Motor carrier classes by state
North Dakota is the rare state where the transport layer is mostly permits and the credential layer is mostly absent, and where the company layer contains a restriction almost nowhere else does: the business may not serve as its own registered agent. What survives in the transport code is a fully priced oversize and overweight permit regime run by the highway patrol, a full apportioned-registration and fuel-tax operation, and a safety adoption whose most important sentence has no number on it at all.
Nobody starting a carrier has a compliance record behind them, and the greater part of a first year is federal ground that does not shift at a state line. What North Dakota adds on top has an unusual shape: heavier on permits than on credentials, and heavier on what has been struck out than on what has been enacted.
Everything below was read at primary source on September 2, 2026. Where a chapter or a section is dead, this page says so and quotes the repeal marker, because a heading that survives its own repeal is the single most reliable way to be wrong about North Dakota. The chapter headed for motor carriers is a repeal block. So is the chapter that would have carried a charge on the transportation of property.
Nothing here is a sequence, and in this state that is not a stylistic choice. With no intrastate operating authority for general freight, no state insurance filing to make and no surviving state carrier tax, there are no state steps to put in order. The permits that do exist attach to particular movements rather than to a startup timeline.
A North Dakota startup file is short on state credentials and specific about permits, which changes where the underwriting questions land.
Tell us what runs, how heavy and how wide, and we will tell you which of these actually touches the operation.
This is the first genuine restriction a North Dakota founder meets, and it is the opposite of the rule in several neighbouring states, so it catches people who have formed a company before.
The Secretary of State’s registered agents page, read September 2, 2026, states: “Many business structures must maintain a North Dakota registered agent that has a physical address in North Dakota. A registered agent (also known as a resident agent or a statutory agent) accepts any notifications of legal action, notice, or demand related to the business and provides those notices to the business (NDCC ch. 10-01.1). A business may not serve as its own registered agent.”
The next sentence supplies the workaround, and it is the one a one-truck operation will use: “However, an individual from the business could serve as the noncommercial registered agent if they reside in North Dakota.” So the owner personally can be the agent; the company cannot. The distinction is between the natural person and the entity, not between insiders and outsiders.
There is then a consent requirement with a sanction attached, and it is unusually strict for a step that leaves no paper trail: “Businesses must obtain an agent’s approval before naming them as a commercial or noncommercial registered agent. Failure to obtain approval from the named agent may result in the involuntary dissolution of your business. Proof of the approval is not required to be filed with the Secretary of State.”
Read those two sentences together. Approval is mandatory, the consequence of not having it is dissolution, and no proof of it is filed anywhere. The obligation is real and entirely undocumented at the state end, which means the only record that it happened is the one you keep. Get the consent in writing and keep it with the formation file.
The formation-side statute is short and points elsewhere for the detail: N.D.C.C. § 10-32.1-16 provides that “Every limited liability company shall have a registered office and a registered agent, in the manner prescribed by chapter 10-01.1.” The operative rules are in the agent chapter, not the company chapter.
One entity-level qualification is worth knowing if the agent is a company rather than a person. A corporation or limited liability company appointed as a noncommercial registered agent must be authorized to transact business in North Dakota, have a physical address in the state, and be in good standing with the Secretary of State.
The company costs were read on the Secretary of State’s own limited liability company page on September 2, 2026, and they are stated as a short fee block rather than buried in a schedule.
Registration, for a domestic or a foreign company, is $135. The annual report, again for either, is $50. An amendment is $50 for a domestic or foreign company. Dissolution or termination of a domestic company is $20, and withdrawal of a foreign one is $20. The governing chapter is N.D.C.C. ch. 10-32.1.
The deadline is the part to write down, because it is not the date most states use and it is not an anniversary. The page states the annual report filing deadline as November 15. Every North Dakota company shares it.
November 15 is an awkward date for a seasonal carrier. It falls after the harvest and construction seasons in a state where a light freight operation may have been running flat out through both, and it lands in the run-up to winter operations rather than in a quiet administrative month.
The naming rule is worth a line because it constrains the trading name on the door as much as on the filing: “The name of a limited liability company must contain the words ‘limited liability company’ or must contain the abbreviation ‘LLC’ or the abbreviation ‘L.L.C.’”
One further thing the office publishes deserves repeating to a first-year owner. The Secretary of State separately maintains a warning page about misleading annual report letters sent by third parties. Solicitations timed to the November deadline, dressed as official notices and priced well above $50, are a known pattern in states with a fixed statewide date. The fee is $50 and the filing is made to the state; anything else asking for more is asking for more.
One set of North Dakota figures circulates in startup guides attached to the wrong party, and the mistake is expensive enough to correct.
The Secretary of State’s registered agents page, read September 2, 2026, publishes these charges: “Inclusion in Secretary of State Commercial Registered Agent Listing - $1,000” and “Termination/Removal from Commercial Registered Agent Listing - $500”. Alongside them sit a statement of change of address at $10, which “Updates addresses for all businesses represented by Commercial Registered Agent”, service of process on the Secretary of State at $25, and resignation as a commercial registered agent at no fee.
Those are the costs of being a commercial registered agent, not the cost of hiring one. A thousand dollars buys a place on the state’s published list of professional agents; it is a supplier’s license, and it has nothing to do with what a carrier pays a service to act for it.
The distinction the page draws is between two categories rather than two price points. A commercial registered agent is one that has filed a commercial registered agent listing with the Secretary of State. A noncommercial registered agent is an individual resident of North Dakota, or a qualifying in-state or foreign entity — and needs no listing at all.
For a one or two truck carrier the practical route is almost always the noncommercial one: the owner personally, or a third party appointed as a noncommercial agent, at whatever that party charges. The $1,000 line never enters the picture.
The $25 service of process fee is the one worth understanding rather than ignoring. It is what it costs when process is served on the Secretary of State instead of on you, and that happens when the agent arrangement has failed. It is a symptom price rather than a startup cost.
Pricing a first-year North Dakota operation turns on the work, not on a credential the state stopped issuing.
Send the equipment, the radius and the commodity, and we will fold the state-specific pieces into the submission.
North Dakota levies no weight-distance tax, no ton-mile tax and no per-vehicle carrier tax on a general freight operation. That is a negative, and the way it was established is worth showing, because a negative asserted without a denominator is not a finding.
The Century Code’s own chapter index for the motor vehicles title carries the entry “Chapter 39-04.1 - Additional Fee for Transportation of Property [Repealed]”. The chapter that would have housed a charge on transporting property is dead, and the index says so in its own link text rather than leaving it to be discovered inside the chapter.
It is not the only one. The chapter headed for motor carriers in the transportation title is a repeal block through and through. Fetched and extracted on September 2, 2026, the entire body of N.D.C.C. ch. 49-18 reads: “CHAPTER 49-18 MOTOR CARRIERS [Repealed by S.L. 1965, ch. 322, § 4; S.L. 1975, ch. 106, § 673; S.L. 1979, ch. 503, § 7; S.L. 1981, ch. 479, § 16; S.L. 1987, ch. 567, § 1; S.L. 1995, ch. 450, § 1]”. Six separate session laws, the last of them in 1995.
That is the C7 hazard in its purest form. The chapter title is exactly the phrase a founder or a researcher would search for, and the document that comes back is a headstone. Anyone who cites the chapter by its heading, without opening it, will report a licensing regime that has not existed for three decades.
State the scope of the tax negative honestly. It rests on the enumerated chapter indexes of the two titles where such a charge would sit, plus the repeal marker on the property-transport chapter itself. It is not a sweep of the revenue title, so it is a strong read negative rather than an exhaustive one.
What North Dakota charges a carrier instead is permits, and those are priced in detail — which is the subject of the next two sections.
North Dakota’s entire statutory contribution to interstate carrier registration is one section, and it is permissive rather than mandatory in form. That matters for how a founder reads the obligation.
N.D.C.C. § 39-19-06, headed “Unified carrier registration system”, provides in full: “The director may adopt all rules necessary to enable this state to participate in the unified carrier registration system. Any moneys derived from participation in the unified carrier registration program must be deposited in the highway fund.”
There is no prohibition in that sentence, no list of covered entities and no vehicle threshold. The state grants itself a power and directs where the money goes. Everything that actually binds a carrier comes from the federal statute and the agreement made under it, not from North Dakota law.
North Dakota does participate. It appears on the plan’s own participating states list, read September 2, 2026, and the administering desk is the North Dakota Department of Transportation’s motor carrier section in Bismarck.
A methodological note belongs here because it changes a conclusion. The chapter containing that section has seven sections, and two of them carry repeal markers — including one with a decimal suffix, § 39-19-06.1, which killed a single-state insurance registration system in 2013. A reader walking the chapter in whole numbers passes over it entirely and reports that system as absent rather than as repealed. Suffixed sections have to be walked for deliberately, and in this chapter that is where a repeal is hiding.
So the honest summary is that a North Dakota carrier operating interstate registers because federal law says so, pays a fee the federal rule sets, and deals with a state department that is authorized rather than obliged to be in the middle of it.
Because North Dakota’s statute grants a power rather than a price, the amount a carrier owes is entirely federal, and it changes this month.
A one or two truck operation files in the rung the table labels B1, whose fleet count it writes as “0-2”. That rung costs $46.00 for registration year 2026, and the broker and leasing column repeats $46.00 rather than differing from it. Read September 2, 2026.
The redesignated older table now carries a terminus it previously lacked, reading “Fees Under the Unified Carrier Registration Plan and Agreement for Registration Years Beginning in 2025 and Ending in 2026”. The version it replaces ran forward into each subsequent registration year.
Neither figure is wrong. The registration year decides which one applies, which is why a figure recorded without its year cannot be relied on in either direction.
The permit regime is where North Dakota’s transport layer actually lives, and it is priced in the statute rather than delegated to a schedule, which makes it unusually easy to budget.
N.D.C.C. 39-12-02, read in full on September 2, 2026, provides that “The highway patrol and local authorities in their respective jurisdictions, upon application and payment of the appropriate charges and for good cause shown, may issue a special written permit authorizing the applicant to operate or move a vehicle, mobile home, or modular unit of a size or weight exceeding the maximum specified by this chapter, upon a highway under the jurisdiction of the body granting the permit.”
The section then sets minimum fees for a named list of instruments. The ten percent weight exemption, harvest and wintertime permit is fifty dollars per month or two hundred fifty dollars per year, with unused monthly fees refundable and unused yearly fees not. An interstate permit is ten dollars per trip, fifty dollars per month, or three hundred dollars for unlimited trips annually. Special mobile equipment is twenty-five dollars per trip, and engineering is twenty-five dollars per trip. Faxing a permit is five dollars.
The rest of the ladder is equally specific. A single trip permit is twenty dollars per trip. A bridge length permit is thirty dollars per trip, fifty dollars per month, or one hundred fifty dollars for unlimited trips annually. A longer combination vehicle permit is one hundred dollars per month. An overwidth vehicle or load at fourteen feet six inches or less, and an overlength vehicle or load at one hundred twenty feet or less, are each twenty dollars per trip, fifty dollars per month, or one hundred fifty dollars annually for unlimited trips.
An electronic system carries its own surcharge, capped: if the highway patrol establishes an online electronic permit system, it “shall assess an additional fee of up to fifteen dollars for every permit issued under this section to be deposited into the motor carrier electronic permit transaction fund.” The fund itself is created in the same section and continuously appropriated.
The provision most worth knowing is the anti-stacking rule, because it prevents the failure mode that plagues local permitting elsewhere: “Notwithstanding any other provision of this chapter, a city, county, or township having control of roads may not impose additional fees for the use of roads beyond the fees established under a uniform permit program.” Local bodies may still issue penalties for violating a posted road restriction, and a denied permit can be renegotiated locally, but they may not simply add a fee on top of the uniform program.
Two operational conditions attach to every permit issued under that section, and both are the kind that decide a roadside outcome rather than a paperwork one.
The carrying duty is written into the same subsection as the issuing power: the permit “must be carried in the vehicle to which it refers in printed or electronic format and must be opened to inspection by a peace officer or agent of the superintendent of the highway patrol unless prior approval is obtained from the highway patrol.”
Two things in that clause are worth pulling out. Electronic format is expressly permitted, so a permit on a phone satisfies the duty on the face of the statute — a point that is not universal across states and is worth knowing before an argument at the roadside. And the duty is to have it “opened to inspection”, which is an active obligation rather than a passive one.
The second condition is a compliance rule with an unusual reach: “It is a violation of this chapter for a person to violate the terms or conditions of the permit.” The permit’s own conditions become statutory obligations, so exceeding a routing restriction or a time limit written on the permit is not a contractual matter with the issuer but a violation of the chapter itself.
One coordination rule sits alongside these and is worth knowing when a movement crosses jurisdictions: each township in a county that participates in a uniform truck permitting system must participate in the same system. And where fee changes are proposed, a uniform permit system must give public notice of the date, hour and place at which the public may comment.
For a startup planning oversize work, the practical shape is that the permit is cheap, the conditions on it are enforceable as law, and the state has deliberately closed the route by which a local body could invent a second charge.
The federal safety corpus reaches North Dakota intrastate carriers through a single short administrative chapter, and the most consequential sentence in it has no number.
N.D. Admin. Code 38-04-01-02, read in full on September 2, 2026, opens: “The following parts of title 49, Code of Federal Regulations, including amendments are adopted by reference”. The phrase “including amendments” is a rolling adoption — the state text moves with the federal text rather than freezing at an edition, and no edition date appears anywhere in the chapter.
Sixteen numbered items follow, including Part 382, five separately named subparts of Part 385, two subparts of Part 386, Part 387, and Parts 390 through 397 individually enumerated. It is a broad and specific adoption list.
Then, after item sixteen, without a number of its own, comes the paragraph that decides the answer for a light operation. Vehicles at or below the ceiling, it says, “are exempt from all federal motor carrier safety regulations unless the vehicle is used to transport hazardous materials requiring a placard, the vehicle is designed to transport more than eight passengers, including the driver, for compensation, or unless the vehicle is designed to transport more than fifteen people, including the driver not for compensation.”
This is a structural trap rather than a drafting one. Anyone who enumerates the adoption list — and the list is exactly what an adoption question invites you to enumerate — reaches item sixteen and stops, because sixteen is where the numbering ends. The carve-out sits past the last number, and every part of the list above it is qualified by it.
The four weight measures in that sentence are joined in a way that changes the test materially, and that analysis is worked through on our North Dakota hot shot page rather than repeated here. What matters for this page is the structural point: the exemption is not inside the list, it is after it, and reading only the list gives the opposite answer.
Enforcement is assigned in the neighbouring section: the regulations “are binding upon all motor carriers and their employees while operating within or through the state of North Dakota and shall be enforced by the North Dakota highway patrol.”
For a new venture the single most relevant item in that adoption list is the federal new entrant safety assurance program, and North Dakota’s treatment of it is a two-step that an adoption summary destroys.
Step one: it is adopted by name. Item five of the list is “Part 385 - Subpart D - New Entrant Safety Assurance Program.” Not a range, not an implication — the subpart is called out individually, alongside Subparts A, B, C and E.
Step two: the unnumbered carve-out described above then exempts intrastate commercial motor vehicles at twenty-six thousand pounds or less from all federal motor carrier safety regulations, subject to the placarded hazmat and passenger limbs. A purely intrastate North Dakota new venture hauling non-hazardous freight in that band is not inside the state-adopted program, despite the program being named four items above the sentence that removes it.
The failure mode here is worth naming because it is the one an automated check reproduces. A search of the chapter for the program returns a hit. A summary of the adoption list reports it as adopted. Both are true and both are misleading, because the qualifier is not in the list and does not mention the program.
Two caveats keep this honest. The exemption is written to intrastate vehicles, so a carrier that crosses a state line is in a different analysis entirely and the federal program reaches it on federal terms. And the exemption is conditioned on the vehicle not carrying placarded hazardous materials and not being designed for the passenger counts named, so a change of commodity changes the answer without any change of equipment.
The chapter is three sections long in total — regulatory intent, adoption of regulations, and amendments — which is why this analysis is short. There is no separate state new entrant program, no state safety rating regime and no state re-verification clock in it.
A founder asking whether North Dakota requires a surety bond will find the word bond in the code and reach the wrong conclusion, because the instrument it names is not a credential bond at all.
N.D.C.C. 39-12-16, headed “Cash bond - Holding”, provides that unless a cash bond is furnished in an amount sufficient to cover the charges for extraordinary use of highways, streets and roads, together with the costs collectible under a subsequent settlement, the vehicle “must be held until a trial of the case can be had before the district court.”
Look at where that section sits and its character is obvious. It is in the middle of an impoundment sequence — impounding an overweight vehicle, the impounding receipt, the impounding notice, the civil complaint, voluntary settlement, mailing the complaint, the cash bond, then trial and charges, then payment, confiscation and sale. The neighbouring section confirms it, providing that if the charges are not paid immediately “from a cash bond previously posted or other cash payment”, the judge orders the vehicle confiscated and sold by the sheriff.
So it is a release instrument, closer to bail than to financial responsibility. It is not a surety bond, it is not filed with an agency, it does not run to the public as an obligee, and it is not a condition of any credential. It exists only after a weight violation has already produced an impoundment.
The surviving credential chapter takes no bond either, and what it takes instead tells you why. For a household goods carrier permit, the department “shall require the owner or operator to procure public liability insurance”, the carrier “shall file the insurance policy with the department”, the policy must be kept in full force with annual proof, and on failure to maintain it “the department shall cancel the permit.” A certificate from an authorized insurer may be filed instead of the policy. The word bond does not appear in that chapter at all.
The net answer for a general freight new venture is a structural one rather than an empirical one: there is no credential to bond. The chapter that once licensed such a carrier is repealed, so the question has no instrument to attach to.
The contrast between two classes of carriage is the clearest way to see the shape of what North Dakota kept, and it also warns off a founder who finds the surviving chapter and assumes it applies.
N.D.C.C. ch. 39-31, “Common Household Goods Carriers”, is live and runs to seventeen sections, five of them repealed in 2015. It makes it unlawful for a common household goods carrier to transport persons or property for hire unless the carrier has obtained a household goods carrier permit and complies with the chapter and the department’s rules, and it bars operation within the state without that permit.
The application requirements read like the credentialing regime other states apply to freight: the application “must contain proof of registration with the secretary of state, and either proof of workers compensation insurance coverage or an affidavit of nonemployment”, and the department “shall deny issuing a household goods carrier permit if the applicant submits an incomplete application.”
The fees are stated in the chapter: a hundred dollars for the application, a hundred dollars non-refundable to transfer a permit, and a thirty-five dollar annual filing fee to maintain it. Permits remain in force and are transferable only on department approval.
None of that reaches general freight, because the class is defined by commodity. The chapter’s opening section defines the common household goods carrier, and a carrier hauling general freight is outside the definition and therefore outside the permit.
So the structural summary is a genuine one rather than a gap in the reading. North Dakota runs a full apportioned-registration and fuel-tax credentialing operation, and a fully priced permit regime for size and weight, while operating no economic entry regulation for general freight at all — credentials without entry control, and one surviving commodity-specific permit that a freight startup will never hold.
Apportioned registration and the fuel-tax agreement are both run by the Department of Transportation’s motor vehicle side, which is the same department that appears as the registration desk earlier on this page.
The North Dakota International Registration Plan Instruction Manual, whose cover reads “North Dakota International Registration Plan Instruction Manual - IRP 2026 • Motor Vehicle Department”, was fetched and read on September 2, 2026.
The qualifying test is the familiar three-limb one, stated in the manual as a power unit that “has two axles and a gross vehicle weight or registered gross vehicle weight in excess of 26,000 pounds, or 2. has three or more axles, regardless of weight, or 3. is used in combination, when the gross vehicle weight of such combination exceeds 26,000 pounds.” The manual repeats the same definition in its apportionable vehicle section with metric equivalents, and excludes recreational vehicles, restricted-plate vehicles and government-owned vehicles.
The second limb is the one to check against a light three-axle unit, because it carries no pounds figure. A vehicle can be well under every weight threshold in this state and still be apportionable on axle count.
The trip alternative is priced as a range rather than a single number, which is unusual enough to quote: the automated permit routing system “can issue most single trip permits in real time 24/7. The permit fee ranges from $20 to $100 and is valid for 3 days. The routing service fee is $10.”
Two operational facts sit in that quotation and are worth acting on. The permit is valid for three days rather than a fixed hour count, and the routing service fee is separate from the permit fee, so the all-in cost of a single movement is the permit plus ten dollars. The twenty-four hour availability is what makes the trip route practical for an operation that takes occasional out-of-state work at short notice.
The fuel-tax agreement side is published from the same document tree, with a companion instruction manual, and the motor carrier services desk answers for both.
Most state pages of this kind have to work hard to avoid presenting a list of requirements as an order. In North Dakota there is nothing to order, and saying so plainly is more useful than manufacturing a pathway.
The instruments that would carry a sequence were read: the repealed motor carriers chapter in full, the three-section safety administrative chapter in full, the enabling safety statute, and the complete chapter indexes of the two relevant titles. None of them conditions any state step on any other state step.
The reason is structural rather than accidental. With no intrastate operating authority for general freight, no state insurance filing to make and no surviving state carrier tax, there are no state steps to place in order. What exists is a safety-rule adoption with an intrastate weight exemption, a permit regime attached to particular movements, and two multistate credentialing programs attached to interstate operation.
Two real conditions do exist and both belong to permits rather than to a startup timeline. An oversize or overweight permit must be obtained before the movement, on the face of the issuing power. And the permit’s own terms bind as statute once issued.
The company layer has one condition of its own: an agent’s approval must be obtained before naming them, on pain of involuntary dissolution, and no proof of it is filed.
That is the whole of it. A page that arranged those four facts into a numbered pathway would be asserting an order the state has not enacted, and in a state where two of the relevant chapters are repeal blocks, inventing structure is exactly the wrong instinct.
Where a page like this stops is part of its sourcing, so the stopping points are printed.
No processing time is stated for a North Dakota filing, because none is published on the Secretary of State’s limited liability company page as read on September 2, 2026. Nothing has been substituted for it.
The tax negative is scoped to the enumerated chapter indexes of the two titles where a motor carrier charge would sit, together with the repeal marker on the property-transport chapter. It is not a sweep of the revenue title.
The safety analysis rests on a three-section administrative chapter read in full, and the conjunctive weight-measure question inside the exemption is worked out on the North Dakota hot shot page rather than here.
The public liability filing question for household goods, and the analysis of what the surviving insurance section does and does not require, likewise sit on that page.
One date belongs in the diary. On October 1, 2026 the national bracket charges go up, and because this state fixes no amount of its own they go up here without any state rulemaking whatsoever. The citation that proves the lower amount today will be pointing at the higher one by the evening of that day. Every other figure above came from a primary source opened 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 North Dakota 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 North Dakota 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.
No. The Secretary of State states it directly: “A business may not serve as its own registered agent.” An individual from the business may serve as a noncommercial registered agent if they reside in North Dakota, so the owner personally can do it — the entity cannot. This is the opposite of the rule in several neighbouring states.
Yes, and the consequence of not having it is severe. The Secretary of State states that businesses “must obtain an agent’s approval before naming them as a commercial or noncommercial registered agent”, that failure to do so “may result in the involuntary dissolution of your business”, and that “Proof of the approval is not required to be filed with the Secretary of State.” Keep the written consent yourself, because the state holds no copy.
Registration is $135 for a domestic or foreign company and the annual report is $50, with a filing deadline of November 15. An amendment is $50, and dissolution, termination or withdrawal is $20. The governing chapter is N.D.C.C. ch. 10-32.1. All read September 2, 2026.
No. That figure is what a commercial registered agent pays to be included in the Secretary of State’s published listing, with $500 for removal from it. It is a supplier’s cost, not a carrier’s. A small operation appoints a noncommercial agent, which requires no listing at all.
None was located. The Century Code title index carries the entry “Chapter 39-04.1 - Additional Fee for Transportation of Property [Repealed]” — the chapter that would have housed such a charge is dead. The negative rests on the enumerated chapter indexes of the two relevant titles rather than a sweep of the revenue title.
Because the heading survives. N.D.C.C. ch. 49-18 is titled “MOTOR CARRIERS”, and the entire body of the chapter, read September 2, 2026, is a repeal block citing six session laws, the last of them in 1995. Anyone who cites the chapter by its title without opening it will report a licensing regime that ended three decades ago.
It depends which one. N.D.C.C. 39-12-02, read in full September 2, 2026, sets a single trip permit at $20 per trip; an overwidth permit to 14 ft 6 in and an overlength permit to 120 ft at $20 per trip, $50 per month or $150 unlimited annually each; a bridge length permit at $30 per trip; a longer combination vehicle permit at $100 per month; and the ten percent weight exemption, harvest and wintertime permit at $50 per month or $250 per year. An online system may add up to $15 per permit.
Not beyond a uniform program. N.D.C.C. 39-12-02 provides that “a city, county, or township having control of roads may not impose additional fees for the use of roads beyond the fees established under a uniform permit program.” Local bodies may still penalize a violation of a posted road restriction, and a denied permit can be renegotiated locally, but they cannot simply stack a charge.
Paper is not required — the statute accepts either. The permit “must be carried in the vehicle to which it refers in printed or electronic format and must be opened to inspection by a peace officer or agent of the superintendent of the highway patrol.” Note also that violating the permit’s own terms or conditions is itself a violation of the chapter.
Not in the light band. The state adoption names “Part 385 - Subpart D - New Entrant Safety Assurance Program” as item five of its list, but an unnumbered paragraph after item sixteen exempts intrastate commercial motor vehicles at twenty-six thousand pounds or less from all of the adopted federal safety regulations, absent placarded hazardous materials or the named passenger limbs. Reading only the list gives the opposite answer.
No, and structurally there is nothing to bond. The one bond in the surviving motor carrier layer is a cash release bond under N.D.C.C. 39-12-16, sitting inside the impoundment sequence after a weight violation; it is not filed with an agency and is not a condition of any credential. The surviving household goods chapter takes a filed insurance policy or an insurer’s certificate, and contains no bond at all.
Possibly, because weight is one of three tests. The 2026 North Dakota instruction manual states the limbs as two axles over 26,000 pounds, “has three or more axles, regardless of weight”, or a combination exceeding 26,000 pounds. The axle limb carries no pounds figure. A single trip permit is an alternative at $20 to $100, valid three days, plus a $10 routing service fee.
There is no order because there are no state steps to order. With no intrastate operating authority for general freight, no state insurance filing and no surviving state carrier tax, nothing conditions anything else. The two real conditions belong to permits — obtain one before the movement, and the permit’s terms bind as statute once issued — and one belongs to the company layer, where the agent’s approval must precede the appointment.
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.
