Motor carrier classes by state
Rhode Island runs the most complete state motor carrier regime in New England and one of the most complete anywhere: a certificate that expires with the calendar year, a tariff that has to be on file before it stays in force, an in-state office or an agent recertified annually, a certificate number legible at fifty feet, and a fuel license that costs nothing at all. Each of those was read in the statute or the rule that writes it.
The mistake a first-year Rhode Island carrier makes is assuming a small state means a light regime. The opposite is true here. Rhode Island writes its motor carrier obligations into statute rather than leaving them to a regulator’s discretion, and then adds a Division rule that goes past the federal floor in two specific places most operators have never met.
This page is about the parts of that regime a startup meets before its first renewal: what the entity costs, when the credential expires, what has to be on file for it to remain in force, where the fuel account lives, what has to be painted on the truck, and which address the Division has to be able to find you at.
One vocabulary problem runs through the whole subject and is worth flagging before anything else. Two different Rhode Island chapters use the word administrator for two different officials. In the motor carrier chapter it means the public utilities administrator. In the fuel use chapter it means the tax administrator. Reading one for the other sends a founder to the wrong building. Everything below was read at source on September 3, 2026.
Rhode Island puts more of a carrier’s obligations in the statute book than almost any state its size, and a startup meets most of them in year one.
Send the units, the lanes and the commodity, and tell us when the authority was granted.
The Rhode Island entity layer is priced in a single statutory section rather than on an agency fee page, which makes it unusually stable and unusually easy to verify. R.I. Gen. Laws section 7-16-65 opens “The secretary of state shall charge and collect:” and then runs a numbered list.
Item (1) is the formation charge: “For filing the original articles of organization, a fee of one hundred fifty dollars ($150)”. Item (13) is the recurring one: “For filing an annual report, a fee of fifty dollars ($50.00)”. So the ongoing cost of holding a Rhode Island company is one third of what it cost to create it, which is the ordinary pattern and a marked contrast with the flat structures some neighboring states use.
Three further items on the same list matter to a carrier and are rarely quoted. Item (2) prices an amendment or restatement of the articles at fifty dollars. Item (4) prices articles of dissolution at fifty dollars, so leaving is cheaper than arriving. And item (19) is the catch-all: “For filing any other statement or report, except an annual report, of a domestic or foreign limited liability company, a fee of ten dollars ($10.00)”.
That last one is worth knowing because of what falls into it. Changing a resident agent, or changing the agent’s address, is done by filed statement under the agent section, and ten dollars is the ordinary charge for such a statement. Keeping the record accurate in Rhode Island is therefore close to free, which removes the usual excuse for letting it go stale. Read on R.I. Gen. Laws 7-16-65 on September 3, 2026.
Rhode Island does not call it a registered agent. Section 7-16-11(a) provides: “Each domestic or foreign registered limited liability company shall have a resident agent for service of process on the limited liability company who shall be either: (1) An individual resident of this state; or (2) A corporation, limited partnership, or limited liability company, and in each case either domestic or one authorized to transact business in this state.”
The list is closed and it is short. An individual has to actually reside in Rhode Island. An entity has to be either formed here or authorized to do business here. A founder in Massachusetts or Connecticut who intended to serve as his own agent for a Rhode Island company cannot, unless he lives in Rhode Island or puts a qualifying entity in the role.
Subsections (b) and (c) then govern changing the agent and changing the agent’s address, each by a statement filed with the secretary of state. That is the mechanism the ten-dollar catch-all fee attaches to, and it is the reason a stale agent record in Rhode Island is a choice rather than an expense. Read on R.I. Gen. Laws 7-16-11 on September 3, 2026.
Section 39-12-7 governs issuance of the common carrier certificate, and buried in the middle of it is a renewal rule that has nothing to do with when the certificate was granted: “Certificates issued under this chapter shall be renewed before the close of business on December 31 of each calendar year. The renewal fee shall be one hundred dollars ($100) and shall be submitted with the renewal form.”
A carrier certificated in February gets eleven months. A carrier certificated in November gets weeks. Nothing in the section prorates the fee or shifts the date, and the standard is renewal before the close of business on December 31 rather than by midnight or by postmark. For a startup that obtained authority late in the year, the first renewal arrives while the operation is still learning what its own routes cost.
The section also sets the entry test, and it is a fitness test decided after a hearing rather than an administrative check: a certificate issues “after a hearing, to any qualified applicant therefor, authorizing the whole or any part of the operations covered by the application, if it is found that the applicant is fit, willing, and able properly to perform the service proposed and to conform to the provisions of this chapter and the requirements, orders, rules, and regulations of the administrator thereunder; otherwise the application shall be denied.”
Two phrases in that sentence deserve attention. The whole or any part means the Division can grant less than was asked for, so an applicant can succeed and still not have the authority it planned around. And otherwise the application shall be denied is mandatory rather than permissive: there is no middle outcome written into the section. Read on R.I. Gen. Laws 39-12-7 on September 3, 2026.
A Rhode Island certificate expires on December 31 whatever month it was granted, and the tariff behind it is a condition of it staying alive.
Tell us the lanes, the equipment and the commodity and we will price the year rather than the paperwork.
The last sentence of section 39-12-7 is a condition attached to both ends of the certificate’s life at once: “No certificate shall be issued to a common carrier by motor vehicle or, when issued, shall remain in force authorizing the transportation of property over the publicly used highways of this state, unless the rates and charges upon which the property is transported by the carrier shall have been published in the tariff and filed with the administrator in accordance with this chapter.”
Read the construction rather than the subject matter. The sentence bars issuance, and then separately bars the certificate from remaining in force. That is not a filing deadline. It is a continuing condition, so a carrier whose published rates fall out of step with what it actually charges has a certificate problem rather than a paperwork problem.
For a new operation the practical effect is that the rate structure has to exist, in a publishable form, before the credential is usable — which is an unusual demand to make of a business that has not yet learned what its lanes cost to run. It is also why Rhode Island startups are well advised to build the tariff around what the operation can sustain rather than around the first load somebody offers.
Section 39-12-22 is the interstate side of the Rhode Island regime, and it contains one of the clearest examples in this series of a statute that is current, unrepealed, and describing a world that ended.
The duty is plain: “Every motor carrier engaged in transporting property over the highways of this state for compensation, in interstate commerce, shall file an application with the administrator for a permit of registration. The application shall be accompanied by a fee of twenty-five dollars ($25.00).” Twenty-five dollars, read on the served statute on September 3, 2026.
The qualifying condition is where it becomes historical. The administrator issues the permit “Upon a showing by the carrier that it has been authorized by the Interstate Commerce Commission to conduct an operation into, from, within, or through this state, and that the carrier is in compliance with all other requirements of this chapter”, and the carrier “shall not so operate in interstate commerce unless and until the permit of registration shall have been issued.” The Interstate Commerce Commission was abolished at the end of 1995. The section carries no repeal marker and its history line shows no amendment addressing that.
This page reports the text as served and does not tell a reader how the Division administers it today, because that was not read. What the section does say clearly, and what does not depend on the defunct reference, is the closing grant: “Every intrastate motor carrier holding either a common-carrier certificate or a contract-carrier permit from the administrator is hereby granted the right to operate motor vehicles in interstate commerce in the transportation of property for compensation … without obtaining an interstate permit of registration from the administrator.” So a carrier that already holds the intrastate credential is expressly excused from this one.
The section adds two narrowing rules worth knowing. A carrier files only “that portion of its interstate authority permitting operations within the borders of this state”, and emergency or temporary operating authority lasting thirty consecutive days or less need not be filed at all, provided the carrier has registered its authority and identified its vehicles under the chapter. Read on R.I. Gen. Laws 39-12-22.
Rhode Island does something in section 39-12-26 that almost no other state does in a single paragraph: it states the federal registration duty for interstate carriers and, in the very next sentence, provides an entirely separate in-state credential for the carriers the federal law does not reach.
The federal half directs every interstate motor carrier transporting property for compensation over Rhode Island highways, subject to the chapter, to “register and identify all vehicles to be operated in the state” in accordance with the federal transportation act of 2005, the carrier registration act inside it, the interstate agreement made under it, “and/or any related successor federal law(s)”. That last clause is doing quiet work: it forward-references successor law, so the section does not go stale when the federal instrument is replaced.
The in-state half follows immediately. Carriers “not subject to the provisions of the foregoing federal law” apply instead to the administrator for a vehicle identification device, and the statute assesses twenty dollars ($20.00) for each device applied for. So a purely Rhode Island operation is not outside the system; it is inside a different, cheaper, state-run version of it.
That is the Rhode Island answer to a question most states leave hanging. In many jurisdictions a carrier that never crosses a line simply falls outside the federal registration and nothing replaces it. Here something does, at twenty dollars a device, furnished annually, with a registration card that the driver must have in the vehicle while it is operating. Read on R.I. Gen. Laws 39-12-26 on September 3, 2026. The device analysis itself, and how it is enforced roadside, is read on the Rhode Island hot shot trucking insurance page.
Section 31-36.1-3(a) requires “Each carrier operating a qualified motor vehicle in two (2) or more jurisdictions” to apply for a motor carrier fuel use license on approved forms, and then states its own price in five words: “there shall be no fee for this license”. That is a stated zero rather than an unread figure, which is a distinction worth drawing because most absent fees are the second thing and not the first.
The license runs open-endedly — it “shall remain in effect until surrendered or revoked” — and identification devices are supplied in the quantity requested, one on the exterior of each side of the cab of each qualified vehicle. There is a date attached: devices “shall be issued each year by the administrator and shall be displayed on or before March 1”.
There is also a genuinely useful startup provision at subsection (c). An unlicensed carrier may obtain a temporary license authorizing one qualified motor vehicle to operate on Rhode Island highways “for a period not to exceed ten (10) days”, without complying with the fees in the section, the tax in section 31-36.1-5, or the bond in section 31-36.1-6. And it too is free: “There shall be no fee for this license.”
Subsection (b) lists four grounds on which the administrator may refuse a license, and the fourth is the one that catches a struggling operator: an application “filed by any motor carrier who is delinquent in the payment of any fee, tax, penalty, or other amount due the administrator for its account”. A refusal on that ground follows a hearing with ten days written notice at which the applicant may appear in person or by counsel. Read on R.I. Gen. Laws 31-36.1-3 on September 3, 2026.
Most states leave the definition of a qualified motor vehicle to the interstate agreement. Rhode Island copies it into the general laws, which means the test is enforceable Rhode Island law and can be read without leaving the statute book.
Section 31-36.1-2(5) defines “Qualified motor vehicles” as a motor vehicle used, designed or maintained for transportation of persons or property and: “(A) Having two (2) axles and a gross vehicle weight or registered gross vehicle weight exceeding twenty-six thousand pounds (26,000 lbs.) … or (B) Having three (3) or more axles regardless of weight; or (C) Is used in combination, when the weight of such combination exceeds twenty-six thousand pounds (26,000 lbs.)”. Recreational vehicles are excluded.
Limb (B) is the one a startup should read twice. It carries no weight floor at all, so a three-axle unit is qualified whatever it weighs, including well inside the light commercial band. A new operator who bought a three-axle truck on the assumption that everything below 26,000 pounds sat outside the fuel regime has misread the definition, and in Rhode Island has misread a Rhode Island statute rather than an interstate agreement.
What the qualification actually triggers is section 31-36.1-5: “There is levied and imposed upon motor carriers a tax at the rate specified in section 31-36-7 on the use of fuel for the propulsion of qualified motor vehicles on the public highways within this state.” Fuel bought in state is taxed at purchase; fuel bought outside is paid when the quarterly returns are filed. This is a fuel use tax and not a weight-distance or ton-mile tax, and the distinction is carried deliberately. Both sections were read on the Rhode Island legislature server on September 3, 2026.
Section 31-36.1-6 is short and every qualifier in it is load-bearing, so it is quoted rather than summarized: “Notwithstanding provisions to the contrary, the tax administrator, pursuant to rules and regulations adopted by the tax administrator, in his or her discretion, may require a motor carrier to post a bond. Such bond shall be consistent with the provisions of the International Fuel Tax Agreement.”
In his or her discretion, may require is not a requirement. A page that reported this as a Rhode Island bonding obligation would be converting a discretionary power into an automatic duty, and a founder budgeting against that would be budgeting for something that may never be asked of them.
What the bond is, if it is asked for, is defined in the same chapter: either a corporate surety bond payable to the state and conditioned on performance of the chapter’s requirements, or an equivalent deposit with the state treasury of money or of United States, state or county obligations taken at market value.
There is a second and quite different Rhode Island bond, and it is not this one. The security chapter for motor carrier liability permits a hundred-thousand-dollar surety bond as an alternative to insurance, filed through the general treasurer. That instrument is read in detail on the Rhode Island hot shot trucking insurance page and is not the fuel bond described here.
This is the first of two obligations in the Division’s own rule that go past the federal floor, and it is the one out-of-state founders trip over. Section 1.8 of 815-RICR-50-05-1, captioned Maintenance of Office in Rhode Island, provides:
“Every common and contract motor carrier of property holding intrastate operating authority shall maintain an office within the state of Rhode Island unless a duly authorized Rhode Island Agent of Process is on file with the Division. Recertification of such Agent of Process is required annually. Complete business addresses for all certificate holders shall include the street, city or town, state, zip code and telephone number of the main office. Post office boxes will not be accepted.”
Three separate demands sit in that paragraph. There is a physical presence requirement with a named alternative. The alternative is not a one-time appointment but an annual recertification, so an agent arrangement that was correct at launch lapses by inaction. And the address given must be a street address with a telephone number, with post office boxes refused in terms.
The federal process agent regime does not require annual recertification and does not refuse a box in those words. So a carrier that satisfied the federal requirement and stopped there has not satisfied Rhode Island. The rule was read on the Rhode Island rules portal on September 3, 2026, where its status is recorded as Active with an effective date of 01/04/2022.
The second beyond-federal obligation is about what is painted on the door. Section 1.9 of the same rule, captioned Vehicle Marking and Identification, provides: “The name as it appears on the certificate, or permit, street address, town or city, along with the certificate or permit number shall be displayed on both sides of every vehicle utilized as a common or contract carrier in letters visible at 50 feet. Appropriate abbreviations are acceptable.”
Two elements go beyond the ordinary federal marking rule. The street address and town or city must appear, and so must the certificate or permit number. A truck marked to the federal standard alone is not marked to the Rhode Island standard, and the legibility test is stated as a distance rather than a letter height.
The paragraph closes with a constraint on branding that catches operators who have accumulated names: “If business names are used in addition to the name on the certificate, the name must be registered with the Division. Only one business name can be used.” One. A carrier running a legal entity name, a trading name for retail work and a second trading name for a broker relationship has a problem here that has nothing to do with trademarks.
All of section 1.9 was read on the rules portal on September 3, 2026, where the rule is recorded as Active with an effective date of 01/04/2022. Section 1.10 adds the record side of the same discipline. Intrastate carriers must retain for at least three years “all freight bills, delivery receipts, shipping orders, tariffs or supplements, copies of contracts and schedules of actual rates, records of insurance coverage, and other prescribed business records”. And section 1.18 supplies the consequence for breaching any of this: suspension, revocation, or a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars per violation.
Rhode Island runs a heavy duty diesel emissions program whose reach begins well below the weight most carriers associate with commercial regulation. Section 31-47.2-2(b) provides that vehicles subject to the chapter “shall include, but not necessarily be limited to, all diesel powered trucks and buses of all model years and over eight thousand five hundred pounds (8,500 lbs.) gross vehicle weight rating that operate on the highways of Rhode Island”.
The hedge in that sentence is carried rather than trimmed. Shall include, but not necessarily be limited to means the listed class is a floor on the program’s reach and not a boundary of it, and subsection (b) opens by leaving the scope to regulation.
The enforcement provisions are practical and short. Emissions inspections “may be performed at roadside or in conjunction with any safety or weight inspection”, which means a truck stopped for weight can be tested for opacity in the same stop. And a failure carries a hard clock: a vehicle found not to comply “shall be repaired within forty-five (45) consecutive calendar days after the inspection so as to comply … or not be operated on the highways of the state”.
Forty-five consecutive days is not forty-five business days, and the alternative written into the section is not a fine but a bar on operating. For a one-truck or two-truck startup that is an existential clock rather than a maintenance note. The section directs the division of motor vehicles administrator, at the direction of the director of revenue and in coordination with environmental management, to set the standards and testing techniques; the fee is set by department of revenue rule and the amount was not read for this page, so none is stated. Read on R.I. Gen. Laws 31-47.2-2 on September 3, 2026.
Rhode Island is the densest state in the country by road network and one of the smallest by area, and those two facts do more to price a new venture here than every statutory fee on this page combined.
What that geography produces is a specific risk shape. Almost nothing in Rhode Island is a long haul. Almost everything is stop-and-go, in traffic, on roads bounded by other traffic, with Providence at the center and Massachusetts and Connecticut a few minutes away in most directions. Frequency of exposure is high and the severity distribution is dominated by low-speed contact rather than by highway events. An applicant describing an intrastate operation is often describing a multi-state one without meaning to, because the state line is closer than the next customer.
The state layer contributes in two places. A carrier that holds the intrastate credential is expressly excused from the separate interstate permit of registration, which simplifies the file. And the December 31 renewal means a first-year submission from a carrier certificated late in the year is being made by an operator who has a renewal in front of him before he has a full quarter of operating history behind him.
Everything else is structural, because a first-year carrier has no losses to read. Equipment, commodity, radius, driver history and the date authority was granted carry the file. Rhode Island adds one more question worth answering in advance: whether the tariff on file describes what the operation actually charges. The December 31 renewal date and the hundred-dollar renewal fee behind that point were read at section 39-12-7 on September 3, 2026.
The security schedule is the largest single Rhode Island subject for a carrier and it is not on this page. The statutory minimums, the surety bond alternative, the self-insurance route, the thirty-day cancellation machinery and the rule that voids limitation-of-liability clauses in a bill of lading are all read on the Rhode Island hot shot trucking insurance page.
Weight, the permit statute and the seasonal and route restrictions that reach a loaded body are read on the Rhode Island dump trucking insurance page. The state view across every motor carrier class sits on the Rhode Island trucking insurance hub. Those pages carry their own figures and their own reading dates; nothing on this page restates a number from either of them.
Splitting it this way keeps each page worth arriving at. A reader who follows a link from here should find something that is not already here.
Three things are missing and each is missing for a reason.
No form number is given for any Rhode Island application. The statutes describe the applications as made “in the form to be provided by” the administrator, and no numbered form was read, so none is named.
No processing time is given for a Rhode Island entity filing, because no agency-stated turnaround was read on any page fetched for this work. And no dollar amount is given for the heavy duty diesel inspection, because section 31-47.2-5 sets that fee by department of revenue rule and the rule itself was not opened here.
One methodological note belongs with those. The Rhode Island statute pages carry no title element at all in their served markup; the citation appears in a heading inside the body. Every section quoted on this page was verified against that heading rather than against a page title, because a document served without a title cannot be checked the usual way.
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 Rhode Island 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 Rhode Island 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.
One hundred and fifty dollars. R.I. Gen. Laws 7-16-65(1) directs the secretary of state to charge and collect, for filing the original articles of organization, a fee of one hundred fifty dollars. The annual report is fifty dollars under item (13) of the same section, and articles of dissolution are fifty dollars under item (4). Read September 3, 2026.
The statute gives a closed list. R.I. Gen. Laws 7-16-11(a) requires a resident agent who is either an individual resident of this state, or a corporation, limited partnership or limited liability company that is domestic or authorized to transact business here. An out-of-state owner cannot serve as his own agent unless he lives in Rhode Island or puts a qualifying entity in the role.
December 31, regardless of when it was issued. R.I. Gen. Laws 39-12-7 provides that certificates issued under the chapter shall be renewed before the close of business on December 31 of each calendar year, that the renewal fee shall be one hundred dollars, and that it is submitted with the renewal form. There is no proration, so a certificate granted in November renews within weeks.
Yes, and it is a continuing condition rather than a deadline. The closing sentence of 39-12-7 provides that no certificate shall be issued, or when issued shall remain in force, unless the rates and charges on which property is transported have been published in the tariff and filed with the administrator. A carrier whose actual charges drift away from its filed tariff has a certificate problem.
It is a twenty-five dollar filing under 39-12-22 for carriers operating in interstate commerce over Rhode Island highways. A carrier that already holds a Rhode Island common-carrier certificate or contract-carrier permit is expressly granted the right to operate interstate without obtaining it. The section’s qualifying condition still refers to authorization by the Interstate Commerce Commission, a body abolished at the end of 1995, and it carries no repeal marker.
Yes, and this is unusual. R.I. Gen. Laws 39-12-26 sets out the federal duty for interstate carriers and then, in the same paragraph, routes everyone the federal law misses to a state credential: a vehicle identification device costing twenty dollars each. Devices are furnished annually and each comes with a registration card the driver has to have aboard while the vehicle is operating.
Nothing. R.I. Gen. Laws 31-36.1-3(a) requires a carrier operating a qualified motor vehicle in two or more jurisdictions to apply for a motor carrier fuel use license and states in terms that there shall be no fee for this license. The temporary ten-day license for a single vehicle under subsection (c) is also expressly free. Identification devices are issued yearly and displayed on or before March 1.
Only for two of its three limbs. R.I. Gen. Laws 31-36.1-2(5) defines a qualified motor vehicle by three tests, and limb (B) reads: having three or more axles regardless of weight. A three-axle unit qualifies at any weight. The 26,000 pound figure governs the two-axle limb and the combination limb. Rhode Island writes this test into its own statute rather than relying on the interstate agreement text.
Not automatically. R.I. Gen. Laws 31-36.1-6 provides that the tax administrator, pursuant to rules he or she adopts, in his or her discretion, may require a motor carrier to post a bond consistent with the fuel agreement. That is a discretionary power rather than a standing requirement, and treating it as automatic would mean budgeting for something that may never be asked.
An office or a named alternative that has to be renewed yearly. Section 1.8 of 815-RICR-50-05-1 requires every common and contract motor carrier of property holding intrastate authority to maintain an office in Rhode Island unless a duly authorized Rhode Island Agent of Process is on file with the Division, and requires recertification of that agent annually. Addresses must be street addresses with a telephone number, and post office boxes are refused.
More than the federal rule asks for. Section 1.9 of 815-RICR-50-05-1 requires the name as it appears on the certificate or permit, the street address, the town or city, and the certificate or permit number, on both sides of every vehicle, in letters visible at 50 feet. Abbreviations are acceptable. Any additional business name must be registered with the Division, and only one business name can be used.
Yes, from a weight most operators would not expect. R.I. Gen. Laws 31-47.2-2(b) reaches all diesel powered trucks and buses of all model years over 8,500 pounds gross vehicle weight rating operating on Rhode Island highways, with the class stated as including but not necessarily limited to those vehicles. Inspections may be done at roadside or alongside a safety or weight inspection.
A hard clock starts. R.I. Gen. Laws 31-47.2-2(f) requires a vehicle found not to comply to be repaired within forty-five consecutive calendar days after the inspection so as to comply, or not be operated on the highways of the state. That is consecutive calendar days rather than business days, and the alternative written into the section is a bar on operating rather than a penalty.
Because two different officials share the word. R.I. Gen. Laws 39-12-2(1) defines administrator as the public utilities administrator, and 31-36.1-2(1) defines the same word as the tax administrator. The motor carrier credential sits with the Division of Public Utilities and Carriers; the fuel account sits with the Division of Taxation. Reading one for the other sends a founder to the wrong agency.
Section 1.18 of 815-RICR-50-05-1 provides that any certificate or permit holder who violates a statute, rule or regulation promulgated by the Division is subject to suspension, revocation, or a fine not to exceed one thousand dollars per violation, under R.I. Gen. Laws 39-12-35 and 39-12-36. The per-violation framing matters more than the number for an operator with several trucks.
Every figure on this page was read at the source below on September 3, 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.
