Motor carrier classes by state
The Alabama rule that is supposed to tell a small intrastate carrier which safety provisions bind it ends at a colon. It names the carriers it covers, promises “the following provisions of this Rule”, and then stops — no list, nothing. Three rules around it are headings with empty bodies, and the term the whole split turns on is defined nowhere in the chapter. That is not a research gap. It is what the official codification says, and it is worth knowing before anyone builds a compliance file on it.
A new venture is an authority applicant with no operating history, and most of the first year is federal and identical from state to state. This page is about Alabama’s own layer. Everything below was read at primary source on September 2, 2026, and every figure carries the date it was read, because one of the largest of them changes on October 1, 2026.
Alabama splits a startup across three bodies that do not reference one another. The Secretary of State forms the entity and imposes the one genuine precedence condition in the whole startup. The Department of Revenue runs the fuel tax, the registration plan and the tax return that stands in for an annual report. The Public Service Commission holds the carrier credential, the identification rules and a safety subchapter with real defects in it.
Nothing here is a sequence. Alabama does condition one act on another in the formation layer, and that condition is quoted below in the agency’s own words. It does not follow that the state imposes an order on the steps of starting a carrier, and none is asserted.
The most useful Alabama questions for a new carrier are about commodity, geography and paperwork, and none of them is about weight.
Tell us what you are hauling and where the legs begin and end, and we will work out which of these obligations reaches you.
Alabama enacts one genuine precedence condition in the startup, it sits in the formation layer rather than in the carrier layer, and it is the reason a carrier reading only the motor carrier chapter would never find it.
The Secretary of State’s limited liability company page states it with a citation attached: “Your entity name must contain the words Limited Liability Company or the abbreviation L.L.C. or LLC. You must obtain a Certificate of Name Reservation [10A-1-4.02(f)] prior to filing your formation documents.” The parallel instruction for a foreign company points at a different section: “You must obtain a Certificate of Name Reservation [10A-1-5.11] prior to filing the Application for Registration.” Read September 2, 2026.
That is a condition of one act on another, stated in mandatory terms and cited to the Code. It is worth taking literally, because the failure mode is not a rejection letter that explains itself — it is a filing that cannot be made, on a day when the operator believed the company existed.
What it is not is a sequence for the business as a whole. Nothing read here orders the entity against the federal registration, against the carrier credential, against the fuel-tax license or against the registration plan. Alabama says one document must come before another document at the same office. It says nothing about the rest, and this page does not fill the silence.
The formation charge is stated on the same page and it is stated with the payee named, which is a phrasing worth noticing: “Domestic LLC Filing / Filing Fees / Secretary of State: $200.00”. Foreign registration on the same page is “Secretary of State: $150.00”. The label implies other payees may add charges, and the page does not enumerate them.
The current form is the Domestic Limited Liability Company Certificate of Formation, whose own stamp reads “LLC Cert of Formation - 10/2022”, read September 2, 2026. Its third item carries a limit most states do not impose: “3. The name of the registered agent (only one agent):”, followed by a street address of the registered office that must be in Alabama and may not be a post office box, the county of that address, and an Alabama mailing address if different.
Read the parenthesis carefully. Alabama does not merely require an agent — it caps the count at one. An operator arriving from a state that permits co-agents, or who intended to name a service alongside a principal, is naming one or the other.
The most consequential thing about Alabama formation is what is absent, and it is absent everywhere rather than in one place. There is no expedite tier for a limited liability company filing. The form carries no expedite option, the company page carries none, and the Secretary of State’s master fee schedule carries exactly one expedite line in the whole document — a $100 per-search fee for record searches under a different chapter of the Code entirely. The domestic limited liability company block on that schedule lists the $200 certificate of formation and nothing else.
So the honest answer to “can I pay to make this faster” is no, and that is a stronger statement than an absence of published turnaround. Two operational cautions printed on the form deserve to travel with it: “Information MUST be typed or filing will be returned without review”, and “There is no notification service/call for pick-up.” A filing returned without review has not been rejected on its merits; it has not been read.
The form does make a statement about timing, and it is the kind of statement that is easy to read as an answer to a question it is not answering.
Item 6 of the certificate reads: “The filing of the limited liability company is effective immediately on the date received by the office of the Secretary of State, Business Services Division or at the delayed filing date (cannot be prior to the filing date) specified in this filing complying with Section 10A-1-4.12”. The delayed option is bounded on the form itself — the chosen date “must be on or after the date filed in the office of the Secretary of State, but no later than the 90th day after the date this instrument was signed”.
That fixes the legal date on which the company exists. It says nothing at all about the day the certificate comes back, and the two are different facts. An operator who needs evidence of formation for a lender, a lease or a broker packet needs the returned document, not the effective date.
The instruction block adds a claim about the user’s own effort rather than the office’s: “You may file the Certificate of Formation online in the time it takes to type this request.” That is a statement about how long it takes to complete the form. It is not a processing commitment, and this page does not present it as one.
The delayed-filing option has one genuine use for a carrier. Where a business wants its existence, its fiscal year and its first tax period to begin on a clean date rather than on whichever day the paperwork was ready, the ninety-day window makes that available. It is a planning tool rather than a speed control.
Alabama pricing turns on commodity and geography long before it turns on equipment.
Send us the equipment list, the lanes and the freight, and we will work the Alabama-specific pieces into the submission.
Alabama does not run an annual report through the Secretary of State for a limited liability company, and this is where a checklist written for a neighbouring state produces a deadline that does not exist.
The $10 annual report fee that circulates in Alabama summaries is a corporation fee. The Department of Revenue’s own description put it beside the privilege tax: “Minimum privilege tax is $100; plus the $10 Secretary of State annual report fee for corporations.” The words “for corporations” are load-bearing, and the Department itself later decoupled the two — the January 2024 notice states that from January 1, 2024 the Secretary of State corporation annual report is no longer filed together with the privilege tax return.
For a limited liability company the recurring instrument was the privilege tax return. The Department states that “every corporation, limited liability entity, and disregarded entity doing business in Alabama or organized, incorporated, qualified, or registered under the laws of Alabama is required to file an Alabama Business Privilege Tax Return and Annual Report… S-corporations, limited liability entities and disregarded entities must file Alabama Form PPT.”
And then Alabama removed it for small businesses, which is the fact that matters most to a one-truck or two-truck carrier. The Department’s notice, read September 2, 2026: “For the taxable years beginning after December 31, 2023, there is a full exemption from the business privilege tax on tax due of $100 or less (Act 2022-252, §40-14(A)-22, Code of Ala., 1975).” And, in terms: “Taxpayers whose business privilege tax is calculated to be $100 or less are not required to file a Business Privilege Tax Return (BPTIN/CPT/PPT).”
So the position for a new venture is that the calculated liability decides whether there is a filing at all, and for a small carrier it will commonly be below the line. That is a conditional rather than a blanket exemption, and it should be tested against the actual computation rather than assumed from the size of the fleet.
The exemption above has a complication that is worth stating plainly, because a reader who lands on the wrong page will reach the wrong answer and will have no reason to doubt it.
Two pages on the Department of Revenue’s own site describe the privilege tax and they do not agree. The notice and the frequently-asked answers carry the 2024 full exemption quoted above. The rates page does not. Read on September 2, 2026, that page still prints the earlier rule — “For the taxable year beginning after December 31, 2022, taxpayers who would otherwise be subject to the minimum tax due of $100 shall pay $50 in lieu thereof” — with no mention of the exemption and no mention of the act that created it.
It is stale twice over. It also still bundles “the $10 Secretary of State annual report fee for corporations” into the privilege tax, which the January 2024 notice expressly ended.
There is no way for a reader to tell from the rates page that it has been overtaken. It carries a departmental title block, sits on the departmental host, and states a rule confidently. What identifies it as superseded is a different page on the same site, and the only way to find that out is to read both.
The general lesson is one this page applies to every figure on it. A source that is authentic is not thereby current, and the check that catches this class of error is reading the instrument that announces a change rather than the page that states a rule. Where two official pages conflict, prefer the one that names the act and the effective date.
Alabama takes part in the Unified Carrier Registration plan, read on the plan’s own participating states list on September 2, 2026. The program reaches interstate operations; a carrier that never leaves Alabama sits outside it.
The administering body is the Public Service Commission — the same body that holds the carrier credential, and not the state transportation department, which is the usual guess. That was read on the national registration system’s own per-state contact record for Alabama, which identifies its own jurisdiction in its data rather than in a page title.
The fee is not an Alabama decision. It is set nationally and adopted by federal rule, and it moves for every participating state on one day.
As of September 2, 2026, bracket B1 — zero to two commercial motor vehicles owned or operated by an exempt or non-exempt motor carrier, motor private carrier or freight forwarder — is $46 per entity for the 2026 registration year. A new venture running one or two power units is a B1 filer.
Both figures are on this page because each is correct for its own period and neither is correct outside it. A figure printed without a date cannot be used by anyone reading it a month later.
Alabama’s motor carrier fuel tax is an interstate instrument by its own terms, and that single sentence reorders what a startup needs to think about.
The Department of Revenue states the authority and the incidence together: the tax rests on “Sections 40-17-150 and 40-17-270 through 40-17-275, Code of Alabama 1975”, and “Excise tax upon motor fuels used in the operation of a motor carrier in Alabama shall be at the same rate per gallon as provided in Section 40-17-325.” The rate is not set in the carrier sections at all; it is imported from the general fuel excise.
Then comes the scope limit, quoted verbatim from the Department’s own page and read September 2, 2026: “Motor carriers with motor vehicles which are operated or caused to be operated wholly within Alabama are exempt from this tax.”
For a carrier whose whole operation is inside the state, that is the end of the question. For one that crosses a line even occasionally, it is the beginning of a license, a decal and a quarterly reporting habit.
The credential itself is priced per set rather than per vehicle in the ordinary sense: “Any motor carrier meeting the above requirements shall pay an annual fee per vehicle to obtain an IFTA license and identification decals. The fee for the decals is $17 per set.” Read September 2, 2026.
The revenue is split by fuel type rather than pooled — the portion attributable to gasoline taxes is distributed in the manner prescribed for gasoline taxes under §40-17-359, and the portion attributable to diesel in the manner prescribed under §40-17-361. That is not an operator’s problem, but it explains why the tax is administered by the revenue department rather than by the commission that holds the carrier credential.
The class of vehicle the fuel tax reaches matters more to a light startup than the tax rate does, because it is the axle count rather than the weight that decides it. And the Department publishes the test twice, in two documents, with a difference that changes its meaning.
The Department’s Motor Carrier Services Manual — whose own cover reads March 2023, notwithstanding a file path and filename that both say otherwise — sets it out as alternatives: a qualified motor vehicle is one “having: • two axles and a gross vehicle weight or registered gross vehicle weight in excess of 26,000 pounds (11,793.401 kilograms); or • three or more axles, regardless of weight; or • used in combination, when the gross vehicle weight or registered gross vehicle weight of such combination exceeds 26,000 pounds (11,793.401 kilograms). Qualified Motor Vehicles do not include recreational vehicles unless they are used in conjunction with any business endeavor.”
The Department’s web page states the same three limbs and joins them with “and” instead of “or”: a qualified motor vehicle is “one which has two axles and a gross vehicle weight or registered gross vehicle weight exceeding 26,000 pounds, has three or more axles regardless of weight, and is used in combination, when the weight of the combination exceeds 26,000 pounds gross vehicle or registered gross vehicle weight”.
Read literally, the web page states a test no vehicle can satisfy — two axles and three or more axles at once. It is a drafting error rather than a different rule, and the manual is the document to cite for the definition. The manual’s reading is also the one that matches the underlying multi-jurisdiction agreement.
With the definition read correctly, the consequence for a small operation is direct. The axle limb has no weight in it. A three-axle straight truck registered in the fifteen-to-twenty-six-thousand-pound band is a qualified motor vehicle on axle count alone, and an operator who checked the weight and stopped there has answered one limb of a three-limb test.
This is worth stating flatly because it is easy to get backwards: Alabama reaches that band by counting axles, not by what kind of truck it is. There is no vehicle-type test on either document, and the file for a light three-axle unit is decided by the same sentence that decides it for a tractor.
The Commission runs an identification regime that is separate from the carrier credential and that a startup meets the first time it takes on equipment under a short lease. It is small, it is precise, and it has a record-keeping tail out of proportion to its size.
Ala. Admin. Code r. 770-X-10-.03-3, headed “Decals”, provides: “Except as provided in 770-X-10-3-2-.01, each power unit leased by an authorized carrier for less than 30 days shall have displayed on the left side of the front windshield a decal furnished by this Commission or a trip permit. Decals shall be effective for a period of seven consecutive calendar days. This decal shall be completed by filling in all of the information required before the power unit commences operation for the lessee.”
Two boundaries are drawn there. The rule reaches a power unit leased for less than thirty days, which is exactly the arrangement a growing carrier uses to cover a surge without buying equipment. And the decal itself lasts seven consecutive calendar days, which is a shorter horizon than most short leases.
The decal is obtained rather than printed: “Decals are obtained by submitting a completed Form B-3 and the statutory fee per decal to the Commission.” And it may not be duplicated — “Decals and trip permits shall not be reproduced.”
The record is the part that outlives the haul. The rule requires every carrier performing non-exempt transportation with a power unit leased for less than thirty days to “prepare and maintain for three (3) years a record showing the serial numbers of the decals used, and indicating when and on what power unit each decal was used”, and that record must be “prepared no later than the close of the business day following the day on which the decal was used.” A seven-day credential generates a three-year file, written up within one business day.
Surrender is also provided for. A decal must be given up to Commission personnel where it is incorrectly filled in, where the operations being conducted are not within the lessee carrier’s authority, or where it has been used beyond seven days.
The discipline of reading a title block rather than trusting a heading applies inside a document as well as at the front of one, and the Commission’s chapter contains a clean example of why.
Rule 770-X-10-.03-1-.01 is headed, in its entirety, “Intrastate Only.” A reader assembling an Alabama file, scanning the chapter’s contents for anything that governs an intrastate-only operation, would stop there and be wrong.
The body binds a completely different population: “All intrastate-only common carriers of passengers in vehicles with a capacity of five passengers or less shall display on each side of each vehicle the following:” — the business name under which the certificate was issued, the city and state from which operating authority is determined, “APSC Cert.” followed by the certificate number, “APSC Reg. No.” followed by the vehicle registration number, and a schedule of fares. All of it “legibly painted directly on the sides of the vehicle in a contrasting color in letters not less than 1-1/2 inches in size”.
Five passengers or fewer, carried for hire, with a fare schedule painted on the door. That is a taxi rule. A freight carrier is nowhere in it.
The heading is not the scope, and the failure this produces is a specific and expensive one: a property carrier that adopts a marking standard written for taxis, and believes it has complied with a rule that never reached it. The rules that do govern marking for other classes sit in the neighbouring numbered rules, under headings that are more honest about what they cover.
This is the most consequential thing in the Alabama chapter for a light intrastate operation, and it is a defect in the codified text rather than an interpretive question.
The Commission divides its safety subchapter in two. One rule addresses interstate carriers and intrastate carriers operating what it calls large commercial vehicles. The other addresses intrastate-only carriers operating only lightweight vehicles — which is to say, exactly the population a new venture with one small truck belongs to.
That second rule, 770-X-10-.17-1-.03, reads in full: “Intrastate Alabama for-hire carriers of passengers or property who are not within an exemption of the Alabama Motor Carrier Act and who do not also conduct interstate operations and who do not operate large commercial vehicles shall comply with the following provisions of this Rule:” — and then the Author, Statutory Authority and History lines begin. Nothing is enumerated. The colon is followed by the attribution block.
It is not alone. Rule 770-X-10-.17-1 itself, headed “Safety Regulations”, has an empty body and blank Author, Statutory Authority and History lines. So does 770-X-10-.17-1-.01, headed “Applicability”. So does 770-X-10-.17-1-.04, headed “Qualifications Of Drivers”. Four rules in one short subchapter are headings with nothing under them, and the one that was supposed to state the standard for the lightest carriers names none.
The consequence is not that a light Alabama carrier is unregulated. Other instruments reach it, and the interstate-facing rule reaches carriers with large commercial vehicles. The consequence is that the specific provision written to tell this class which rules bind it does not do so, and no amount of careful reading will extract an answer from a rule that contains none.
There is a further defect worth carrying, because it makes the same subchapter hazardous to cite. The internal cross-references inside the driver-qualification rule point at the wrong rules — the reference for physical qualifications lands on the disqualifications rule, the reference for the road test lands on the scope rule, and the reference for the employment application lands on a different rule again. Anyone following a cross-reference in that subchapter should check where it actually lands.
One practical note on reading the chapter at all. The public-facing administrative code address for it is a script-driven page that returns no text to an ordinary fetch; the official chapter document is served from the legislature’s own document endpoint. A reader who concludes from a blank page that the chapter is unavailable has been defeated by the delivery mechanism rather than by the source.
The division described above rests entirely on one phrase, and the phrase has no definition anywhere in the chapter that uses it.
The interstate-facing rule, 770-X-10-.17-1-.02, requires compliance with the federal motor carrier safety regulations by “For-hire carriers of passengers or property who are not within an exemption of the Alabama Motor Carrier Act and who operate within the borders of Alabama in interstate commerce and all other carriers that operate large commercial vehicles”. Its companion rule addresses carriers who “do not operate large commercial vehicles”. Everything about which side of the line a carrier stands on turns on that term.
A sweep of the entire chapter finds the phrase in exactly three places: the table of contents line, and inside those two rules. The word “lightweight” behaves identically. The chapter’s own definitions rule was read in full and defines neither; it defines a small set of other terms and otherwise adopts the statutory definitions by reference.
So no weight can be attached to the Commission’s split from within the Commission’s own chapter. A carrier with a small truck cannot determine from this instrument whether it operates a large commercial vehicle, and neither can anyone advising it.
This page does not resolve that, and it is worth saying why rather than picking a number. Attaching a weight to an undefined statutory term is precisely the kind of inference that reads as helpful and is not evidence. The rule is silent; the honest report is that it is silent.
One further feature of the same rule should not be paraphrased away. It requires compliance “notwithstanding any exemptions in such regulations for lightweight vehicles and drivers of lightweight vehicles”. That is a direction to disregard relief the federal text itself offers, which is unusual enough to be worth reading twice — and it applies to whichever carriers the undefined term captures.
The Commission maintains a driver-qualification code of its own alongside the federal corpus, which is unusual, and the first substantive line of it differs from the federal position.
Rule 770-X-10-.17-1-.05 states the reach: “The regulations in this part establish minimum qualifications for persons who drive motor vehicles, as, for, or on behalf of motor carriers. The rules in this part also establish minimum duties of motor carriers with respect to the qualifications of their drivers.”
Rule 770-X-10-.17-1-.06, headed “General Qualifications”, then opens: “(1) A person shall not drive a motor vehicle unless he is qualified to drive a motor vehicle and a motor carrier shall not require or permit a person to drive a motor vehicle unless that person is qualified to drive a motor vehicle as follows: (a) Is at least 18 years of age. (b) Can read and speak the English language sufficiently to converse with the general public, to understand highway traffic signs and signals.”
Eighteen is the Commission’s own floor. The federal driver-qualification part that the same subchapter directs certain carriers to comply with sets twenty-one for the general case. Which governs a particular driver depends on which side of the undefined term above the carrier falls, and this page does not resolve that.
For a new venture the practical reading is cautious rather than permissive. A state rule stating a lower age is not a grant of permission against a federal requirement that independently applies, and an underwriter will price a young driver on the exposure rather than on the citation. The provision is worth knowing exists; it is not worth building a hiring policy on without resolving which regime the operation sits in.
The subchapter continues through disqualifications, employment applications, road tests, examination, physical qualifications, exceptions and driver’s license — a full driver-qualification structure of the state’s own, sitting alongside the federal one rather than instead of it.
The Commission’s application for a motor carrier certificate is Form 14A, marked “(Property, except household goods)”, and every page of it carries the footer “Revised 2018 — APSC Form No. 14A”. Read September 2, 2026.
The form prints a filing fee on its own face, in two places. Its instructions read that the application “should be typed or neatly printed, properly signed and sworn to, and filed with the $100.00 filing fee (cashier’s check or money order)”, and its checklist repeats the requirement as an item to tick: “$100.00 filing fee paid (cashier’s check or money order only)”. The same section refers to a separate registration instrument, Form B-2, with “statutory fee of $6.00 per vehicle”.
Now the qualification, which matters as much as the figures. What is reported here is what a 2018 form prints, not a confirmed current fee schedule. No Commission fee schedule was verified for this page, and none is asserted. A form eight years old is evidence of what was charged when it was revised; it is not evidence that the charge has not moved since.
That distinction is worth making explicitly rather than quietly, because the temptation with a fee is to state it flatly and let the citation carry the risk. A figure with a date and a source qualification is usable. A figure presented as current, on a document that does not claim to be current, is a guess wearing a citation.
Two further terms on the same form are stable enough to rely on regardless. Payment is restricted to a cashier’s cheque or money order — no card, no company cheque — which is a genuine planning item for an operator who does everything else electronically. And the application must be sworn to, which means a notary is in the path before it can be filed at all.
The Commission’s economic regime — the entry prohibition, the exemptions, the amounts, the filing forms and the verification letter that arrives years later — is set out at length on our Alabama hot shot page and is deliberately not repeated here.
So is the safety statute’s intrastate structure: which federal parts are made unlawful to violate, the weight carve-out that takes a class straight back out, and the discretionary power to hold a federal amendment off intrastate vehicles for a period. Those are large questions with long answers, and they are already answered.
The reason for keeping them there rather than duplicating them is straightforward. Two versions of the same analysis drift apart, and the one a reader finds first is not necessarily the one that was corrected. One page owns each question.
This page owns what surrounds them: the name that must be reserved before the company can be formed, the single agent, the absence of any way to buy speed, the return that most small carriers will not file, two departmental pages that contradict each other, a national fee changing on October 1, a fuel tax that exempts the carrier who never leaves, an axle limb that catches a light truck, a seven-day decal with a three-year record behind it, a heading that means taxis, and a safety rule that promises a list and gives none.
Unified Carrier Registration is federal in structure and collected by the participating states, so the fee is the same wherever a carrier registers and no state sets it. It is changing, and both figures are current for their own period.
For the 2026 registration year, bracket B1 — an exempt or non-exempt motor carrier, motor private carrier or freight forwarder operating zero to two commercial motor vehicles — is $46.00 per entity. From October 1, 2026, for the 2027 registration year and each subsequent year, that bracket is $55.00 per entity, under FMCSA final rule 91 FR 56063, published September 1, 2026. The larger fleet brackets rise on the same date; the full schedule is in the rule rather than restated here.
One trap is worth naming, because no ordinary check catches it. The same rule renumbers the sections: it redesignates the current 49 CFR §367.50 as §367.40 and adds a new §367.50 carrying the 2027 table. Until October 1, 2026 the citation “49 CFR 367.50” names the $46 schedule; from that date the identical citation names the $55 schedule, and the section carries no repeal marker to signal the change. A document citing §367.50 for $46 becomes wrong without being edited.
UCR figures read at the Federal Register on September 2, 2026.
The state minimum is a licensing threshold. The program an operator actually needs is built from these lines:
We write new ventures as a named class rather than as an unpriced version of an established fleet, and we read each account against the state layer the operator actually meets rather than against the federal floor alone. For a Alabama operator that means starting from what the state does and does not require of a carrier with no operating history, separating the credentials the state issues from the ones it merely asks you to hold, and treating the absence of a filing regime as a fact about the submission rather than a gap in it.
If the operation also runs freight under separate authority, the Alabama trucking insurance page covers the state’s broader motor carrier picture, and the new venture trucking insurance page covers the class mechanics that apply wherever the operator runs.
Yes, and the Secretary of State states it with a citation: “You must obtain a Certificate of Name Reservation [10A-1-4.02(f)] prior to filing your formation documents.” A foreign registration carries the parallel condition under 10A-1-5.11. That is a condition of one filing on another at the same office; nothing sequences the entity against the carrier credential or the tax programs.
The Secretary of State charge is $200.00 for a domestic limited liability company and $150.00 for a foreign registration, read September 2, 2026. There is no expedite tier — not on the form, not on the entity page, and not on the master fee schedule, whose only expedite line is a $100 fee for record searches under a different chapter.
No processing time is published. The form states that the filing is “effective immediately on the date received”, or on a delayed date no later than the ninetieth day after signing, but that fixes the legal date the company exists rather than the day the certificate comes back. The instruction that you can file “in the time it takes to type this request” describes the form, not the office.
Not with the Secretary of State. The $10 annual report fee is a corporation fee and was decoupled from the privilege tax return in January 2024. The limited liability company instrument was the privilege tax return on Form PPT, and for taxable years beginning after December 31, 2023 a computed liability of $100 or less carries a full exemption with no return required.
No. The Department of Revenue states it directly: “Motor carriers with motor vehicles which are operated or caused to be operated wholly within Alabama are exempt from this tax.” The tax is an interstate instrument. A carrier that does cross a line pays $17 per set for the identification decals alongside an annual per-vehicle license fee.
Yes, on the axle limb. The Department’s Motor Carrier Services Manual, cover-dated March 2023, sets the test as alternatives, the second of which is “three or more axles, regardless of weight”. Note that the Department’s web page joins the same three limbs with “and” instead of “or”, which as printed states a test no vehicle can meet. Cite the manual for the definition.
The Commission’s rule reaches a power unit “leased by an authorized carrier for less than 30 days”, requires a decal or trip permit displayed on the left side of the front windshield, and provides that “Decals shall be effective for a period of seven consecutive calendar days.” Decals come from Form B-3, may not be reproduced, and generate a three-year record of serial numbers written up by the close of the next business day.
There is a rule written for exactly that purpose and it enumerates nothing. Rule 770-X-10-.17-1-.03 names intrastate-only carriers operating only lightweight vehicles, says they “shall comply with the following provisions of this Rule:” and then ends. Three neighbouring rules in the same subchapter are headings with empty bodies. That is what the official codification says.
The chapter does not say. The phrase carries the entire split between the Commission’s interstate-facing safety rule and its intrastate-only one, and it appears in the chapter only three times — the contents line and the two rules that turn on it. The definitions rule defines neither it nor “lightweight”. No weight can be derived from the chapter, and none is asserted here.
The Commission’s Form 14A, footer revision 2018, prints a $100.00 filing fee on its face in two places and requires payment by cashier’s cheque or money order only. It also refers to Form B-2 with a stated statutory fee of $6.00 per vehicle. That is what the 2018 form says; no current Commission fee schedule was confirmed for this page and none is asserted.
Every figure on this page was read at the source below on September 2, 2026, with the effective date of the version read. Treat each as current as of that date rather than as permanent.
Send the equipment list, the operating radius and the commodity, and tell us the date authority was granted. We will size the program against the first year the operation will actually have rather than against a statutory floor.
