Motor carrier classes by state
Florida is one of nine states outside the Unified Carrier Registration plan, and for an interstate startup that single fact reshapes the first year. The obligation does not disappear because the state is absent from it — federal law moves the registration to another state that a carrier maintains an office or operating facility in. Alongside that sits a privilege tax with its own chapter, a four dollar identifying device, a formation fee split into two required line items, and an annual report whose late penalty is four hundred dollars.
An operator opening a carrier has no safety history to be judged on, and the bulk of a first year runs on federal rules that are the same on both sides of any border. The part that is not the same is Florida’s, and it is what follows. Each amount was opened at its own primary source on September 2, 2026 and prints with that date attached, because the biggest of them is replaced four weeks afterwards.
Two Florida facts dominate a startup budget and neither is a rule about trucks. The first is that the state does not participate in the interstate carrier registration plan, so a carrier based here that runs interstate has to work out where its registration actually lands. The second is that the annual company report carries a four hundred dollar penalty for lateness, which is an order of magnitude above the underlying fee and above what most states charge.
Nothing here is a sequence. Florida imposes no state entry credential on a general freight carrier, so there is nothing for the remaining obligations to be sequenced against. The permit regime has genuine conditions, and they attach to particular movements rather than to a startup timeline.
A Florida startup file has an unusual gap in it and an unusual penalty in it, and both change what a submission needs to explain.
Tell us the equipment, the radius and the commodity, and we will tell you which of these actually touches the operation.
Florida prices formation as two separate mandatory line items rather than one, and collapsing them understates the cost by a quarter.
The Division of Corporations limited liability company fee table, read September 2, 2026, lists “Filing Fee (Required) $100.00” and “Registered Agent Fee (Required) $25.00”, and then totals them itself: “Total Fee For New Florida/Foreign LLC $125.00”.
The second line is genuinely unusual. Most states treat the registered agent as a required designation and charge nothing extra for it; Florida marks the agent fee “(Required)” in exactly the same way it marks the filing fee, and bills it separately. A founder comparing Florida to a neighbouring state on the headline filing fee alone is comparing $100 to a number that should be $125.
The agent has a price after formation too, and it is asymmetric in a way worth planning around. Changing the registered agent is $25. But a registered agent resigning from an active company is $85, against $25 for resigning from a dissolved one. The higher figure attaches to the situation a carrier is actually likely to be in.
The remaining formation-adjacent charges from the same table: a certificate of status is $5, a certified copy of a record is $30, articles of correction are $25, a name reservation is $25, and any other amendment is $25. Articles of dissolution or withdrawal are $25, and articles of revocation of dissolution are $100.
None of those is large individually. The point of listing them is that Florida charges for a great many discrete acts at $25 each, so a first year with two address changes, an agent change and an amendment is not a $125 year.
This is the single most expensive avoidable mistake in the Florida startup layer, and the size of the step is what makes it worth a section of its own.
From the same fee table, read September 2, 2026: “Annual Report (& Supplemental Fee) $138.75” and “Annual Report (Received after May 1) $538.75”. The difference is four hundred dollars exactly, and it is a cliff rather than a slope — there is no per-day accrual and no partial penalty.
Four hundred dollars is nearly triple the underlying fee, and it is more than three times what it cost to form the company. For an owner-operator it is a meaningful fraction of a week’s revenue, spent on nothing.
The report itself is not complicated and does not require professional help, which is what makes the penalty avoidable in a way that most compliance costs are not. Put a reminder in the calendar for the first quarter, not for April.
There is one relief that a first-year founder should know about, quoted from the same source: “Those business entities formed or effective after January 1st of this year are not due an Annual Report”. A company formed during the current calendar year has no annual report obligation until the following year — so the trap is set for the second year, not the first, which is precisely when a new operation has stopped thinking about state filings and started thinking about freight.
An amended annual report, if something in the filed report needs correcting, is $50. And reinstatement after a lapse is $100 plus, as the table puts it, “each year annual report fee” — so a company that lets the report slide is paying the reinstatement charge on top of the accumulated report fees rather than instead of them.
This is the Florida fact most likely to be misread in both directions, so it is worth stating the mechanism rather than the conclusion.
Florida is not a participating state. The plan’s own participating states list was fetched and parsed on September 2, 2026 and names forty-one states. Florida is not one of them, and there is consequently no Florida administering agency for the program to contact.
The wrong inference is that a Florida-based interstate carrier therefore does not register and does not pay. That is not what happens, and the reason is federal rather than state.
49 U.S.C. 14504a, read at source on September 2, 2026, defines a base-state as one that is in compliance with the participation requirements and in which the entity maintains its principal place of business. It then provides for designation elsewhere: “A motor carrier, motor private carrier, broker, freight forwarder, or leasing company may designate another State in which it maintains an office or operating facility to be its base-State in the event that— (i) the State in which the motor carrier, motor private carrier, broker, freight forwarder, or leasing company maintains its principal place of business is not in compliance with the requirements of subsection (e); or (ii) the motor carrier, motor private carrier, broker, freight forwarder, or leasing company does not have a principal place of business in the United States.”
So the registration moves to another state, and the fee is paid there. That is a genuine planning question for a Florida startup rather than a technicality, because the statute conditions the designation on the carrier maintaining “an office or operating facility” in the state it designates. A carrier with a yard, a terminal or a satellite office in another state has an obvious answer.
A carrier with no such facility anywhere else does not, on the face of the statute, and this page does not invent one. What happens in that case is governed by the agreement and the plan’s own handbook, which was not read in this pass. The residual is recorded rather than papered over.
One methodological note, because it changes what this page relies on. Earlier project research had confirmed the non-participation a second way, through a per-state contact endpoint that returned live records for participating states and errors for the nine absent ones. That control could not be reproduced on September 2, 2026: the endpoint returned HTTP 426 for every state probed, participating or not. The published participating-states list is what this finding rests on, and it stands on its own.
Florida pricing turns on the operation, and on where the interstate paperwork actually lands.
Send the equipment, the radius and the commodity, and we will fold the Florida-specific pieces into the submission.
Because the registration moves rather than disappearing, the amount still matters to a Florida-based interstate carrier — it is simply paid somewhere else.
Wherever it is paid, the charge is the same. The table labels the entry row B1 and writes its fleet count as “0-2”; registration year 2026 prices that row at $46.00 for the entity, and at $46.00 again for a broker or leasing company. Read September 2, 2026.
The fee is national, so a Florida carrier registering through a base state in the southeast pays the same figure as one registering anywhere else. There is no premium and no discount for being based in a non-participating state; the only difference is where the paperwork goes.
The rule also shuffles the section numbering of the part it amends, in a way a compliance file will carry forward without noticing. One section disappears, the two above it drop down a number each, and a new section is written into the vacated slot. The consequence is that a single unchanged citation — “49 CFR 367.50” — resolves to the lower table before the first of October and to the higher table after it, under a heading that barely differs.
The redesignated older table now carries a closing year it never previously had, reading “Fees Under the Unified Carrier Registration Plan and Agreement for Registration Years Beginning in 2025 and Ending in 2026”.
Both numbers are right for their own registration year, which is why a note that records the amount without the year is not usable in either direction.
Florida does levy a tax on motor carrier operation, and it is easy to miss because its chapter heading and its short title describe two different things.
The chapter is headed “TAX ON OPERATION OF COMMERCIAL MOTOR VEHICLES”, and its own short title, at section 207.001, is “the Florida Diesel Fuel and Motor Fuel Use Tax Act of 1981”. One name describes the incidence; the other describes the measure. Both were read at the Florida Senate’s published chapter on September 2, 2026.
The operative levy is section 207.003: “A tax for the privilege of operating any commercial motor vehicle upon the public highways of this state shall be levied upon every motor carrier at a rate which includes the minimum rates provided in parts I-III of chapter 206 on each gallon of diesel fuel or motor fuel used for the propulsion of a commercial motor vehicle by such motor carrier within the state.”
Read the structure of that sentence, because it explains the naming. What is taxed is the privilege of operating. How the tax is measured is fuel consumed in the state. It is not a weight-distance tax and it is not a flat per-vehicle charge; it is a privilege tax measured by fuel.
The administering department is named in the chapter’s own definitions: the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles. That is the same department that runs apportioned registration, which keeps the correspondence in one place — unlike states that split the tax to a revenue department. The chapter adds shared inspection and enforcement roles for the agriculture and transportation departments, and names the Department of Legal Affairs or a state attorney for collection suits.
The reciprocal agreement power sits at section 207.0281, which permits the department to enter “a cooperative reciprocal agreement, including, but not limited to, the international fuel-tax agreement, with another state or group of states”. So Florida’s participation in the multistate fuel-tax arrangement is authorized inside this chapter rather than somewhere else.
Alongside the tax sits a small registration and identification requirement with a small price, and the price is the kind that is easy to forget and easy to be stopped over.
Section 207.004, read September 2, 2026, provides: “There shall be a fee of $4 per year or any fraction thereof for each such identifying device issued.” Four dollars per device per year, and the words “or any fraction thereof” mean a partial year costs a whole year.
The class that has to hold one is set by the chapter’s own definition, and it is worth reading in full because one of its limbs does not mention weight at all. Section 207.002(1) defines a commercial motor vehicle as “any vehicle not owned or operated by a governmental entity which uses diesel fuel or motor fuel on the public highways; and which has a gross vehicle weight in excess of 26,000 pounds, or has three or more axles regardless of weight, or is used in combination when the weight of such combination exceeds 26,000 pounds gross vehicle weight.”
Three limbs joined by “or”. Two are weight tests at twenty-six thousand pounds. The middle one is a count of axles with no pounds figure attached to it, so a three-axle unit is inside this tax chapter at any weight, provided it runs on diesel or motor fuel on the public highways.
That is the specific failure a light Florida operation is prone to. A founder who checks the scale, concludes the truck is under every weight line in the state and treats the fuel tax chapter as somebody else’s problem has tested two limbs out of three.
The definition also carries an exclusion that will not help a freight carrier but explains an anomaly a reader may notice: it excludes vehicles owned or operated by a community transportation coordinator, or by a private operator providing public transit services under contract with one.
One further reason to read this chapter rather than assume it is stable: it is live legislation. The financial responsibility section that sits alongside it in a different title carries a 2026 amendment in its history line, which is inside this project’s own research window. Chapters that move recently are chapters to re-read rather than to quote from memory.
Apportioned registration is a uniform interstate arrangement, which is why most state pages describing it read alike. Florida publishes an extra sentence that reaches below the uniform threshold, and it is aimed at exactly the operation this page is written for.
The Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles program page, read September 2, 2026, sets out the usual three criteria for power units of an apportionable vehicle: “Have a gross vehicle weight (GVW) over 26,000 pounds; or Have three or more axles, regardless of weight; or Are used in combination with a trailer for a combined GVW that is over 26,000 pounds”.
Then comes the sentence that is not in the uniform text: “If a vehicle has a gross vehicle weight (GVW) less than 26,000 pounds or combination thereof may be required to be registered as an apportioned vehicle or obtain a valid IRP trip permit if conducting interstate commerce (i.e., operating from out of state but conducting point-to-point commerce in Florida).”
The wording is loose — it is agency prose rather than statutory drafting — but the reach is clear enough to act on. A vehicle under twenty-six thousand pounds may be required to be apportioned, or to hold a trip permit, where it is conducting point-to-point commerce in Florida while operating from out of state.
For a fifteen-to-twenty-six-thousand-pound operation that is the relevant sentence on the page, and it is the one a summary of the uniform plan will never contain. Do not carry another state’s description of apportionment into Florida on this point.
One navigation warning is worth passing on because it wastes a genuine amount of time. The live path for this program sits under the department’s driver license and commercial motor vehicle driver section rather than under a commercial vehicles heading, which is counter-intuitive for a registration program, and the more obvious path returns the department’s not-found page.
The trip permit is the practical alternative for an operation whose Florida work is occasional, and the page names it in the same breath as the registration requirement rather than burying it elsewhere.
Florida’s oversize and overweight regime is the state layer a general freight startup is most likely to actually touch, and it is priced generously at the bottom and capped at the top.
The duty is stated first. Fla. Stat. 316.550(1), read September 2, 2026, provides that an oversize or overweight vehicle or load “may not enter onto or be operated on a public road in this state unless the owner or operator of such vehicle has first obtained the special permit” from the appropriate governing jurisdiction.
Two issuers exist. Subsection (2) empowers the Department of Transportation for highways under its jurisdiction, and a local authority for highways under its, each to act “in its discretion and upon application and good cause shown therefor” and to issue a permit describing the vehicles and load to be moved and the highways for which it is requested.
The pricing is at subsection (6): “The minimum fee for issuing any such permit shall be $5. The Department of Transportation may issue blanket permits for not more than 36 months. The department may charge an annualized fee for blanket permits not to exceed $500.”
Read the three sentences together and the design is clear. Five dollars is a floor rather than a price, so a single movement is cheap at the bottom of the range. A blanket permit can run for three years, which is a long horizon for a state permit. And the annualized charge for a blanket permit is capped at five hundred dollars, so the worst case for a carrier that permits continuously is a known number rather than an open one.
Timing is stated for one category. Subsection (4) provides that route-designated permits for vehicles within the named statutory limits plus the scale tolerance “shall be issued within 14 days after receipt of the request.” Fourteen days is a statutory duty on the department, not a target.
And the permit has to travel. Subsection (7): “Every special permit shall be carried in the vehicle or combination of vehicles to which it refers and shall be open to inspection by any police officer or authorized agent of any authority granting such permit. No person shall violate any of the terms or conditions of such special permit.” The second sentence converts the permit’s own conditions into a legal obligation.
One subsection of the permit statute is a due-process floor rather than an operational rule, and it is worth knowing because it protects a carrier at exactly the point where a new operation is most vulnerable.
Fla. Stat. 316.550(9), read September 2, 2026: “The Department of Transportation may not refuse to issue a permit under this section to any person solely on the basis that such person allegedly violated this chapter or the rules promulgated hereunder until a final order is entered with regard to such violation pursuant to chapter 120.”
The operative words are “allegedly” and “until a final order is entered”. An open allegation, however serious, cannot by itself be the sole basis for refusing a permit. The department has to see the administrative process through first.
Why that matters to a startup specifically: a new carrier has no compliance history, so a single disputed roadside citation carries proportionally more weight than it would against a decade of clean operation. Without this subsection, a contested allegation could effectively suspend a business from oversize work while it was being resolved. The statute says it cannot.
Note the limits honestly. The protection is against refusal “solely on the basis” of an alleged violation, so it does not prevent refusal on other grounds — and the issuing power at subsection (2) is discretionary in the first place. It is a floor, not a guarantee.
The penalty side of the same section is capped rather than open-ended, with penalties for exceeding permit terms limited to one thousand dollars per vehicle across the dimensional and the operational and safety categories.
Two blanket permit families sit alongside the general regime and are worth knowing about if the work touches them: mobile cranes, including towing a vehicle up to five thousand pounds where the combination does not exceed ninety-five thousand pounds, and crane-plus-support combinations up to twelve feet wide, fourteen feet six inches high and one hundred feet long; and wreckers.
A founder asking whether Florida requires a bond will find security language in the statute book and needs to know what it is attached to, because it is not attached to carrier status at all.
Fla. Stat. 316.550(2), read at source on September 2, 2026, ends with this: “The Department of Transportation or local authority is authorized to issue or withhold such permit at its discretion or, if such permit is issued, to limit or prescribe the conditions of operation of such vehicle or vehicles; and the department or local authority may require such undertaking or other security as may be deemed necessary to compensate for any damage to any roadway or road structure.”
Everything about that clause is narrow. It is permissive — “may require”. It is keyed to a purpose — compensating for damage to a roadway or road structure. It attaches to a permit rather than to a carrier. And it prescribes no amount and no form, so there is no schedule to look up in advance.
So the answer to the bond question for a general freight new venture is that no carrier bond exists, and the only security instrument located is a discretionary, permit-side, road-damage-keyed undertaking that may or may not be imposed on a particular oversize movement.
The scope of that negative is worth stating. It rests on three sections read in full: the permit statute at 316.550, across all eleven subsections; the intrastate safety section; and the financial responsibility section in the insurance title. None of the three contains a carrier bond, a surety requirement or a security condition attached to carrier status.
One further absence in the financial responsibility section is worth noting in passing because it is unusual: that section offers no self-insurance alternative at all. It is a bare obligation to be insured. The figures it sets and how they apply are analyzed on our Florida hot shot page rather than restated here.
Earlier project research recorded a Division of Corporations statement describing mail filings as processed in the order received. That statement could not be relocated on September 2, 2026, and this page does not repeat a quotation it did not read.
What was reached that day: the limited liability company fee table, which publishes charges and no durations; the electronic filing landing page for a Florida limited liability company, which carries payment-processor information and filing instructions but no turnaround figure; and a processing-dates path that returned the department’s not-found page.
So the field stands unverified. No day count, no range, and no characterization of the queue is asserted anywhere on this page.
That is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight. A processing time is exactly the kind of figure that gets copied forward for years after it stopped being true, and a page that prints one without a current read is manufacturing confidence rather than reporting a fact.
The practical instruction is to treat timing as a question for the Division rather than for a guide, and to note that Florida’s electronic filing route exists and is prominently signposted, which is generally the faster path where it is available.
One payment detail was read and is worth knowing before filing: the Division uses a third-party payment service for card payments on online filings, the confirmation receipt arrives from that service, and the biller line on a card statement will not read as the Division’s own name. Keep the receipt, because the Division says it carries information used to locate and reconcile the filing.
Every page in this series has to be careful not to present a set of requirements as a sequence. In Florida the question barely arises, and saying why is more useful than constructing a pathway.
Florida imposes no state entry credential on an intrastate general freight carrier. The state layer for such a carrier is a safety regime and a tax regime, not an authorization regime, and the section that would carry an entry requirement was read in full and contains none.
With no entry credential, there is nothing for the other obligations to be conditioned on. The company formation happens at the Division of Corporations. The tax chapter attaches to operating a qualifying vehicle. Apportioned registration attaches to interstate operation. The federal registration attaches to interstate operation and is administered elsewhere because Florida is outside the plan. None of these is a prerequisite of any other.
The conditions that do exist belong to permits and are stated as conditions. An oversize or overweight movement requires the permit first, on the face of the statute. The permit’s own terms bind once issued. And route-designated permits within the named limits must be issued within fourteen days of the request — a duty on the department rather than on the carrier.
The company layer has a timing fact rather than a condition: an entity formed or effective after January 1 of the current year is not due an annual report that year, which is a relief rather than an ordering rule.
That is the whole of it. Arranging those items into a numbered pathway would assert an order that Florida has not enacted, and in a state whose entry regulation was dismantled rather than never built, inventing structure is the wrong instinct twice over.
Three subjects are worked out in full elsewhere on this site rather than duplicated here, and several boundaries are printed where they occur.
The intrastate safety adoption, its frozen federal edition and the conjunctive weight test inside its exemption are on our Florida hot shot page. So is the liability ladder and where its bottom rung sits relative to a light combination. So is the vehicle definition in the registration title, including its own axle limb — a different statute from the tax chapter definition quoted on this page, and analyzed there.
This page covers the layer around all of that: forming the company and the two required fees, the annual report and its four hundred dollar cliff, the state’s absence from the interstate registration plan and what federal law does about it, the privilege tax and its four dollar device, apportioned registration and Florida’s extra sweep, the permit regime with its floor, its cap and its due-process subsection, and the one security clause the statute book contains.
The boundaries. The processing time is unverified because no statement could be relocated. The base-state question for a carrier with no out-of-state office or operating facility is a residual governed by the plan’s agreement and handbook, which was not read. And the second confirmation of non-participation, through a per-state contact endpoint, could not be reproduced — the endpoint returned HTTP 426 for every state probed on September 2, 2026.
One date belongs in the diary. On October 1, 2026 the national registration bracket fees rise, and a Florida-based interstate carrier will pay the higher figure in whichever base state it registers through. On the same day the section number that currently proves the lower figure begins naming the higher one.
Where a figure appears on this page without a scheduled change, none was found in the text read on September 2, 2026 — which is not the same as a guarantee that none exists.
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 Florida 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 Florida 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.
$125.00, in two required parts. The Division of Corporations fee table lists “Filing Fee (Required) $100.00” and “Registered Agent Fee (Required) $25.00”, and totals them as “$125.00”. Quoting the $100 alone understates the cost by a quarter. Read September 2, 2026.
It is $138.75, and $538.75 if received after May 1 — a flat $400 penalty with no per-day accrual. An amended annual report is $50. Reinstatement after a lapse is $100 plus each year’s annual report fee, so the reinstatement charge sits on top of the accumulated fees rather than replacing them.
No, if the company was formed this year. The Division states that “Those business entities formed or effective after January 1st of this year are not due an Annual Report”. The obligation starts the following year, which is exactly when a new operation has stopped thinking about state filings.
No. The plan’s own participating-states list, fetched and parsed on September 2, 2026, names forty-one states and Florida is not among them. There is no Florida administering agency for the program.
Yes — the duty moves rather than disappearing. 49 U.S.C. 14504a provides that a carrier “may designate another State in which it maintains an office or operating facility to be its base-State” where its principal place of business is in a state not in compliance with the participation requirements. A Florida-based interstate carrier registers and pays through that other state.
This page does not answer that, because the statute conditions the designation on the carrier maintaining “an office or operating facility” in the state it designates, and what happens otherwise is governed by the plan’s agreement and handbook, which was not read in this pass. The residual is recorded rather than guessed at.
Yes. Chapter 207 is headed “TAX ON OPERATION OF COMMERCIAL MOTOR VEHICLES” and its short title is the Florida Diesel Fuel and Motor Fuel Use Tax Act of 1981. Section 207.003 levies “A tax for the privilege of operating any commercial motor vehicle upon the public highways of this state”, measured on each gallon of diesel or motor fuel used in the state. It is a privilege tax measured by fuel, not a weight-distance charge.
It can, on the axle limb. Section 207.002(1) defines a commercial motor vehicle as one using diesel or motor fuel on the public highways “and which has a gross vehicle weight in excess of 26,000 pounds, or has three or more axles regardless of weight, or is used in combination when the weight of such combination exceeds 26,000 pounds gross vehicle weight.” Three limbs joined by “or”, and the middle one states no weight.
It is the identifying device. Section 207.004 provides that “There shall be a fee of $4 per year or any fraction thereof for each such identifying device issued.” The phrase “or any fraction thereof” means a partial year is charged as a full one, and the fee is per device rather than per company.
The department says it can. Its program page adds a sentence the uniform plan text does not carry: a vehicle with a gross vehicle weight “less than 26,000 pounds or combination thereof may be required to be registered as an apportioned vehicle or obtain a valid IRP trip permit if conducting interstate commerce (i.e., operating from out of state but conducting point-to-point commerce in Florida).” Do not carry another state’s summary into Florida on this point.
The statute sets a floor rather than a price: “The minimum fee for issuing any such permit shall be $5.” Blanket permits may run for not more than 36 months, with an annualized fee capped at $500. Route-designated permits within the named statutory limits and the scale tolerance must be issued within 14 days of the request.
Not on that basis alone. Fla. Stat. 316.550(9) provides that the department “may not refuse to issue a permit under this section to any person solely on the basis that such person allegedly violated this chapter or the rules promulgated hereunder until a final order is entered”. It is a floor, not a guarantee — the issuing power itself remains discretionary and refusal on other grounds is not barred.
No carrier bond was found. The only security instrument located is at Fla. Stat. 316.550(2), which lets the department or a local authority “require such undertaking or other security as may be deemed necessary to compensate for any damage to any roadway or road structure” — permissive, permit-side, and keyed to road damage rather than to carrier status. Three sections were read in full and none contains a carrier bond.
This page does not say. No processing statement could be relocated on the Division of Corporations pages reached on September 2, 2026 — the fee table publishes charges and no durations, the electronic filing page carries instructions rather than a turnaround, and a processing-dates path returned the department’s not-found page. Printing an unread figure would manufacture confidence rather than report a fact.
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.
