operation runs is a distribution rather than a maximum.
Authority type and the contract stack finish it. Whether the operation runs under its own federal registration or leased on to another carrier changes who files what and whose lapse 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 in a state whose cargo liability is already uncapped by statute, an indemnity in a broker contract is not a small clause.
Because two of the most consequential statements on this page are negatives, this section sets out what was read rather than asserting what was not found.
The R909 rule program was enumerated from the Utah Office of Administrative Rules index for the whole Transportation / Motor Carrier program. It contains exactly five rules — R909-1, R909-2, R909-3, R909-4 and R909-19 — and all five were fetched and read. R909-1 was read in full, sections R909-1-1 through R909-1-6. There are zero occurrences of “cargo” in R909-1, R909-3, R909-4 and R909-19. The occurrences in R909-2 are cargo securement, cargo tank and pilot escort language rather than insurance.
As a whole-corpus control, the entire current Utah Administrative Code was searched for “cargo” and returns eleven rules statewide — air quality, petroleum storage tanks, four hazardous waste rules, state surplus property, heavy vehicle inspections, special fuel tax, the size and weight rule, and adverse weather traction — none of which is a motor carrier cargo-insurance rule. A search for “household goods” across the whole code returns two rules, R392-502 on public lodging facility sanitation and R414-305 on resources, neither of them transportation.
On the statutory side, Title 72 Chapter 9 was read in full, all thirty-three sections. The insurance provisions it contains are 72-9-103, which directs the department to make rules adopting the federal safety regulations “including minimum security requirements for motor carriers” and sets the childcare passenger figures, and nothing else. There is no cargo provision and no operating-authority provision.
Two limits on all of that are stated so a reader can see them. The reading covers the Motor Carrier Safety Act and the motor carrier rule program, which is where a cargo requirement or an operating authority for property carriers would live; it does not cover every title of the Utah Code. And the conclusion that a for-hire combination below both prongs is outside the R909-1 incorporation follows the definition chain in 72-9-102 as written — no Utah decision construing that chain in this direction was located, and 72-9-401’s duty on “a motor carrier” runs through the same chain, which is a consequence this page notes rather than one it resolves.
No Utah statute or rule read for this page names this work. There is no defined term for it, no dedicated certificate, no separate filing table and no endorsement the state requires by name. The words operators use for this business do not appear in the instruments that govern it.
Utah reaches it the way it reaches motor carriage generally — through a definition of an intrastate commercial vehicle that was drawn for other reasons. What makes the state worth a page rather than a paragraph is that the definition has two prongs, that the second prong lowers the line by ten thousand pounds on the strength of a driver’s age, and that the whole regulatory package downstream of it turns on which prong applies.
The result an operator has to work with is a set of answers that change with the crew list. Below both prongs, with an older driver and no listed materials, Utah’s motor carrier rules do not reach the operation and no state minimum or cargo requirement attaches to it — while an uncapped statutory cargo liability sits in the same chapter, running through the same definition. Above either prong, a large block of federal text frozen at June 22, 2023 attaches at once, along with the financial-responsibility part inside it.
That is not a comfortable place to run uninsured, and nothing on this page suggests otherwise. It is a description of what Utah requires, which is a smaller thing than what a carrier on this class of work should carry.
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 Utah 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 Utah 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.
Two, and the driver decides which. Utah Code 72-9-102(3)(a) provides for 26,001 or more pounds on gross vehicle weight rating, gross vehicle weight, gross combination weight rating or gross combination weight, “whichever is greater,” where the vehicle “is operated by an individual who is 18 years old or older”; and 16,001 or more pounds on manufacturer’s gross vehicle weight rating or gross combination weight rating where it “is operated by an individual who is under 18 years old.” Both prongs sit in the same subsection.
Because Utah wrote it into the definition rather than into an exception. The under-eighteen prong of 72-9-102(3)(a)(ii) lowers the state’s own intrastate line by ten thousand pounds for that age band. Nothing federal does this. The practical effect is that assigning a driver can change which regulatory package applies to the vehicle they were assigned to — and the assignment is usually a dispatch decision rather than a compliance one.
Not in its own words. The only property figure Utah states is in Utah Admin. Code R909-1-4(2), $750,000 for an intrastate private motor carrier, and R909-1-4(1) defines a private motor carrier as one who “is not a for-hire motor carrier.” For-hire carriage reaches financial responsibility through the R909-1-3(1) incorporation of Parts 387 through 399, which is applied to intrastate commercial motor carriers as defined in 72-9-102(3) — so a combination below both prongs is not reached by it.
No, and the absence was established by reading. All five rules in the R909 program were read; there are zero occurrences of “cargo” in R909-1, R909-3, R909-4 and R909-19, and the occurrences in R909-2 are securement and cargo tank language. A full-text search of the entire current Utah Administrative Code returns eleven rules containing “cargo,” none of them an insurance filing rule. Title 72 Chapter 9 was read in full and contains no cargo provision.
No. Utah Code 72-9-401(1)(b) provides that “A contract, receipt, rule, regulation, or other limitation of any character whatsoever may not exempt the motor carrier from this liability,” and subsection (2) sets the measure at “the full actual loss, damage or injury to the property.” Subsection (3)(b) declares any limitation of liability unlawful and void, subject to a narrow released-value exception that operates only where rates dependent on a declared value are established by order of the commission.
None is created by the chapter that governs motor carriers. Title 72 Chapter 9 was read in full for this page — twenty-seven pages, thirty-three sections across seven parts — and no section creates a certificate, permit or license for hauling property for compensation. Part 6 does create authorized towing certificates for tow truck motor carriers, which shows the Legislature wrote a certificate regime where it wanted one. The department’s powers over freight carriers are enforcement powers rather than a gate.
No. Utah Admin. Code R909-1-3(1) incorporates 49 CFR Parts 350 through 384, Part 385.4, Parts 387 through 399 and Part 40 “as amended by the Federal Register through June 22, 2023,” which is a static incorporation. Two provisions are excluded as they apply to intrastate drivers only — 391.11(b)(1) and 391.49. The rule itself carries a Date of Last Change of June 23, 2026 and a Notice of Continuation of July 6, 2026.
Yes, and it removes the weight question. Utah Admin. Code R909-1-4(3) requires “each interstate and intrastate for-hire and private motor carriers transporting any quantities” of oil listed in 49 CFR 172.101, or hazardous waste, hazardous material or hazardous substances defined in 49 CFR 171.8, to have a $1,000,000 minimum level of financial responsibility and an MCS-90 endorsement maintained at the principal place of business. There is no weight element and no placarding threshold in that subsection.
There is no table to quote and any figure offered without seeing the operation would be invented. What moves it is the driver roster and whether anyone is under eighteen, the manufacturer’s ratings and the heaviest configuration actually run against both prongs, whether any listed material is ever carried in any quantity, the cargo limit set against an uncapped statutory liability, the radius distribution and whether dispatches leave the state, and the indemnity and additional-insured terms in shipper and broker 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.
