Motor carrier classes by state
Michigan splits one startup across three departments and then gives two of them nearly identical vocabulary. The Secretary of State runs apportioned registration, the Department of Treasury runs the fuel tax, and the State Police issue the operating credential — while the statute that creates that credential still names a fourth body that has not administered it since 2015. Almost nothing about this state layer is expensive. Most of what it costs a new venture is the time spent finding out who is actually holding each piece.
A new venture is an authority applicant with no operating history, and the federal part of that first year is the same everywhere. This page is about the Michigan part. Every figure below was read at primary source on September 2, 2026 and carries the date it was read, because two of them are scheduled to change — one twenty-nine days later, and one a little over a year after that, in the opposite direction.
Michigan is a cheap state to form a business in and a confusing one to be regulated by. The formation fee is fifty dollars and a class of applicants pays nothing. The annual filing is one document that does two jobs. The fuel tax has an axle limb with no weight in it and then removes anyone who never leaves the state. And the rule chapter that governs motor carriers still carries part headings for regimes that were rescinded in their entirety eight years ago.
Nothing on this page is a sequence. Michigan writes several genuine conditions — a credential before operation, fees paid before operation, a national registration renewed by a fixed date to keep a state credential alive — and each is stated here as the condition its statute states. That is not the same as the state imposing an order on the steps of starting a carrier, and we do not assert one.
A Michigan file is three agencies deep and the underwriting questions are not the same at each one.
Send the equipment, the commodity and whether the work stays inside Michigan, and we will sort which of these actually touch you.
The price of entry here is set in statute rather than by an agency schedule, which is unusual and useful — it means the figure cannot move without a bill.
MCL 450.5101(1)(b) reads, in full: “Articles of organization, $50.00.” The same subsection prices a name reservation at $25.00. Both were read on September 2, 2026, and the section carries a 2023 amendment as its most recent change.
The provision most likely to be missed sits further down the same section. Subsections (7) through (10) waive the articles-of-organization fee where a majority of the initial membership interests are held by veterans. A veteran-owned startup that pays fifty dollars has paid something the statute did not require, and no agency will refund it on its own initiative.
The agency schedule agrees with the statute. The Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs publishes a filing fees document whose limited liability company block lists form 700, Articles of Organization, at $50, and form 540, Application for Reservation of Name, at $25.
One caution about reading that document. The corporations block on its first page carries an almost identical layout, and the name-reservation fee there is $10, not $25. Cross-applying a figure from the corporation block to a limited liability company gets the wrong number for the right-looking row.
Michigan publishes an expedited service ladder with six rows, and the rows are not simply a speed scale. Half of them turn on whether the document creates an entity or concerns one that already exists, and a new venture is on the cheaper side of that split.
The agency schedule prints the ladder inside the limited liability company block, keyed to form 272, the Expedited Service Request Form: one hour, same day, $1000.00; two hour, same day, $500.00; same day for any existing entity documents, $200.00; same day for formation or qualification documents, $100.00; twenty-four hours for any existing entity documents, $100.00; and twenty-four hours for formation or qualification documents, $50.00. The schedule adds that these “are in addition to the filing fee of the document.”
For a startup, then, the practical ladder is short: $50 buys a twenty-four-hour turn on the formation itself, and $100 buys the same day. The $200 and the upper $100 row are for documents filed later in the entity’s life, and quoting either as the price of accelerating a formation overstates it.
There is a statutory twin to that table, and it disagrees with the schedule about scope. The expedited-service provision in the Business Corporation Act sets the identical six amounts, but its two “existing entity” limbs say on their face that they concern a domestic corporation or a qualified foreign corporation. The limited liability company act’s own fee section was read in full, subsection by subsection, and contains no expedited service fee at all. The agency nevertheless prints the whole ladder inside its limited liability company block, and that is what a filer is charged, so the schedule is what this page reports.
Two things the schedule does not tell you are worth naming. There is no published cutoff time — the statutory provision expressly leaves the deadline to the department, and the schedule prints none, so a same-day request made late in the afternoon has no published rule to point at. And there is no standard turnaround at all. Four separate agency pages covering the corporations division, limited liability companies, mail filing and frequently asked questions were fetched and searched, and none of them contains a processing time, a business-day estimate or the word expedited outside the fee schedule itself.
The term of art here is resident agent, not registered agent, and Michigan asks for two things rather than one. A packet that supplies only an agent has supplied half of what the statute requires.
MCL 450.4207(1) provides that every domestic and authorized foreign limited liability company “shall have and continuously maintain in this state both of the following: (a) A registered office that may, but need not be, the same as its place of business. (b) A resident agent.”
The same subsection then constrains who the agent can be by reference to the office. An individual agent must be “an individual resident in this state whose business office or residence is identical with the registered office”, and a corporate or company agent must have “a business office identical with the registered office”. The registered office is not a mailing convenience; it is the address the agent has to match.
Subsection (2) states what the appointment does: “The resident agent appointed by a limited liability company is an agent of the company upon whom any process, notice, or demand required or permitted by law to be served upon the company may be served.”
Subsection (4) supplies the consequence of letting it lapse, and it is the reason the word “continuously” in subsection (1) matters. If a company fails to appoint or maintain an agent, or the agent cannot be found or served through the exercise of reasonable diligence, service of process may be made by delivering or mailing by registered mail to the administrator. In plain terms, a lapsed agent does not stop a lawsuit; it moves the delivery address to a state office and away from you.
The section was last amended in 2002 and carries no repeal marker.
New venture pricing turns on the operation, not on how many agencies are involved in it.
Send the equipment list, the radius, the commodity and whether any load leaves Michigan, and we will work the state-specific pieces into the submission.
Most states run a registered agent record and an annual report as two separate instruments. Michigan merges them, which is why the annual obligation is called a statement rather than a report and why the thing it contains is an address rather than a set of accounts.
MCL 450.4207(3) provides that a limited liability company “shall file with the administrator an annual statement executed as provided in section 103 containing the name of its resident agent and the address of its registered office in this state. The statement shall be filed not later than February 15 of each year, except that a limited liability company formed after September 30 or a foreign limited liability company authorized to transact business in this state after September 30 need not file a statement on the February 15 immediately succeeding its formation or authorization.”
Two operational facts fall out of that sentence, and both matter to a venture that is choosing when to form.
First, the due date is a fixed calendar date, not an anniversary. February 15 is February 15 whether the company was created in January or in August, so a mid-year formation gets a shorter first year of good standing than a January one.
Second, there is a genuine grace built into the exception, and its edge is September 30. A company formed on September 29 owes a statement the following February 15. A company formed on October 1 does not — its first statement is due more than sixteen months after formation. For a venture with flexibility about its start date, that is a real difference, and it is written into the statute rather than being an agency practice.
Scheduled fee changes usually go one way. This one does not, and the whole change is written into the fee provision itself rather than sitting in a session law you would have to go looking for.
MCL 450.5101(1)(g) reads, verbatim: “Annual statement of resident agent and registered office, $15.00 if paid after September 30, 2027. Through September 30, 2027, the fee is $25.00.”
So the annual statement described in the previous section costs $25.00 today, on September 2, 2026, and $15.00 for anything paid after September 30, 2027. Both figures are correct for their own period, and a page carrying only one of them is wrong on one side of that date.
The practical effect is small in dollars and worth knowing anyway. A venture forming now will file its first statement by February 15, 2027 at $25.00 and its second by February 15, 2028 at $15.00. Nothing is gained by delay — the earlier filing is the one that keeps the company in good standing — but a budget built on $25.00 recurring indefinitely is overstated from late 2027 onward.
We flag the direction because it is unusual. Almost every other dated figure on this network of pages moves upward, including the national registration fee described further down, which rises on October 1, 2026. Two scheduled changes, thirteen months apart, pointing opposite ways.
A Michigan startup deals with three different state organizations for three different things, and none of them can answer for the others. Knowing which is which saves more time than any single fee on this page saves money.
Apportioned registration sits with the Secretary of State. The state’s own registration manual for the plan is published under that office’s industry services pages, and its desk is reached there.
The fuel tax sits with the Department of Treasury. Its fuel tax agreement material is published under the business taxes section, and the tax statute described later on this page defines “department” as the department of treasury in terms.
The operating credential sits with the Michigan State Police. Its Commercial Vehicle Enforcement Division states its own role: “The Regulatory and Credentialing Section of the Michigan State Police, Commercial Vehicle Enforcement Division (MSP/CVED) issues intrastate operating authority to for-hire motor carriers in accordance with the Motor Carrier Act and administers the Unified Carrier Registration (UCR) program for interstate motor carriers in accordance with the UCR Act and Agreement.” Read on the division’s own regulatory and credentialing page on September 2, 2026.
Here is where a reader gets lost. The Motor Carrier Act itself defines “commission” as the Michigan public service commission, and every operative sentence about the credential is written in terms of what the commission shall do. The commission is not the body a carrier deals with. The act’s definitional section carries a compiler’s note recording that the powers and duties under the Motor Carrier Act were transferred to the Michigan State Police by executive reorganization order in 2015. The statutory actor and the operating agency diverged; the requirement did not.
The same vestige shows up in the rule numbers. The motor carrier rules are numbered in the R 460 series, which is a public service commission range, but the published chapter identifies its author as the Department of State Police, Commercial Vehicle Enforcement Division, acting under the Motor Carrier Act and the 2015 reorganization order. Reading the rule prefix as an agency assignment produces the wrong department.
The threshold for apportioned registration is usually described as a weight, and for most equipment that description is adequate. It is not complete, and the incomplete part is exactly the part that catches a light three-axle combination.
The Michigan registration manual, at revision 09/2025, reserves the term apportionable vehicle for a power unit that is used or intended for use in two or more member jurisdictions, that carries persons for hire or is built or kept mainly for hauling property, and that then satisfies one of three tests. Its own words for those tests: “has two Axles and a gross Vehicle weight or registered gross Vehicle weight in excess of 26,000 pounds (11,793.401 kilograms)”; “has three or more Axles, regardless of weight”; or “is used in combination, when the gross Vehicle weight of such combination exceeds 26,000 pounds”.
The limbs are alternatives. The first and third are weight tests at 26,000 pounds. The second is not a weight test at all — a three-axle power unit is an apportionable vehicle on the axle count alone, whatever it scales.
The manual then states the corollary as an option rather than an exemption: vehicles or combinations with a gross vehicle weight of 26,000 pounds or less, and two-axle vehicles, “may be proportionally registered at the option of the registrant.” A light two-axle operator can choose apportioned registration; a three-axle operator has passed the definition without choosing anything.
One cross-document discrepancy is worth recording rather than smoothing, because both documents are Michigan primary sources. The registration manual gives the metric equivalent of 26,000 pounds as 11,793.401 kilograms. The fuel tax statute discussed in the next section gives it as 11,797 kilograms. The pounds figure is the same in both and is the one to work from; the metric conversions disagree by about four kilograms and nothing in either document reconciles them.
Michigan runs a motor carrier fuel tax under its own act, and the definition that decides who is inside it does two surprising things in quick succession. It reaches down below any weight threshold on one limb, and then it lifts out an entire class of operator on a test that has nothing to do with size.
MCL 207.211(l) defines a qualified commercial motor vehicle, subject to the following subdivision, as a motor vehicle used, designed, or maintained for transportation of persons or property and one of the following: “(i) Having 3 or more axles regardless of weight. (ii) Having 2 axles and a gross vehicle weight or registered gross vehicle weight exceeding 26,000 pounds or 11,797 kilograms. (iii) Is used in a combination of vehicles, if the weight of that combination exceeds 26,000 pounds or 11,797 kilograms gross vehicle or registered gross vehicle weight.”
Read the first limb on its own. Three axles, regardless of weight. A small three-axle unit well under twenty-six thousand pounds is a qualified commercial motor vehicle for this tax on axle count alone, and an operator who has checked the scale and stopped has answered only two of the three limbs.
Then subdivision (m) takes most of that back for a purely Michigan operation. A qualified commercial motor vehicle “does not include a recreational vehicle, a road tractor, truck, or truck tractor used exclusively in this state”. The exclusion turns on where the vehicle works, not on what it weighs.
The definition of who owes the tax points the same way. Subdivision (g) defines a motor carrier as a person who operates a qualified commercial motor vehicle on a Michigan public road “and at least 1 other state or Canadian province”, or a person operating one in Michigan who is licensed under the fuel tax agreement. Both limbs require something beyond Michigan.
Put together, this is an interstate instrument wearing a definition broad enough to look like an intrastate one. A three-axle unit that never crosses a state line is described by the axle limb and then removed by the exclusive-use exclusion. A three-axle unit that crosses once is inside on both counts, at any weight. The section carries a 2024 amendment effective April 2, 2025 as its most recent change.
If the previous section put you inside the fuel tax, this one is the filing rhythm, and it belongs to neither of the agencies that hold your other credentials.
MCL 207.212(1) provides that “A motor carrier licensed under this act shall file a return and pay the tax due quarterly to the department on or before the last day of January, April, July, and October of each year on a form prescribed and furnished by the department.” The department here is the Department of Treasury, defined as such in the act’s own definitions.
Four dates, all month-ends, and none of them lines up with the February 15 statement deadline described earlier or with the national registration year that opens on October 1. A Michigan operator running interstate has at least three separate recurring calendars, held by three separate offices.
One hedge belongs on the rate rather than the schedule, and we state it because quoting the wrong figure here is easy. The same subsection contains a cents-per-gallon rate, and that rate has been superseded since January 1, 2017 by a later subsection which ties the rate to the general motor fuel tax provisions instead. The figure printed inside subsection (1) is therefore not the operative rate, and this page does not state a per-gallon amount. Anyone quoting one should take it from the current rate provision the act points to, not from the sentence that sets the filing dates.
That is a small example of a general rule worth carrying into any state file: a live section can contain a dead number, and the death is recorded somewhere else in the same act.
Michigan participates in the national registration for interstate carriers; that was read on the plan’s own participating states list on September 2, 2026, and the State Police division quoted earlier states in its own words that it administers the program for interstate motor carriers.
Michigan does not set the fee and does not restate the bracket schedule in its own law. The Michigan record contains the consequence of not registering and none of the arithmetic of registering, which is why the figures below are attributed to their federal sources rather than to a Michigan instrument.
Michigan attaches a consequence to letting the registration lapse that most states do not, and it reaches the state credential rather than the federal one. That provision, and what it does to intrastate authority, is set out on our Michigan hot shot page rather than repeated here.
Beyond the credential itself, Michigan issues something physical for each vehicle, and there is a divergence between the statute and the rules about who has to carry it.
The statute requires the issuing body to furnish a decal and a cab card for each vehicle an intrastate-only motor carrier of general commodities is authorized to operate, in addition to the ordinary registration plates. The cab card is carried in the vehicle it was issued for; the decal is attached to a conspicuous location on that vehicle as directed.
The rules add the operational detail. Rule 460.18501 provides that on issuance of a certificate of authority and payment of the appropriate fees an identification decal is issued for each self-propelled motor vehicle covered by the certificate, that the decal “shall expire automatically on December 31 of the year for which it was issued, unless the date of expiration is extended by the department”, and that a replacement decal costs $5.00. Rule 460.18502 does the same for cab cards: one per self-propelled vehicle, carried with the vehicle so it can be easily inspected, with a $5.00 replacement fee.
Now the divergence. Each of those two rules ends with the same sentence: “This rule does not apply to a UCR motor carrier of general commodities.” The statute contains no such exception. A carrier that is also registered under the national program — which is to say, one that runs interstate as well — is placed outside the per-vehicle decal and cab card regime by rule rather than by statute.
The practical reading for a new venture is that the decal question is decided by whether the operation is purely intrastate, and that the answer is in the rules rather than in the act. Both rules were amended in 2018 and both remain live; they sit in a chapter where a good deal else does not, which is the subject of the next section.
This is a reading hazard rather than a requirement, and it costs a researcher real time. The published motor carrier rule chapter still carries part headings for regimes that no longer have any content underneath them.
The part covering emergency-temporary and temporary authority is the one a new venture is most likely to go looking for, because temporary authority is exactly what an operator wants when a contract starts before a credential arrives. The heading survives in the published chapter. Every rule under it does not: rules 460.18901 through 460.18904, 460.18906, 460.18907, and 460.18909 through 460.18912 all read “Rescinded”, each with a 2018 history line. There is no rule 460.18905 and no 460.18908. Ten rescinded rules, one surviving heading, and nothing there to apply for.
The same pattern repeats immediately after it. The part covering collective rate making is rescinded across its entire run, rules 460.19001 through 460.19022.
The lesson generalizes, and it is the reason this section exists on a page about starting a business. A part heading in a published administrative code is a table-of-contents artefact. It survives the rescission of everything beneath it, and a search that matches on headings will return a regime that no longer exists. The disposition line under the rule number is the thing to read, and the history line beside it is the date it happened.
The rules described in the previous section are the counter-example and the reason this is worth checking rather than assuming. In the same chapter, on either side of these rescinded parts, the decal and cab card rules are live, amended in 2018 rather than removed in 2018.
One requirement in the application section deserves separate treatment because it is the single place where the Michigan scheme and the fact of being new pull against each other, and nothing we read resolves it.
MCL 476.3(1) requires an application for a certificate of authority to be on a prescribed form, signed by the owner or an officer, “stating the ownership and condition of the equipment and physical property of the applicant proposed to be used, that the vehicles of the applicant have passed an inspection within the immediately preceding 12 months under the motor carrier safety act of 1963, 1963 PA 181, MCL 480.11 to 480.25, and shall contain other information as the commission requires.”
Read literally, that asks a new venture to state something about the twelve months before its application concerning vehicles it may have owned for a week. A truck bought new has not passed an inspection in the preceding twelve months because there were no preceding twelve months to pass one in. A truck bought used may have been inspected in someone else’s hands, which satisfies the words on their face but not obviously their purpose.
We record that as read rather than smoothing it over, because the honest answer is that nothing we opened resolves it — not the section, not the neighbouring sections, and not the agency’s own published approval checklist, which lists business filings, worker’s compensation evidence, insurance documents and fees without addressing how a first-time applicant meets a lookback.
The same subsection gives the reviewing body a discretionary second look that is worth knowing about for a different reason. It may request supplemental information about accident records and citations issued to the applicant or its drivers within the immediately preceding twelve months “when that information is considered necessary to make findings regarding the fitness of the applicant.” For a genuinely new entity there is nothing to produce; for principals with history at another operation, there may be.
Michigan writes more genuine conditioning than most states in this network, including one that runs on a calendar date and one that makes a federal registration a survival requirement for a state credential. That makes it exactly the place where a numbered list would be tempting and wrong.
The first is stated in the language of order and is a condition on operating rather than a step in a procedure. MCL 476.1 provides that a motor carrier of general commodities “shall not operate upon any public highway without first having obtained a certificate of authority from the commission.”
The second is about money and reaches every fee in the act at once. MCL 478.2(4): “A motor carrier shall not operate any motor vehicle upon or over the highways of this state, except as otherwise provided in this act, while any of the fees imposed by this act remain unpaid.” One unpaid item, whatever it is, is enough.
The third is the unusual one and it has a date in it. MCL 478.2(2) provides that the commission “shall revoke the intrastate authority of a UCR carrier that fails to renew its annual UCR registration by January 1.” That is a federal registration operating as a survival condition of a state credential, and the analysis of what it does downstream is on our Michigan hot shot page rather than here.
Each of those is a condition the statute states, and we state them as conditions. None of them says which of the other startup tasks comes first. Nothing read tells a new venture to form the entity before securing insurance, or to pay fees before filing an application, or to do any of these in any particular order relative to the others. Presenting them as steps one through three would assert a sequence the act does not impose, and it would be wrong in the specific sense that doing them in another order does not make any of them defective.
The one date that genuinely constrains planning is January 1, and it constrains renewal rather than entry.
Three large parts of the Michigan picture are handled in detail on our Michigan hot shot page, and repeating them here would add length without adding anything a reader could use.
The certificate of authority itself — who needs one, what the statute makes of a for-hire operation with no weight floor, the application fee, the renewal fee and the annual per-vehicle administration fee — is set out there, together with the findings the issuing body must make before granting it.
So is the insurance and bond provision, including the delegated rulemaking power that carries no dollar figure of its own, and the worker’s disability compensation condition that attaches to the same section and has to be demonstrated at initial application. And so is the weight cutout in the safety adoption, which is the provision that decides how much of the federal corpus reaches a light intrastate unit.
The Michigan hot shot cell carries all three with the sections quoted in full. If you are working out what Michigan requires of you before you begin, that is the page to read next.
What this page covers is everything around that credential: forming the company, the agent and the statement that keeps it alive, which office holds which program, apportioned registration, the fuel tax, the national registration Michigan collects but does not price, the per-vehicle credentials, and the parts of the rule chapter that no longer contain anything.
Two figures above have a known change date and one calendar date constrains a renewal. Everything else was read on September 2, 2026 with no scheduled change found in the text read.
October 1, 2026 is the near one. The national registration bracket B1 rises from $46.00 to $55.00 for registration year 2027 and subsequent years, and the federal section number holding the current table is redesignated on the same day. A citation copied today will still resolve in November and will resolve to a different figure.
October 1, 2027 is the far one, and it moves the other way. Michigan’s annual statement fee falls from $25.00 to $15.00 for anything paid after September 30, 2027, by the terms of the fee provision itself.
January 1 is the recurring one. A carrier that has not renewed its national registration by that date loses its intrastate authority by statute, and the state credential’s own renewal window runs from October 1 to December 1 each year.
February 15 is the annual one, subject to the September 30 formation exception described earlier.
The rest of the figures here were taken from their own sources on September 2, 2026 and carried no change date in the text we saw. We report that as an observation about the documents rather than as a promise about the future.
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 Michigan 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 Michigan 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.
Fifty dollars. MCL 450.5101(1)(b) states it in full: “Articles of organization, $50.00.” The fee is waived where a majority of the initial membership interests are held by veterans, under subsections (7) through (10) of the same section. Read September 2, 2026.
No ordinary turnaround is published. Four agency pages covering the corporations division, limited liability companies, mail filing and frequently asked questions were fetched and searched on September 2, 2026, and none contains a processing time or a business-day estimate. What is published is an expedited ladder: $50 for a twenty-four-hour turn on a formation document and $100 for the same day, each on top of the filing fee.
Yes, on February 15, and it is a fixed calendar date rather than a formation anniversary. MCL 450.4207(3) requires an annual statement carrying the resident agent’s name and the registered office address. A company formed after September 30 does not file on the February 15 immediately following its formation.
Because the fee provision says so on its face. MCL 450.5101(1)(g) reads: “Annual statement of resident agent and registered office, $15.00 if paid after September 30, 2027. Through September 30, 2027, the fee is $25.00.” It is $25.00 today and $15.00 for anything paid after that date.
It uses resident agent, and it requires a registered office alongside the agent. MCL 450.4207(1) requires both to be continuously maintained in the state, and constrains the agent by reference to the office: an individual agent must be resident in Michigan with a business office or residence identical with the registered office.
The Michigan State Police, Commercial Vehicle Enforcement Division. The Motor Carrier Act still frames every duty in terms of the public service commission, but a compiler’s note on the act’s definitional section records the transfer of those powers to the State Police by executive reorganization order in 2015. The statutory actor and the operating agency have diverged; the requirement has not.
Possibly, and then possibly not, for two different reasons. MCL 207.211(l)(i) makes a vehicle with three or more axles a qualified commercial motor vehicle regardless of weight. Subdivision (m) then excludes a road tractor, truck or truck tractor used exclusively in this state, and subdivision (g) defines the taxpayer as someone operating in Michigan and at least one other state or province, or licensed under the fuel tax agreement.
Quarterly, on or before the last day of January, April, July and October, filed with the Department of Treasury on a form it prescribes, under MCL 207.212(1). No per-gallon rate is quoted on this page: the rate figure printed in that same subsection has been superseded since January 1, 2017 by a later subsection tying it to the general motor fuel tax provisions.
Forty-six dollars through the 2026 registration year, and fifty-five from October 1, 2026 onward. Both figures are for the smallest bracket, which covers zero to two commercial motor vehicles, and the change is made by FMCSA final rule 91 FR 56063. Note that neither number comes from a Michigan source: the state collects the fee, does not set it, and does not reproduce the schedule anywhere in its own law.
For an intrastate-only operation, yes — one identification decal and one cab card per self-propelled vehicle covered by the certificate, with $5.00 replacement fees for each. Both rules end with the sentence “This rule does not apply to a UCR motor carrier of general commodities.” The statute contains no such exception; it exists only in the rules.
Not under the rules that used to provide for it. The part heading for emergency-temporary and temporary authority survives in the published rule chapter, but every rule under it reads “Rescinded” with a 2018 history line — ten rules in total, with no rule 460.18905 and no 460.18908. A surviving part heading is not a surviving requirement or a surviving remedy.
Nothing we read resolves it. MCL 476.3(1) requires the application to state that the applicant’s vehicles have passed an inspection within the immediately preceding twelve months, and a vehicle bought new has no such twelve months. The section, its neighbours and the agency’s own published approval checklist were read on September 2, 2026 and none addresses a first-time applicant.
It imposes conditions, not an order. The certificate must be obtained before operating on a public highway; operation is barred while any fee imposed by the act remains unpaid; and a national registration not renewed by January 1 costs a carrier its intrastate authority. None of those says which startup task comes first, and no numbered order is asserted here.
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.
