Motor carrier classes by state
Minnesota gives a first-year carrier two gifts and one trap. The gifts are a company renewal that costs nothing at all and a registered agent requirement that is conditional rather than compulsory. The trap is a state education program with a ninety-day clock and a sanction most founders would not believe if they had not read it: miss the window and the registration you have just obtained becomes void by operation of the statute, without any hearing, notice or discretion in between.
Nobody starting a carrier arrives with a compliance record, and the greater part of a first year is federal ground that does not shift at the state line. Minnesota supplies the shifting part, and that is the subject here. Each amount was opened at its own primary source on September 2, 2026 and prints beside that date, because one of the biggest is replaced four weeks later.
The Minnesota layer is spread across an unusual number of desks. The company lives at the Secretary of State. The transport credential lives with the commissioner of transportation. Apportioned registration and the fuel-tax agreement live with the Department of Public Safety, and so does the fuel tax itself. And a workers’ compensation statute written for every licensing agency in the state reaches across and conditions the transport credential from outside the transport code entirely.
None of what follows is an order of operations. Minnesota stacks several conditions onto a single act of issuance, which is a genuinely demanding requirement and a genuinely different thing from a sequence. Each condition is stated below as the instrument states it, and no ranking among them is asserted, because none was read.
A Minnesota startup file has a free renewal, a ninety-day clock and a non-transport statute sitting on top of it, and all three change what an underwriter asks about.
Tell us what the operation looks like and we will tell you which of these actually attaches to it.
Nearly every state requires a company to name an agent for service of process. Minnesota requires an address, and treats the agent as contingent — and the conditional clause that does it is easy to read past.
Minn. Stat. 322C.0201, subdivision 2, read September 2, 2026, requires the articles of organization to state “the street address of the initial registered office and, if the limited liability company has an agent for the service of process, the name of the agent for service of process of the company at the registered office”.
Everything turns on the four words “if the limited liability company has”. The registered office is required unconditionally. The agent is required only where one exists. A Minnesota company may therefore be formed with an address and no named agent — an option a founder from a neighbouring state would not think to look for, and would not find if searching for the words a neighbouring state uses.
The same conditional survives into the recurring filing. The renewal contents are set by a general filings statute, which asks for the registered or designated office address and “the name of the registered agent of the organization for service of process, if any”. The hedge is carried forward rather than quietly dropped at renewal, which is the strongest indication that it is deliberate drafting rather than a gap.
None of that makes an agent a bad idea. Service still has to arrive somewhere, and an address with nobody attached to it is an address that can be missed. The point is narrower and useful: in Minnesota the agent is a choice you are making rather than a box the state is forcing, and it can be revisited without amending an obligation.
Most states put the price of forming a company in a schedule of charges, which is why the number changes without the formation rule changing. Minnesota puts it in the sentence that defines when the company comes into existence.
Minn. Stat. 322C.0201, subdivision 4(a), read September 2, 2026, provides: “A limited liability company is formed when articles of organization have been filed with the secretary of state accompanied by a payment of $135.”
That drafting has a practical consequence worth knowing. Formation is defined by the filing and the payment together — the company is not formed by a filing that arrives without the money. A rejected payment is not a late fee situation; on the face of the statute it is a company that has not been formed.
It also means the figure is comparatively stable, because changing it requires amending the formation provision rather than reprinting a schedule. A founder reading a two-year-old Minnesota guide is on firmer ground with this number than with most state filing fees, though the sensible practice is still to re-read it rather than assume it.
There is no separately itemized agent charge stacked onto that figure — consistent with the conditional agent rule above, there is nothing to itemize.
This is the single most favourable line in the Minnesota startup budget, and it comes with the sharpest consequence attached to it.
Minn. Stat. 322C.0208, headed “ANNUAL REPORT FOR SECRETARY OF STATE” and read September 2, 2026, requires that each calendar year beginning in the year after the articles are filed, the company “must file with the secretary of state by December 31 of each calendar year a renewal containing the items required by section 5.34”, and then states plainly: “no fee is required to file an annual renewal.”
Two dates are doing work in that sentence. The deadline is December 31, a fixed calendar date rather than a formation anniversary — so every Minnesota company in the state is due in the same week, and a founder who files in March is not due until the December of the following year. That first-year gap is exactly where the obligation gets forgotten.
The sanction is administrative and automatic in character. The statute describes the notice as “informing the limited liability company that failing to file the annual renewal will result in an administrative termination of the limited liability company or the revocation of the authority” to do business in Minnesota. Termination, not a penalty; the company stops rather than owing.
For a carrier that is a materially worse outcome than a fine, because operating credentials, insurance and contracts are all held in the name of an entity that has been terminated. The renewal is free, takes minutes and is the cheapest compliance obligation in this entire page — which is precisely why it gets skipped.
The contents come from the general annual renewal statute, which asks for the standard identifying items along with the registered or designated office and the agent name, if any.
What a first-year Minnesota operation pays turns on the work, not on the filing calendar.
Send the units, the radius and the commodity, and we will fold the Minnesota-specific pieces into the submission.
Minnesota prices speed but does not promise it, and the honest thing to do with that is to report both halves rather than one.
Minn. Stat. 5.14, headed “TRANSACTION SURCHARGE” and read in full on September 2, 2026, is one sentence: “The secretary of state may impose a surcharge of $20 on each transaction involving expedited service that is provided by the Office of the Secretary of State.”
What is not there is a duration. The statute names a price and a category, and it does not say what expedited service delivers, or what the standard service takes, or what either is measured against. Nothing in the formation provisions supplies a figure either.
So the processing time for a Minnesota filing is recorded here as unverified, and no estimate is substituted for it. A turnaround attributed to a state office that never published one would be a fabricated figure carrying a citation to something that does not say it, which is exactly the failure this discipline exists to prevent.
The practical instruction is to treat timing as a question for the office rather than for a guide, and to note that the surcharge is written as permissive — “may impose” — so its application is a matter of office practice rather than a certainty on the face of the statute.
Minnesota does not run a weight-distance tax. What it runs is a full fuel tax instrument with its own chapter heading, and a definition inside it that reaches lighter equipment than most operators expect.
The chapter is Minn. Stat. ch. 168D, headed “MOTOR CARRIER FUEL TAX”, and it runs to eighteen sections: definitions, a fuel tax compact, compliance, taxing authority, a license, license fees, a decal fee, returns, credit or refund, records, auditing and reporting, a temporary fuel permit, an anti-evasion section, enforcement powers, delinquency, transfer of funds, exemptions and rulemaking. That is not a fee tucked into a registration chapter; it is a tax with its own machinery.
The definition that decides who is inside it was read at source on September 2, 2026. Minn. Stat. 168D.01, subdivision 8, provides that a “qualified motor vehicle” means a motor vehicle used, designed, or maintained to transport persons or property and that “(1) has two axles and a gross vehicle weight or registered gross vehicle weight exceeding 26,000 pounds; (2) has three or more axles regardless of weight; or (3) is used in combination, when the weight of the combination exceeds 26,000 pounds gross vehicle or registered gross vehicle weight.” It excludes a recreational vehicle and vehicles exempt from registration under a named clause.
Because the drafting strings the three clauses together with “or”, satisfying any single one is enough. Two of them measure pounds and set the line at 26,000. The middle clause measures nothing of the kind: it counts axles and stops there. A modest three-axle rig that would clear every scale threshold in this state is nonetheless captured, purely by that count.
That is a specific and avoidable planning failure for a light operation. An operator who has weighed the equipment, concluded the fuel-tax layer does not apply and moved on has answered two of the three limbs and never reached the one that would have caught them.
One structural point sits underneath the whole chapter. Minn. Stat. 168D.04, subdivision 1(a), preserves state sovereignty inside the compact: each member “shall retain its sovereign authority to determine tax rates and exemptions and to exercise other substantive tax authority.” The agreement harmonizes reporting; it does not surrender the rate.
Two obvious wrong answers exist for who administers a Minnesota motor carrier fuel tax, and the statute rules out both of them in a single definition.
Minn. Stat. 168D.01, subdivision 3, read September 2, 2026, provides: “‘Commissioner’ means the commissioner of public safety of the state of Minnesota, acting directly or through duly authorized agents.” Not the Department of Revenue, which administers most Minnesota taxes. Not the Department of Transportation, which holds the transport credential. The Department of Public Safety.
That is consistent with where the neighbouring credentials sit. Apportioned registration and the fuel-tax agreement are both run by the Driver and Vehicle Services division of the same department, through its prorate desk in St Paul, which is in-person by appointment only.
It also means a founder’s correspondence splits along a line that has nothing to do with subject matter. Anything about the fuel tax, the fuel-tax agreement or apportioned plates goes to public safety. The property-carrier credential goes to transportation. The company itself goes to the Secretary of State. Three departments, and the split does not follow the intuition that tax goes to revenue.
A correction belongs on the record here, because it is the kind that propagates. Earlier research in this project cited the Minnesota state motor carrier tax to Minn. Stat. 221.026 — a section headed “MOTOR CARRIER OF PROPERTY; EXEMPTIONS” that contains no tax of any kind. Both instruments were re-read on September 2, 2026. The tax is chapter 168D; 221.026 is an exemption provision in the credential chapter. A citation that contradicts its own record is worse than no citation, and it is fixed here rather than carried forward.
Apportioned registration is a uniform interstate plan, which is why most state pages about it read identically. Minnesota adds a limb that the uniform text does not have, and it is the one that reaches a light startup.
The Department of Public Safety overview, read September 2, 2026, lists four qualifying criteria for a vehicle traveling in two or more member jurisdictions: “Has two axles and a gross vehicle weight or a registered gross vehicle weight over 26,000 pounds”; “Has three or more axles regardless of weight”; “Is used in combination when the gross vehicle weight of the combination exceeds 26,000 pounds”; and “A power unit involved in interstate transportation outside the state of Minnesota regardless of gross vehicle weight or axles, excluding a pickup truck or van with a manufacturer’s nominal rating carrying capacity of three-fourths ton or less.”
Read the fourth one twice. It has no weight test and no axle test — the words are “regardless of gross vehicle weight or axles”. On the department’s own statement, a power unit involved in interstate transportation outside Minnesota qualifies on that basis alone, subject only to the light pickup and van carve-out at the end.
For a fifteen-to-twenty-six-thousand-pound operation that crosses a state line, that is decisive, and it is the opposite of the conclusion a founder would reach by reading the uniform plan text and stopping. Do not carry a neighbouring state’s summary into Minnesota on this point.
The same page also anchors the qualifying class to a state statutory definition of commercial vehicle rather than to the plan alone, and explains that fees are calculated on the percentage of distance driven in each jurisdiction multiplied by that jurisdiction’s full-year registration fee.
The carve-out at the end of the fourth prong is narrow and specific: a pickup truck or van with a manufacturer’s nominal rating carrying capacity of three-fourths ton or less. It is a rating test, not a scale reading, and it will not rescue a light truck that rates above it.
Minnesota’s interstate registration law is short, and most of it is no longer there. Reading it properly requires walking the subdivisions rather than scanning them, because one of the repealed ones does not sit where a reader would look.
Minn. Stat. 221.60 has eight subdivisions numbered 1, 2, 3, 3a, 4, 5, 6 and 7. Six of them — subdivisions 2, 3, 3a, 4, 5 and 6 — carry a repeal marker. Only subdivisions 1 and 7 operate.
Subdivision 3a is the one worth pausing on as a matter of method. A reader walking from 1 to 7 in whole numbers passes straight over it, and would report the single-state insurance registration system it once carried as simply absent rather than as repealed in 2008. Absence and repeal are different findings and they support different conclusions. The letter-suffixed subdivision has to be walked for deliberately.
What survives is the duty and the authority. Subdivision 1 provides that a foreign or domestic motor carrier, motor private carrier, leasing company, broker or freight forwarder “may operate in interstate commerce in Minnesota only if it first complies with the Unified Carrier Registration Agreement authorized by United States Code, title 49, section 14504a, enacted pursuant to the Unified Carrier Registration Act of 2005, and the rules, regulations, and directives adopted thereunder, including registering with a base state and paying all required fees.”
Note what that subdivision does not contain: any fleet-size floor, any weight threshold, any Minnesota-specific carve-out. The duty attaches to the five named entity types on interstate operation, full stop.
Subdivision 7 assigns the administration. The commissioner of transportation “is authorized to take all necessary actions to enter into” the agreement and “shall implement and administer the agreement and the rules and regulations adopted thereunder”. So this credential goes to transportation, not to public safety, splitting it from the fuel-tax and apportioned-plate desks described above.
Minnesota collects the registration fee and does not set it. The rate is national, and it moves this month.
At the foot of the ladder sits the rung the table labels B1 and describes by a fleet count of “0-2”. Its registration year 2026 charge is $46.00 for the entity, and $46.00 again where the filer is a broker or a leasing company. Read September 2, 2026.
There is a renumbering inside that rule which will outlast anyone’s memory of it. One section is deleted outright and the two above it each slide down a number, after which a fresh section is written into the slot the last one vacated. What that does to the string “49 CFR 367.50” is invisible on the page: today it resolves to the lower table, from October it resolves to the higher one, and the section heading barely changes either side of the switch.
The redesignated older table also gains an end date it did not have. Its heading now reads “Fees Under the Unified Carrier Registration Plan and Agreement for Registration Years Beginning in 2025 and Ending in 2026”, where the previous version ran forward into each subsequent year without a terminus.
Both numbers are right for their own registration year. A note that records the figure without the year is not usable, and a note that records the section number without the rule is worse.
This is the Minnesota provision a new venture most needs to know and least expects, and it exists because Minnesota built its own answer to the problem the federal new entrant program solves elsewhere.
The federal new entrant safety assurance program is not extended to Minnesota intrastate carriers. The state’s adoption section incorporates Part 385 in exactly one place — the hazardous materials safety permit subpart — and does not incorporate the new entrant subpart or the practice-and-procedure part at all. What Minnesota built instead is an education requirement with teeth.
Minn. Stat. 221.124, read in full on September 2, 2026, describes a program consisting of “an initial contact, for educational purposes, between a motor carrier required to participate and representatives of the Department of Transportation”, delivered either through a seminar or, at the department’s discretion, through a personal contact. The subject matter is enumerated: “insurance requirements; accident reporting; accident countermeasures; identification of vehicles; driver qualifications; maximum hours of service of drivers; the safe operation of vehicles; equipment, parts, and accessories; and inspection, repair, and maintenance.”
Who has to attend is specific, and it is not a delegate. Subdivision 2 requires a carrier that first registers with or receives a permit from the commissioner after January 1, 2000 to participate, and “must have in attendance at least one motor carrier official having a substantial interest or control, directly or indirectly, in or over the operations conducted or to be conducted under the carrier’s registration or permit.” An office manager will not satisfy it; an owner will.
And here is the sanction, quoted because paraphrase would soften it. Subdivision 3: a carrier required to participate “must do so within 90 days of the service date of the order granting the permit or within 90 days of registering, unless the commissioner extends the time for compliance. Failure to comply with the requirement of subdivision 2 makes the order granting the permit or the carrier’s registration void upon expiration of the time for compliance.”
Void, not suspended and not revoked — the instrument ceases to exist at the end of the ninety days without any further act by anyone. The one relief valve is written into the same sentence: the commissioner may extend the time for compliance, which means the extension must be sought before the ninety days run rather than explained afterwards.
One of the conditions on a Minnesota transport credential is not in the transport code at all. It is in the workers’ compensation chapter, it is written to every licensing agency in the state, and it carries its own penalty.
Minn. Stat. 176.182, headed “BUSINESS LICENSES OR PERMITS; COVERAGE REQUIRED” and read in full on September 2, 2026, provides: “Every state or local licensing agency shall withhold the issuance or renewal of a license or permit to operate a business in Minnesota until the applicant presents acceptable evidence of compliance with the workers’ compensation insurance coverage requirement of section 176.181, subdivision 2, by providing the name of the insurance company, the policy number, and dates of coverage or the permit to self-insure.”
Note the verb. It is not that the agency may decline; it “shall withhold”. And the evidence is itemized rather than left to satisfaction: insurer name, policy number, coverage dates, or the self-insurance permit.
The same section prices the failure: “The commissioner shall assess a penalty to the employer of $2,000 payable to the commissioner for deposit in the assigned risk safety account, if the information is not reported or is falsely reported.” Two thousand dollars, and it attaches to a reporting failure rather than to a coverage failure.
The transport department implements this on the face of its own application, which tells applicants that a certificate cannot issue until the workers’ compensation certificate of compliance form is completed, and that it must be signed in front of a notary public. That application text is carried from earlier project research rather than re-read on September 2, 2026; the statute above was re-read at source.
For an owner-operator with no employees the answer is not that the requirement disappears but that the correct route through it is the nonemployment path rather than a policy, and that the route still has to be documented and notarized rather than left blank.
Minnesota’s chapter for transport credentials contains a permit and per-vehicle identification regime, and it is easy to assume a new freight carrier is inside it. The rule that sets the fees opens by saying otherwise.
Minn. Stat. 221.131, subdivision 2(a), read September 2, 2026, is one sentence long: “This subdivision applies only to holders of household goods mover permits and motor carriers of passengers.”
Everything priced in that subdivision therefore prices something a general freight startup does not hold. For completeness, and because the numbers circulate in guides that omit the scope clause: an annual registration fee of $75 on each vehicle including pickup and delivery vehicles; a distinguishing annual identification card per vehicle or power unit that “must at all times be carried in the vehicle or power unit to which it has been assigned”; a $10 transfer fee to reassign a card; and a $10 charge to replace an unexpired lost card. Certificated passenger carriers pay $40 per vehicle under subdivision 3, and up to five transferable floater cards are available to carriers subject to either subdivision.
One drafting detail in the same subdivision is worth carrying because it recurs across states: trailers and semitrailers used in combination with power units “may not be counted as vehicles in the computation of fees under this section if the permit holder pays the fees for power units.” Where a per-vehicle charge exists in Minnesota, it is a power unit charge.
There is a repealed subdivision in the middle of this section as well — subdivision 2a — which is the same walking hazard described earlier in this page. Letter-suffixed subdivisions are where repeals hide.
The net result for a general freight new venture is a genuine negative: no per-vehicle permit, no cab card and no annual identification card, because the regime that would issue them says on its face that it applies to two classes this carrier is not in.
Minnesota converges more conditions on a single act than any other state in this group, which makes it the place where a numbered pathway is most tempting and most wrong.
The issuance provision names four antecedents of one act: a registration statement complying with the two named subdivisions, payment of the required fee, a satisfactory safety rating, and where applicable compliance with the financial responsibility requirements. It then adds a bar in the negative — the commissioner may not issue to a registrant with an unsatisfactory safety rating.
The department’s own application adds a fifth on its face, the notarized workers’ compensation certificate of compliance described above. And a separate insurance provision puts one thing before another in terms: before providing transportation, the carrier must secure, cause to be filed and maintain in full effect the required certificate.
Now read what that is and is not. It is a demanding convergence: five facts must all be true at the moment of issuance, and one of them must remain true afterwards. It is not an order. Nothing in what was read on September 2, 2026 says the safety rating comes before the fee, or the fee before the statement, or the workers’ compensation certificate before either.
That distinction has a practical payoff rather than being a lawyer’s scruple. If the conditions were ordered, a founder would work them in series and the elapsed time would be the sum. Because they converge, they can be worked in parallel, and the elapsed time is the longest of them rather than the total.
One reverse condition completes the picture and is worth planning around: on a failure to file or maintain the required security, the registration is suspended or canceled, and a person may not operate while it is under suspension or cancellation. That one is a continuing condition rather than an entry condition.
Two subjects are worked out in detail elsewhere on this site rather than repeated here, and the split is deliberate.
The registration statement itself — what it is, what the exemption list lifts a property carrier out of, why the instrument is a certificate of registration rather than a permit, and where the weight lines do and do not sit — is on our Minnesota hot shot page. So is the insurance side: the form set, who executes and files it, the amounts and the endorsement, and the cargo treatment.
This page covers the surrounding layer instead: forming the company and renewing it for nothing, the fuel tax chapter and its axle test, the fourth apportionment prong, the registration fee Minnesota collects but does not price, the education program that voids a registration, the workers’ compensation statute reaching in from outside the transport code, and the permit chapter’s own scope clause.
Two boundaries belong on the record. The processing time is unverified because no duration is published in the statutes read. And the department application text quoted in the workers’ compensation section is carried from earlier project research rather than re-read on September 2, 2026 — the statute behind it was re-read at source.
One date should be in the diary rather than the file: on October 1, 2026 the national registration bracket fees rise, and the section number that currently proves the lower figure begins naming the higher one.
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 Minnesota 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 Minnesota 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.
Only conditionally, which is unusual. Minn. Stat. 322C.0201, subd. 2, requires the articles to state “the street address of the initial registered office and, if the limited liability company has an agent for the service of process, the name of the agent for service of process of the company at the registered office”. The office is mandatory; the agent is contingent on the company having one, and the same conditional wording carries into the annual renewal.
$135, and the figure sits inside the formation rule rather than a schedule. Minn. Stat. 322C.0201, subd. 4(a): “A limited liability company is formed when articles of organization have been filed with the secretary of state accompanied by a payment of $135.” Formation is defined as the filing and the payment together. Read September 2, 2026.
No. Minn. Stat. 322C.0208(b) requires an annual renewal filed with the secretary of state “by December 31 of each calendar year” and states that “no fee is required to file an annual renewal.” The first one falls in the calendar year after formation, which is where the obligation is most often forgotten.
The statute describes the consequence as “an administrative termination of the limited liability company or the revocation of the authority of the limited liability company and foreign limited liability company to do business in Minnesota.” It is termination rather than a penalty, which for a carrier is worse than a fine — credentials, insurance and contracts all sit in the terminated entity’s name.
This page does not say, because no duration is published in the statutes read on September 2, 2026. Minn. Stat. 5.14 prices expedited service at a $20 surcharge per transaction and says nothing about how long either service takes. An estimate attributed to the office would be a figure the office never published.
Yes, and it has its own eighteen-section chapter: Minn. Stat. ch. 168D, headed “MOTOR CARRIER FUEL TAX”. It is a fuel tax rather than a weight-distance or ton-mile charge, and it carries its own license, decal fee, quarterly returns, records, audit and enforcement machinery.
It can, because weight is only one of three alternatives. Minn. Stat. 168D.01, subd. 8, defines a qualified motor vehicle by three limbs joined by “or”, and the second is “has three or more axles regardless of weight”. A three-axle vehicle is inside the definition on axle count alone, whatever the scale reads.
The Department of Public Safety. Minn. Stat. 168D.01 defines the commissioner as “the commissioner of public safety of the state of Minnesota, acting directly or through duly authorized agents”, and the apportioned registration and fuel-tax agreement programs are run by that department’s Driver and Vehicle Services division. The transport credential, by contrast, sits with the commissioner of transportation.
Quite possibly, because Minnesota writes a fourth prong the uniform plan text does not. The Department of Public Safety overview lists “A power unit involved in interstate transportation outside the state of Minnesota regardless of gross vehicle weight or axles”, excluding only a pickup or van with a manufacturer’s nominal rating carrying capacity of three-fourths ton or less. Do not carry a neighbouring state’s summary into Minnesota here.
It is a state education requirement under Minn. Stat. 221.124, delivered as a seminar or a personal contact with the Department of Transportation, covering insurance, accident reporting, vehicle identification, driver qualifications, hours of service, safe operation, equipment and maintenance. A carrier registering after January 1, 2000 must attend within 90 days, through an official with substantial interest or control, and failure “makes the order granting the permit or the carrier’s registration void upon expiration of the time for compliance.”
Not by the state adoption. Minnesota incorporates 49 C.F.R. Part 385 in a single place — the hazardous materials safety permit subpart, for carriers hauling the designated materials. The new entrant subpart is not incorporated, and neither is the practice-and-procedure part. What Minnesota runs instead is the initial motor carrier contact program described above.
You need to document your position on it, and the statute is mandatory on the agency. Minn. Stat. 176.182 provides that every state or local licensing agency “shall withhold the issuance or renewal of a license or permit to operate a business in Minnesota” until the applicant presents insurer name, policy number and coverage dates, or a self-insurance permit. The section also assesses a $2,000 penalty where the information is not reported or is falsely reported.
Not as a general freight carrier. Minn. Stat. 221.131, subd. 2(a) opens with a scope clause: “This subdivision applies only to holders of household goods mover permits and motor carriers of passengers.” The $75 per-vehicle fee and the annual identification card priced in that subdivision belong to those two classes, not to a property carrier hauling general freight.
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.
