Motor carrier classes by state
The single most consequential Maine fact for a first-year carrier is not a rule at all — it is a queue. The Secretary of State publishes its own current corporate filing turnaround at forty to fifty-five business days, and adds that expedited requests are themselves running late. Everything else about starting here is comparatively gentle, and one thing about it is actively misleading: the statute headed for an operating authority license is a heading with nothing underneath it.
Someone starting a carrier has no operating history behind them, and the bulk of a first year runs on federal rules that do not vary by state. What is left over in Maine is the subject here. Each figure was opened at its primary source on September 2, 2026 and is printed with that date beside it, since one of the larger ones is replaced four weeks later.
Maine has an unusually candid publishing habit, which works in a founder’s favor. The Secretary of State prints its actual current backlog on its own landing page rather than a target. The statutes print repeal markers on the contents page rather than only inside the section. And the safety rule chapter prints its amendment history in full. A page like this one is easier to write honestly about Maine than about most states, because the state does more of the disclosure itself.
Nothing here is presented as a sequence. Maine writes exactly one condition that puts one thing before another, and it is stated below in the words of the statute that writes it. The remaining obligations are independent of one another, and arranging them into a pathway would assert an order the state has not enacted.
A Maine startup timeline is dominated by a queue rather than by requirements, which changes what a realistic first-load date looks like.
Tell us the equipment, the radius and the commodity, and we will tell you which of these actually attaches.
Most state offices publish a target. Maine publishes what is actually happening, and for a founder planning a start date that is the most useful sentence on this page.
The Secretary of State’s Corporations-Business Services page, read on September 2, 2026, states: “Processing Time: Corporate filing processing time is currently 40-55 business days. To determine if your filing has been processed, please go to Corporate Search to do a corporate name lookup. When you are on the Information Summary page, you can see additional filing information by scrolling to the bottom of the page and selecting ‘view list of filings.’”
Immediately above that, on the same page and read the same day, sits the sentence that closes the obvious escape route: “Expedited Filings: Due to the high volume of expedited filing requests, there may be a delay in processing.” Paying for speed does not remove the queue; it moves you into a shorter one that is itself congested.
Translate forty to fifty-five business days into a working calendar and the scale is clear. Business days exclude weekends and state holidays, so the range is roughly eight to eleven weeks of wall-clock time — and the office notes it will be closed for a state holiday in early September, which sits inside the window for anyone filing now.
The operational consequence for a carrier is specific rather than general. Almost everything else a first-year operation needs is held in the name of the entity: bank accounts, credentials, insurance and contracts. A formation filing that takes two months is a two-month delay on all of them, not on one of them.
Two practical notes follow from the office’s own text. It tells you how to check status yourself — a corporate name lookup, then the filings list at the bottom of the information summary — which is faster than telephoning. And it publishes its hours: open Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., with customer service telephone hours from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Maine puts its filing charges in a single statute rather than a schedule, which makes them easy to verify and comparatively stable.
31 M.R.S. §1680, read September 2, 2026, provides: “For filing of a certificate of formation under section 1531, a fee of $175”. That is the cost of bringing the company into existence.
The recurring filing is priced in the same section: “For filing of an annual report under section 1665, a fee of $85 for a limited liability company or a fee of $150 for a foreign limited liability company”. A Maine company pays eighty-five; a company formed elsewhere and qualified into Maine pays a hundred and fifty.
Lateness is priced twice, in two different mechanisms, and the distinction is worth understanding. There is a late filing fee: “For failing to deliver an annual report by its due date, in addition to the annual report filing fee, a fee of $50.” And there is a separate penalty for failing to file at all, which the section caps: $150, “to a maximum fee of $600, regardless of the number of delinquent reports or the period of delinquency”.
That cap is unusual and worth knowing rather than discovering. In many states delinquency compounds year on year without limit, so a company dormant for five years faces five multiples. Maine stops the penalty at six hundred dollars however long the lapse ran and however many reports were missed. It does not make delinquency cheap, but it makes it finite.
The agent side carries its own penalty at the same figure: “for failure to appoint or maintain a registered agent, a fee of $150; for failure to notify the Secretary of State that the registered agent or the address of the registered agent has been changed or failure to appoint a replacement registered agent after the registered agent has resigned, a fee of $150”. Two distinct failures, both at a hundred and fifty.
On expedited service the statute prices nothing. What it says is that “Fees for expedited service are deposited into a fund for use by the Secretary of State in providing an improved filing service.” The existence of the tier is acknowledged; its amount is not codified, and this page does not supply one.
Maine’s recurring company filing is a window rather than a deadline, and knowing both ends of it prevents the two most common errors.
31 M.R.S. §1665(1), read September 2, 2026, provides that “Each year, each limited liability company or each foreign limited liability company authorized to conduct business in this State shall deliver to the office of the Secretary of State for filing an annual report”, and the section then lists the contents: the company name, the information required by a general filings provision, the principal office address, a description of the business conducted in Maine, and contact details for at least one member, manager or authorized person.
The timing is at subsection 3, and the first year is treated separately: “The first annual report under this section must be delivered to the office of the Secretary of State between January 1st and June 1st of the year following the calendar year in which a limited liability company was formed or a foreign limited liability company delivered its statement of foreign qualification to the office of the Secretary of State for filing. For subsequent years, annual reports must be delivered to the office of the Secretary of State between January 1st and June 1st of the following calendar year.”
The first error is filing too early. The window opens on January 1 of the year after formation, so a company formed in March has no annual report obligation at all in its first calendar year.
The second error is treating the closing date as a soft one. June 1 is the end of the window, and the fifty dollar late fee attaches from the due date, with the separate delinquency penalty behind it.
One content requirement deserves attention from a carrier specifically: the report asks for “a description of the business conducted in Maine”. That is a public statement about what the company does, filed annually, and it is worth keeping it consistent with what the operation actually is — because it is the description a counterparty or an underwriter will find when they look the company up.
The window is fixed statewide rather than tied to a formation anniversary, which means every Maine company shares the same five-month period and the office’s workload concentrates inside it. Given the turnaround figure at the top of this page, filing in January rather than late May is the obviously better habit.
In Maine the timeline is usually the constraint, not the rulebook.
Send the equipment, the radius and the commodity, and we will work the Maine-specific pieces into the submission.
In a state where several transport sections have been struck out, it is worth confirming that a requirement is live rather than assuming it, and Maine makes that check easy by printing the history under every section.
31 M.R.S. §1661 reads in its entirety: “Registered agent for limited liability company. A limited liability company must have and continuously maintain a registered agent in this State as defined by Title 5, section 102, subsection 27.” That is the whole section.
Its section history shows an enactment, an affecting provision and one amendment, and no repeal marker of any kind. The requirement is current.
Two words in that sentence do the work. “Continuously” means the obligation is a state of affairs rather than a filing event, so a gap between one agent resigning and the next being appointed is a breach even if no document was ever late. And “in this State” means an out-of-state address does not satisfy it.
The definition is not in the company title at all — it is a cross-reference to a general definitions provision in another title. A founder searching the company chapter for what qualifies as an agent will not find it there, which is the same structural pattern as the fee statute sitting outside the formation chapter.
The enforcement is the penalty pair described above: a hundred and fifty dollars for failing to appoint or maintain the agent, and a further hundred and fifty for failing to notify a change of agent or address, or failing to replace an agent who has resigned. The second of those is the one that catches a carrier whose commercial agent service lapses quietly.
This is the Maine research hazard, and it is worth demonstrating rather than describing, because the demonstration is what makes it memorable.
29-A M.R.S. §552 is headed “Operating authority license required”. Fetched and read at source on September 2, 2026, its entire body is one word in parentheses: “(REPEALED)”. The section history runs “PL 1993, c. 683, §A2 (NEW). PL 1993, c. 683, §B5 (AFF). PL 1995, c. 65, §§A153,C15 (AFF). PL 1995, c. 65, §B6 (AMD). PL 2009, c. 435, §6 (AMD). PL 2009, c. 598, §9 (RP).”
The final entry is the operative one. The abbreviation RP is repeal, and it happened in 2009. Everything before it is the life of a section that no longer exists.
Now consider what a heading-only read produces. The phrase “Operating authority license required” is precisely the string a founder, a search engine or an automated citation check would match on. It sits in a subchapter headed for motor carrier registration. It looks, from the outside, exactly like a live requirement — and reading it that way inverts the answer completely.
It is not alone. The served contents page for that chapter shows repeal markers against several neighbouring sections in the same subchapter, including the identification device section, the lapse of license section, and a motor carrier review board section. The apparatus around the license went with the license.
The lesson generalizes past Maine. A title block proves you have opened the right document; it proves nothing about whether that document still operates. Repeal markers and effective-date blocks are the only things that answer that question, and a repeal marker can carry a future date and read as current text today.
What the repeal means for a general freight carrier, and what the state does instead, is worked through on our Maine hot shot page. This page notes the trap and moves on rather than restating that analysis.
Maine writes its own fuel-use threshold into statute rather than delegating it entirely, and the fourth limb of that threshold is the one that reaches light equipment.
29-A M.R.S. §525(1), read September 2, 2026, provides that a person operating a vehicle using fuel other than gasoline must establish an account for fuel use reporting if that vehicle: “A. Is registered for a gross vehicle weight in excess of 26,000 pounds; B. Is designed to carry 20 or more passengers; C. Is used in combination with another vehicle or vehicles and the combined gross weight is in excess of 26,000 pounds; or D. Has 3 or more axles on the power unit regardless of gross weight.”
Limb D is the trap for a light operation. It has no weight floor whatsoever, and the words “regardless of gross weight” are the statute’s own. A three-axle power unit in the fifteen to twenty-six thousand pound range is inside the account requirement on axle count alone, whatever the registered weight is.
Limb A also rewards a careful read. It is expressed as “registered for a gross vehicle weight”, which is a registration fact rather than a scale reading. A vehicle registered at a higher weight than it typically runs is measured by the registration, not by the load.
The limbs are alternatives, joined by “or”, so satisfying any one of them brings the vehicle in. An operator who has checked the combined weight and stopped there has answered limb C and left the other three untested.
The costs on this side are modest and specific. The decal fee is five dollars for each vehicle under subsection 5. And there is a trip alternative to licensing: subsection 7 sets the fee for a permit at fifty dollars, for a three-consecutive-day permit in lieu of licensing.
For a startup the arithmetic is the same one that recurs across states. A recurring account carries a fixed reporting burden that does not shrink with low volume; the trip permit carries a marginal cost that does not shrink with frequency. Which is cheaper is a question about the number of qualifying trips, and it is worth working out before the first one rather than after.
Maine issues fuel-use identification decals for two different kinds of operation, and it gives them different expiry dates. That is a small fact with a real failure mode attached.
29-A M.R.S. §525(6)(A), read September 2, 2026, provides: “A fuel use identification decal issued pursuant to the International Fuel Tax Agreement expires on December 31st. A fuel use identification decal issued for intrastate operation expires on June 30th.”
So the interstate decal runs on a calendar year and the intrastate decal runs to the end of June. A carrier holding both is managing two renewal dates six months apart, on decals that look substantially alike on the windscreen.
The predictable error is assuming a single December renewal covers everything and running an expired intrastate decal through the first half of the following year. The second predictable error is the reverse — renewing in June and assuming the interstate decal moved with it.
That Maine issues an intrastate decal at all is itself worth noting, because it means the fuel-use layer here is not exclusively an interstate phenomenon. An operation that never leaves the state can still be inside a decal regime, on the strength of the four limbs set out above.
Enforcement is assigned in the same section to “A state police officer or any member of the Department of Public Safety designated by the Commissioner of Public Safety”, which is a different body from the Secretary of State office that issues the credential.
The practical instruction is unglamorous: put both dates in the same calendar, and check which decal is which before assuming one covers the other.
Apportioned registration in Maine is implemented by statute and priced in it, which makes the costs unusually easy to check.
29-A M.R.S. §531 provides that “The Secretary of State shall implement the International Registration Plan”, and adds at subsection 2 that “The plan agreement prevails if in conflict with other laws or rules regarding registration of vehicles”. That is a genuine subordination of state law to the agreement on registration questions, and it is why the statute states no weight threshold of its own — subsection 3 delegates that to the plan.
The fees sit in the next section. A cab card is five dollars each. A seventy-two hour trip permit is twenty-five dollars per vehicle. An unladen weight permit is twenty-five dollars and is valid for thirty days. Temporary registration runs up to forty-five days, one per vehicle per year.
The enforcement figure is the one to note before it is needed: a minimum fine of five hundred dollars for failing to comply with the plan’s registration requirements. It is a floor rather than a ceiling, and it is set in the statute rather than left to a schedule.
The shape those numbers make is a state that has priced short-term compliance cheaply and non-compliance expensively. Twenty-five dollars for three days of legal operation against a five-hundred-dollar minimum for running without the credential is a deliberate gap, and it is aimed squarely at the operation that takes an occasional out-of-state load and does not want the annual apparatus.
The unladen weight permit is worth knowing about separately, because it solves a specific problem: moving a power unit empty, for repositioning or repair, without registering it for loaded operation. Twenty-five dollars for thirty days is a cheap answer to a question that otherwise looks expensive.
Both apportioned registration and the fuel-use side run through the Secretary of State’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles, so the correspondence stays with one office rather than splitting across departments as it does in several neighbouring states.
Maine’s own contribution to interstate carrier registration is an authorization rather than a command, and reading it that way explains why the binding figure is federal.
29-A M.R.S. §551(1), read at source on September 2, 2026, provides: “The Secretary of State, acting with the concurrence of the Commissioner of Transportation and the Commissioner of Public Safety, may enter into a multistate agreement or federal program for the administration of this subchapter. The Secretary of State may participate in the Unified Carrier Registration System created under the federal Unified Carrier Registration Act of 2005 authorized in PL 109-59.”
Subsection 4 carries the money power in the same permissive form: the Secretary of State “may collect and distribute fees for other participating jurisdictions and receive fees from those jurisdictions collected on behalf of this State”, and “may collect, distribute and receive fees pursuant to the requirements of the federal Unified Carrier Registration Act of 2005 authorized by PL 109-59.” Subsection 5 adds rulemaking, again with the two commissioners concurring.
Nothing in any of that sets a rate or imposes a duty on a carrier. Maine authorizes itself to take part; the obligation and the number both come from federal law. Maine does take part — it appears on the plan’s own participating states list, read September 2, 2026.
The figure, then. A one or two power unit venture files in the rung the table labels B1 and describes by a fleet count of “0-2”. Registration year 2026 prices that rung at $46.00 for the entity, with $46.00 repeated for a broker or leasing company.
One structural detail in that rule will outlive anyone’s memory of it. Section 367.30 is removed, 367.40 becomes 367.30, 367.50 becomes 367.40, and a new 367.50 is added — so the citation “49 CFR 367.50” names the lower table today and the higher one from October, unchanged in appearance. The redesignated older table also gains a closing year it did not previously carry.
Maine levies no ton-mile, weight-distance or highway-use tax on a motor carrier. That is a negative, and the value of a negative depends entirely on the size of the denominator behind it.
The denominator here is the full chapter list of the taxation title, read on September 2, 2026. Its motor fuel part contains exactly these chapters: gasoline tax; gasoline road tax, repealed; use fuel tax; taxation of motor fuels consumed by interstate buses; special fuel tax act; trust funds; regional fuel tax agreement and its successor chapter, both repealed; and indexing of motor fuel tax rates.
That list was then swept for the words highway, mile, weight, carrier and truck across the whole title chapter listing, and the only matches were sales and use tax chapters. There is no chapter in the taxation title that levies a charge on distance traveled or weight carried.
Two of the entries in that list are themselves repealed, which is consistent with the pattern elsewhere in Maine: the state has retired more transport-related instruments than it has enacted in recent decades, and the retired headings survive in the indexes.
State the scope honestly. This is a chapter-level sweep of the taxation title rather than a section-by-section read of every chapter in it. A charge buried inside a chapter whose heading does not suggest it would not be caught by this method, and that limitation is part of the finding rather than a footnote to it.
What Maine does charge a carrier is set out elsewhere on this page: filing fees, decals, cab cards, trip permits, overlimit permits and the federal registration fee it collects. None of those is a tax on operation, and the difference matters when a founder is comparing states on total cost.
Maine’s oversize and overweight regime is priced as a band rather than a fixed figure, and it carries one genuine condition that a founder needs to know before quoting an oversize move.
29-A M.R.S. §2382(1), read September 2, 2026, provides: “The Secretary of State, acting under guidelines and advice of the Commissioner of Transportation, may grant permits to move nondivisible objects having a length, width, height or weight greater than specified in this Title over a way or bridge maintained by the Department of Transportation.”
Note the word nondivisible. The permit is for objects that cannot be broken down, which excludes a heavy load of divisible freight from the regime entirely — a distinction that decides whether an overweight permit is even the right instrument for a given movement.
The price is a band with both ends set in statute. Subsection 2 provides that the Secretary of State “may set the fee for single trip permits, at not less than $6, nor more than $30, based on weight, height, length and width”, and separately allows fees for multiple trip and long-term overweight permits to be implemented by rule once set by the Commissioner of Transportation.
The condition is at subsection 4, and it is one sentence: “A vehicle granted a permit for excess weight must first be registered for the maximum gross vehicle weight allowed for that vehicle.” Registration for the maximum allowed weight is a condition of the excess weight permit.
State that for what it is. It is a condition on a permit, not a sequence for starting a business. Maine is not telling a new carrier to do one thing and then a second thing; it is saying that a permit for excess weight rests on a registration fact being true. Turning that into a numbered pathway would assert an order Maine has not enacted, and this page does not.
Two further terms round out the regime. Long-term permits of up to one year are available for trucks, truck tractors, semitrailers, heavy duty recovery vehicles and one class of special mobile equipment, with the schedule set by rule. And a permit is “limited to the particular vehicle or object to be moved, the trailer or semitrailer hauling the overlimit object and particular ways and bridges” — it is not a general authorization, and it does not travel with a different vehicle. County commissioners and municipal officers may grant permits for a reasonable fee over ways and bridges they maintain.
The federal safety-fitness framework is the defining first-year experience of a carrier, and whether it reaches a Maine intrastate operation is decided by a rule chapter with an unusual layout. Reading that chapter the obvious way produces the wrong answer.
The chapter’s part list sits in two sections. One adopts a group of federal parts without state amendments; the next adopts a further group with state amendments and then sets out those amendments in detail. A reader enumerating those two sections finds no mention of the safety-fitness part anywhere, and would reasonably conclude Maine does not adopt it.
It does. A separate section of the same chapter, sitting after the part list, is one sentence long and is the entire section: the Bureau of the Maine State Police “hereby adopts and incorporates by reference into this Chapter Title 49, PART 385 of the Code of Federal Regulations, AS AMENDED.” The adoption is rolling — “as amended” — and no edition date appears anywhere in the chapter.
That is the mirror image of the structural hazard on the North Dakota page. There, an adoption list is followed by an unnumbered paragraph that switches parts of it off. Here, an adoption list is followed by a separate section that switches something on. In both states, enumerating the list and stopping produces the opposite of the truth.
The adoption is within power. The enabling statute enumerates the parts the bureau may incorporate, and the safety-fitness part is among them. The financial responsibility part is not on that enabling list, which is why Maine has no adoption of it — a negative that follows from the enabling statute rather than from an omission in the rule.
Intrastate reach is explicit in the chapter’s applicability section, which applies the regulation to any interstate or intrastate common, contract and private motor carrier transporting passengers or property in Maine, with a vehicle floor at ten thousand and one pounds gross vehicle weight rating or gross combination weight rating, or the corresponding actual weights, whichever is greater.
One asymmetry inside the chapter is worth carrying because it is counter-intuitive. An intrastate cutout removes vehicles in the ten thousand to twenty-six thousand pound band from two federal registration and marking sections — but it does not touch the safety-fitness part. A carrier in that band can therefore sit inside the safety-fitness framework while being outside the federal rule that would ordinarily identify it. The chapter’s amendment history runs to two 2015 filings and carries no repeal marker.
Several states compel a purely intrastate carrier to hold a federal identification number. Maine writes the provision as an authorization, and the difference is visible in two words.
29-A M.R.S. §555-A provides: “The bureau may require a motor carrier to have and display a United States Department of Transportation census number. The bureau may adopt rules to administer this section.” The verb is may in both sentences.
That is a delegation rather than a duty. What binds a particular carrier depends on what the bureau has required by rule, not on the face of the statute — so the statute alone cannot answer the question for an individual operation.
The implementing rule’s own definition of a commercial motor vehicle is set at a gross vehicle weight, rating or registered gross weight exceeding twenty-six thousand pounds, or a combination exceeding that figure, or a vehicle designed to carry more than eight passengers for compensation. That definition is carried from earlier project research rather than re-read on September 2, 2026, and it is flagged as such rather than presented as a fresh read.
There is a further cutout in the safety rule chapter pointing the same way: intrastate vehicles in the ten thousand to twenty-six thousand pound band that are neither buses nor hazardous materials carriers are exempt from the two federal sections that require a number and vehicle marking. Maine’s own rule pulls that band out of the identification requirement rather than into it.
For a light intrastate operation the honest summary is therefore conditional rather than definitive: the statute permits the requirement, the implementing definitions read above the band, and the safety rule exempts the band from the federal marking sections. A carrier planning interstate work is in an entirely different position, because the federal requirement reaches it on federal terms regardless of what Maine has or has not required.
Enforcement of the chapter, separately, sits with the Bureau of State Police.
Across everything read for this page, Maine imposes exactly one condition that makes one thing turn on another for a for-hire vehicle, and it belongs to registration rather than to authority.
29-A M.R.S. §1611(1) provides: “The Secretary of State may not register any motor vehicle for rent, lease, hire or livery and a person may not operate or cause to be operated on any public way in the State such a motor vehicle until the owner or owners of that vehicle procure insurance or a bond covering the operation of that vehicle.”
The sentence does two things at once, which is why it is worth quoting rather than summarizing. It bars the registration until cover is procured, and independently it bars operation until cover is procured. Those are two separate prohibitions on two separate actors.
The obligation is then continuing rather than a one-time gate. Subsection 3 requires the owner to “maintain at all times the required amount of insurance or bond during the term of the vehicle’s registration”, and directs the Secretary of State to “immediately suspend or revoke” the registration certificate and plates of a vehicle for which the required cover is not maintained.
It also puts a duty on the insurer that is worth planning around at renewal time: “the insurance provider must provide at least 30 days’ notice of cancellation of insurance to the Secretary of State.” Thirty days is the notice period, and it runs to the state rather than only to the insured.
That is the whole of Maine’s ordering. Nothing sequences the repealed authority provisions against anything, because there is nothing left of them. Nothing sequences the interstate registration statute, which is permissive authority to the Secretary of State and imposes no order on anyone. Nothing sequences apportioned registration or fuel-use licensing against each other — those sections impose fees and penalties, not an order.
So a first-year Maine carrier is working through a set of independent obligations plus one real condition, in a state whose office turnaround is the dominant variable in the timeline. Treating the obligations as parallel is not a shortcut here; it is what the statutes actually permit.
Two subjects are worked out in full on our Maine hot shot page rather than duplicated here, and one field on this page is deliberately blank.
The first is what the repeal of the operating authority section actually leaves behind for a general freight carrier, and how the state regulates the class it no longer licenses. The second is the insurance figures Maine writes for a for-hire vehicle, which are stated and analyzed there with the statutory text behind them.
The blank is deliberate: this cell records the insurance amounts field as unverified for its own purposes, and does not state a figure it has not read at source today. Where a number is not read, no number appears.
The boundaries elsewhere are printed where they occur. The commercial vehicle definition in the identification rule is carried from earlier project research rather than re-read on September 2, 2026. The taxation title negative is a chapter-level sweep rather than a section-by-section read. The expedited service fee is acknowledged by statute and priced by rule, and this page supplies no amount for it.
One date belongs in a diary rather than a file. The national bracket charges go up on October 1, 2026, and since the Maine statute is permissive and fixes no amount, they go up here with no Maine action whatsoever. From that morning, the citation proving today’s lower amount points at the higher one instead.
Everything else on this page was read at primary source on September 2, 2026.
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 Maine 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 Maine 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.
The Secretary of State publishes its own current figure: “Corporate filing processing time is currently 40-55 business days.” Read September 2, 2026. The same page adds that “Due to the high volume of expedited filing requests, there may be a delay in processing.” In wall-clock terms that is roughly eight to eleven weeks, before state holidays.
The certificate of formation is $175 under 31 M.R.S. §1680, and the annual report is $85 for a Maine company or $150 for a foreign one. A late annual report adds $50 to the filing fee, and failure to file carries a further $150 penalty capped at $600 regardless of how many reports were missed or how long the delinquency ran.
Between January 1 and June 1, and the first one falls in the year after the year of formation. 31 M.R.S. §1665(3) sets the window for both the first report and subsequent ones. A company formed in, say, March has no annual report obligation at all in its first calendar year.
Yes. 31 M.R.S. §1661 reads in its entirety: “A limited liability company must have and continuously maintain a registered agent in this State as defined by Title 5, section 102, subsection 27.” Its section history carries no repeal marker. The word “continuously” makes it a state of affairs rather than a filing event, so a gap between agents is a breach.
Because the heading outlived the section. 29-A M.R.S. §552 is headed “Operating authority license required”, and its entire body, read at source on September 2, 2026, is “(REPEALED)”, with a section history ending “PL 2009, c. 598, §9 (RP)”. A title block proves you have the right document; only a repeal marker answers whether it operates.
No such chapter exists in the taxation title as read on September 2, 2026. Its motor fuel part contains gasoline, use fuel, interstate bus, special fuel, trust fund and indexing chapters, two of them repealed, and a keyword sweep of the title chapter listing for highway, mile, weight, carrier and truck returned only sales and use tax matches. The sweep is chapter-level rather than section-by-section.
It can, on the axle limb. 29-A M.R.S. §525(1)(D) requires a fuel-use reporting account for a vehicle that “Has 3 or more axles on the power unit regardless of gross weight.” The four limbs are alternatives, so satisfying any one of them brings the vehicle in — and that one carries no weight floor at all.
Because the statute sets two different dates. 29-A M.R.S. §525(6)(A): “A fuel use identification decal issued pursuant to the International Fuel Tax Agreement expires on December 31st. A fuel use identification decal issued for intrastate operation expires on June 30th.” A carrier holding both is managing two renewals six months apart.
A cab card is $5 each, a seventy-two hour trip permit is $25 per vehicle, an unladen weight permit is $25 and valid 30 days, and temporary registration runs up to 45 days with one per vehicle per year. The statute also sets a minimum fine of $500 for failing to comply with the plan’s registration requirements. Read September 2, 2026.
A single trip permit is set “at not less than $6, nor more than $30, based on weight, height, length and width” under 29-A M.R.S. §2382(2). Multiple trip and long-term overweight fees are implemented by rule rather than fixed in statute. The permit covers nondivisible objects, and it is limited to a particular vehicle, object, hauling trailer and named ways and bridges.
Yes, and the statute is one sentence: “A vehicle granted a permit for excess weight must first be registered for the maximum gross vehicle weight allowed for that vehicle.” That is a condition on the permit, not a sequence for starting a business, and this page reports it as a condition.
Yes, and the adoption is easy to miss. The chapter’s part list does not mention Part 385 anywhere, but a separate one-sentence section adopts it — the Bureau of the Maine State Police “hereby adopts and incorporates by reference into this Chapter Title 49, PART 385 of the Code of Federal Regulations, AS AMENDED.” The adoption is rolling and carries no edition date, and the chapter applies to intrastate carriage from 10,001 pounds.
The statute permits rather than commands. 29-A M.R.S. §555-A provides that “The bureau may require a motor carrier to have and display a United States Department of Transportation census number”, and may adopt rules to administer it. Separately, the safety rule chapter exempts intrastate vehicles in the 10,000 to 26,000 pound band that are neither buses nor hazardous materials carriers from the two federal number and marking sections.
One condition, and it belongs to registration. 29-A M.R.S. §1611(1) bars the Secretary of State from registering a for-hire vehicle, and separately bars anyone from operating it, until the owner procures insurance or a bond. Cover must then be maintained throughout the registration term, and the provider must give the state at least 30 days’ notice of cancellation. Nothing else read imposes an order.
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.
