Motor carrier classes by state
South Dakota asks a new carrier for very little and dates almost none of it in a way that stays put. Its annual report due date is being replaced on January 1, 2027 by a provision already enacted, so the Legislature currently publishes two versions of the same section and both are correct for their own period. Its registration ladder starts below four thousand pounds, its safety chapter carries two different frozen federal editions twenty years apart, and the one surviving section in its motor carrier chapter captioned as an application for a permit is a single-trip road permit rather than anything a business applies for.
A new venture is an authority applicant with no operating history, and most of the first year is federal and looks the same everywhere. This page is about what South Dakota adds, which is less than most states and more precisely dated than most.
Everything below was read at primary source on September 2, 2026, and every figure carries the date it was read. Two of them have a known change date: one in twenty-nine days, one in four months. Both changes are already law rather than proposals, which is why both the current and the scheduled text appear here together.
The Legislature publishes its statutes through a machine-readable interface rather than as pages, which matters for a practical reason. For at least one section it serves the current text and the scheduled replacement in the same response, one after the other, separated by a header naming the effective date. A reader who takes the first block and stops has the version that expires; a reader who takes the last block and stops has the version that has not started.
Nothing on this page is a sequence. South Dakota conditions two things on movement having not yet begun, and each is stated as the condition its statute states. No order among the tasks of starting a business is asserted.
A South Dakota file is short, and the short files are the ones where a stale date does the most damage.
Send the equipment, the commodity and the radius, and we will work out which of these actually reaches your operation.
South Dakota charges more to file on paper, and it is worth understanding how the schedule expresses that, because the two figures look like two prices for one filing and they are not.
The Secretary of State’s filing fees schedule, headed as effective July 1, 2016, carries the domestic limited liability company block with articles of organization at $150 filed electronically online and $165 filed via paper, the paper figure annotated as including the paper filing fee. Read September 2, 2026.
The fifteen-dollar difference is itself a listed item elsewhere on the same schedule, in the general business services block: “Paper Filing Fee for documents able to be filed online | $15”. So the document costs $150 and the channel costs $15, rather than the document costing two different amounts. That distinction becomes useful the moment more than one paper filing is contemplated, because the surcharge attaches per document able to be filed online rather than once per visit.
The agency’s own form agrees with the schedule. The articles of organization form for a domestic limited liability company carries the header “FILING FEE: $165 (includes $15 paper filing fee)” — which is the paper figure, because the form is the paper route.
For calibration, the foreign side of the same table is an order of magnitude different: a foreign certificate of authority is $750 online and $765 on paper. A venture bringing an out-of-state company into South Dakota rather than forming one here is looking at five times the domestic cost.
One sourcing note. The formation fee is not in the statute. The limited liability company act’s fee section does not carry it, and the neighbouring section with a similar caption governs how documents are delivered rather than what they cost. This figure is agency-published only, which means it can move without a bill.
Several states sell a completion time. South Dakota sells priority, and it says so in a parenthetical that is worth reading closely before it is relied on for a start date.
The same schedule carries, in the general business services block: “Expedited Fee (Expedited service is defined as: completion sooner than the normal course of business upon request.) | $50”.
That parenthetical is the agency’s complete definition. It names no hour count, no business-day count and no cutoff time, and none appears anywhere else on the schedule. Expedited service here means faster than whatever the office is currently doing, which is a relative statement about an unpublished baseline.
The unpublished baseline is the second half of the problem. No standard turnaround appears on the schedule either. So a new venture buying expedited service is buying a comparative improvement over a figure the office does not publish, and cannot compute a promised completion date from anything on the page.
The practical reading is not that fifty dollars is a bad purchase. It is that a South Dakota formation should not be placed on a critical path with a date attached to it, because the state has not published anything that would support such a date. Where a contract start depends on the entity existing, the safe planning assumption is the one the agency has actually made available: none.
What the schedule does price precisely is the channel. The paper surcharge above is a definite fifteen dollars for a definite consequence. The expedite fee is a definite fifty dollars for an indefinite one.
South Dakota requires a registered agent, and it does not say so in the limited liability company act. The requirement arrives by cross-reference, which is why searching the business-entity act alone for the words registered agent returns less than expected.
SDCL 47-34A-203(a)(3) makes “The information required by § 59-11-6” a mandatory content of the articles of organization. That is the whole of the requirement as it appears in the formation statute — a pointer.
SDCL 59-11-6 is where the substance lives, and it is captioned “Appointment of registered agent”. It provides that a registered agent filing must state: “(1) The name of the represented entity’s commercial registered agent; or (2) If the entity does not have a commercial registered agent: (a) The name and address of the entity’s noncommercial registered agent; or (b) The title of an office or other position with the entity if service of process is to be sent to the person holding that office or position, and the address of the business office of that person.”
Three routes, then, and the third is the one most often overlooked. An entity that names neither a commercial agent nor an individual noncommercial one may instead name an office within itself — a position rather than a person — with that person’s business address. For a small operation whose only member is also its only manager, that route exists.
The structure matters for maintenance as well as for formation. Because the requirement is a cross-reference into a general title rather than a rule inside the entity act, changes to it can happen in a title a business owner has no reason to be watching. The same title carries the annual report contents described below, for the same reason.
New venture pricing turns on the operation, not on how thin the state file happens to be.
Send the equipment list, the radius, the commodity and the intended formation date, and we will fit the South Dakota pieces into the submission.
The recurring filing here is genuinely annual, unlike the biennial regimes in several neighbouring states, and its contents are set somewhere other than where its duty is set.
SDCL 47-34A-211 creates the duty and immediately delegates: a limited liability company, and a foreign limited liability company authorized to transact business in this state, “shall deliver to the secretary of state for filing an annual report pursuant to §§ 59-11-24 to 59-11-26, inclusive.” The entity act says that it is owed; the general title says what is in it and when.
The fee is on the Secretary of State’s schedule and splits by channel like the formation fee: $55 filed electronically online, $70 filed via paper. A delinquent report attracts a further $55, listed separately as a late fee. The agency’s own annual report form for a domestic limited liability company repeats the paper figure and the delinquency charge in its header.
SDCL 59-11-24 sets the contents: the entity name, its jurisdiction, its principal office address, the registered agent information required by the section discussed above, and the names and business addresses of its governors — with the useful carve-out that a member-managed limited liability company need not set out its governors.
The item most likely to surprise a trucking startup is the last one, because it has nothing to do with trucking. The report must state “Whether the entity owns any agricultural land, as defined in § 43-2A-1, and, if so, whether the entity has any foreign beneficial owners,” followed by requirements to give the legal description or common location, the total acreage and the current use. The Secretary of State aggregates the answers into a public report each December.
A carrier that owns nothing but a yard and a shop answers no and moves on. A carrier whose owners put the operating land inside the same entity as the trucks has a disclosure obligation attached to its annual filing, and it is worth knowing that before the entity structure is settled rather than afterwards.
This is the reason no South Dakota due-date sentence should be published without a date attached to it. The provision that fixes when the annual report is owed is being replaced in four months, the replacement is already on the books, and the Legislature currently publishes both.
The current text, SDCL 59-11-25, is captioned “Time for filing annual report.” and provides: “The first annual report shall be delivered to the Office of the Secretary of State before the first day of the second month of the year following the year in which a filing entity or qualified foreign entity … was authorized to transact business. The subsequent annual report shall be delivered to the Office of the Secretary of State by the same date each subsequent year.”
So today the rule is a single fixed date derived from the year of authorization, and it recurs on that same date every year.
The replacement carries a longer caption — “Time for filing annual report--Exceptions--Indication on formation document--Change-of-filing-date form” — and changes the shape of the answer entirely. It provides that an entity required by law to file an annual report must do so “(1) In the month representing the first-year anniversary of the entity’s formation and in each same month annually thereafter; or (2) Beginning in the calendar year after the entity’s formation, on or before January thirty-first, and each January thirty-first thereafter.” It adds: “At the time of formation, an entity shall indicate on the formation document which filing date the entity has selected.”
Its source line reads “SL 2008, ch 275, § 25; SL 2026, ch 203, § 1, eff. Jan. 1, 2027.” The effective date is on the face of the provision.
Two consequences for a venture forming now. First, a company formed before January 1, 2027 is governed by the current rule and should read it, not the replacement. Second, a company forming on or after that date acquires a choice it must exercise at formation rather than later — an anniversary month or a fixed January 31 — and the election is recorded on the formation document itself. A formation packet prepared from guidance written this year will not contain that election, and a formation packet prepared from the new provision will contain an election the current form has nowhere to put.
The Legislature’s interface serves both texts in one response, the second beneath a header naming January 1, 2027. Reading only the first block, or only the last, gets a correct South Dakota statute and the wrong rule for a given date.
The national registration for interstate carriers reaches South Dakota, and the state’s statutory language about it is unusual enough to quote rather than summarize.
SDCL 49-28-69 reads, in full: “Compliance with the Unified Carrier Registration Act. Notwithstanding any provisions of this chapter, the department may participate in and comply with the Unified Carrier Registration Act of 2005.”
The word is may. Several states on this network write the same commitment with shall, and at least one adds a separate provision making it unlawful to operate without registering. South Dakota grants a power rather than imposing a duty on itself, and the sentence begins by disapplying the rest of its own chapter to make room for the exercise.
That is a statement about the state, not about the carrier. The obligation on a carrier to register comes from federal law and from the plan, and it is not softened by how a participating state words its own authority. South Dakota is on the plan’s own participating states list, read September 2, 2026, and the Department of Revenue is the state body the chapter names.
Why carry the hedge at all, then? Because it is the kind of word that a reader will encounter and misinterpret in the other direction, concluding that registration is optional here. It is not. The permissive word governs whether the department participates in the plan, and it does.
South Dakota administers collection of the national registration fee and does not set it. The amounts are fixed by bracket and adopted by federal rule, and they are moving.
A one- or two-truck venture is a bracket B1 filer on either side of the date. What changes is nine dollars, and the section number the figure lives under.
The rule also fixes its own contestation window on the same date: petitions for reconsideration were to be submitted no later than October 1, 2026.
This section corrects something we previously recorded incorrectly, and the correction is worth stating in the open because the mistake is easy to repeat.
The South Dakota Department of Revenue publishes a commercial and agricultural vehicle handbook, and its 2022 edition is the current one — the department says so on its own site, and no later edition has been published. In its fuel tax agreement passages it states the qualifying test in full: a qualified motor vehicle is one used, designed, or maintained for transportation of persons or property “with two axles and a gross weight or registered gross vehicle weight exceeding 26,000 pounds; with three or more axles regardless of weight; or used in a combination exceeding 26,000 pounds gross vehicle weight.”
Three alternatives, and the middle one carries no pounds at all. For the fuel tax agreement, three axles qualifies a vehicle whatever it scales, and a light three-axle combination that clears no weight threshold in this state is inside that regime on the count alone.
We had previously recorded the handbook as stating the same axle limb for apportioned registration. Re-read at source on September 2, 2026, it does not. The phrase occurs exactly twice in the whole document and both occurrences are in the fuel tax material — once in the fuel tax chapter and once in the licensing chapter’s fuel tax section. The handbook’s registration material describes apportionment, the federal heavy vehicle use tax and excise tax, and contains no qualifying-vehicle definition.
So the honest statement of the position is this. South Dakota publishes the axle limb for the fuel tax agreement. No South Dakota source read here states a qualifying-vehicle definition for apportioned registration; that definition comes from the plan itself, and several other states recite it in their own manuals while South Dakota does not. That is a limit on what this state has published, not a finding that apportioned registration works differently here.
One further distinction the handbook draws is worth carrying so it is not conflated with either test. Its covered farm vehicle material turns on 26,001 pounds gross vehicle weight rating, and that is a federal exemption rather than a threshold on registration or on the fuel tax.
South Dakota levies no weight-distance tax and no ton-mile tax on motor carriers. What it charges is a registration fee banded by gross weight, which is a different kind of instrument and behaves differently: it is paid once a year on the vehicle rather than accruing with miles.
The proof of that negative is an enumeration rather than a search. The complete section lists of the commercial motor vehicle certificate chapter and of the motor carrier regulation chapter were both walked, and the only money sections in them are registration fees and the disposition of fees received. There is no distance-based charge to find.
SDCL 32-9-15 is the ladder, captioned “Schedule of commercial motor vehicle fees per gross pounds--Older vehicles”. Read at source on September 2, 2026 it runs: gross weight under 4,000 pounds, $85; 4,001 to 6,000, $100; 6,001 to 8,000, $115; 8,001 to 10,000, $130; 10,001 to 12,000, $150; 12,001 to 14,000, $175; 14,001 to 16,000, $200; 16,001 to 18,000, $225; and 18,001 to 20,000, $250. Above that, the statute provides for “each additional 2000 pounds or major fraction thereof in excess of 20,000 pounds, forty dollars.”
A fifteen-to-twenty-six-thousand-pound unit therefore sits squarely inside the published ladder rather than at its edge, and the ladder starts well below anything a freight operation runs. There is no small-vehicle floor here to fall under.
Two provisions in the same section are easy to miss and both change the arithmetic. A further seven dollars is added for vehicles or combinations over seventy-eight thousand pounds under the overweight provisions. And the section’s closing sentence — the “Older vehicles” half of its caption — provides that a vehicle ten years old or more by model year on the first of January pays ninety percent of the prescribed fee. A ten-percent reduction on used equipment is a real consideration for a startup buying older trucks.
One small defect in the text is worth noting for anyone doing the arithmetic precisely: the first band is worded as gross weight under 4,000 pounds and the second begins at 4,001, which leaves exactly 4,000 pounds unaddressed between them. Nothing in this range affects a freight venture, but it is the kind of gap that tells you to read the band edges rather than assume them.
The federal new entrant safety assurance program lives in a single part of the federal regulations, at its subpart D. Whether a state extends anything of that shape to its own intrastate carriers is answered by reading the state’s adoption list, and South Dakota’s list is short.
SDCL 49-28A-3 adopts, by enumeration, part 107 subparts F and G, parts 171 to 180, part 387 and parts 390 to 397. The enumeration steps from 387 straight to 390. Part 385 does not appear anywhere in the section, and the whole chapter was read section by section rather than sampled — all ten section entries — to confirm that it appears nowhere else in the chapter either.
Parts 380, 382, 383, 386, 398 and 399 are likewise absent from the list.
The consequence is a proved negative rather than a gap in the reading. There is no state-adopted new entrant safety assurance program for a purely intrastate South Dakota carrier to be inside, no state-adopted twelve-month or eighteen-month audit deadline, and no state analogue written in its place — nothing in either chapter creates a safety audit, a compliance review or an entry-level review program of its own.
That is a narrower statement than it may look, and the narrowness is deliberate. It says what the chapter does not adopt and what the two chapters do not create. It says nothing about what a carrier operating in interstate commerce owes federally, which is unaffected by any of this.
How much of the parts South Dakota did adopt reaches a light intrastate unit is a separate question with a more interesting answer, and it is worked through on our South Dakota hot shot page rather than repeated here.
South Dakota freezes the federal text it adopts at a stated date rather than adopting it as amended from time to time, and it rolls that date forward by legislation. What is easy to miss is that the chapter contains more than one such date, and reading only the main adoption section produces the wrong one for part of the chapter.
The headline date appears twice in a single sentence of the adoption section: the hazardous materials parts and the safety parts are each adopted “as amended through January 1, 2026”. That is the current freeze for the main body of adopted federal text, read September 2, 2026.
Elsewhere in the same chapter, SDCL 49-28A-10 — which requires warning placards on storage facilities for hazardous or explosive materials — references 49 CFR part 172 as amended through January 1, 2006. Twenty years behind the chapter’s own headline date, in the same chapter, on a topic a fuel or chemical operation could plausibly touch.
We state that precisely rather than loosely. That section is a storage-facility placarding rule; it is not a general adoption of the hazardous materials part, and describing it as one would overstate what it does. What it does establish is that a single freeze date cannot be assumed to govern a whole chapter.
The mechanism that moves the headline date is a duty rather than a clause. SDCL 49-28A-5 provides that “The director of the Division of the Highway Patrol shall annually review the regulations for motor carrier safety and the transportation of hazardous materials as contained in the code of federal regulations to determine if the rules promulgated pursuant to § 49-28A-2 should be amended.”
That duty has been discharged consistently. The adoption section’s source chain shows an amending act in every year from 1997 through 2026 without a gap, most recently by a 2026 session law. So the freeze is real but short-lived: a South Dakota edition is typically one year behind the current federal text rather than indefinitely behind it, and the chapter is amended annually rather than occasionally.
This is the trap most likely to produce a confidently wrong answer about South Dakota, and it survives because the caption is a perfectly reasonable description of something else.
SDCL 49-28-36.7 is captioned “Application for permit.” In a chapter titled motor carrier regulation, that reads exactly like the entry point a business would use. Its text is: “A motor carrier shall make an application for a single trip permit as required by the department, and the permit secured at a port of entry or by such other means designated by the department prior to beginning movement over the state’s highways. The application shall include the applicant’s name and business address, a description of the vehicle, and the route of travel suggested for the trip.”
A single trip permit, secured at a port of entry, describing one vehicle and one suggested route. That is a movement authorization, not a business credential, and it is the whole of what the section does.
The caption alone would invert the answer, and this is the general lesson worth taking out of the section. A caption in a codified statute is an editorial label attached to text; it survives amendments to the text beneath it and it is written to be short rather than to be complete. The body is the thing.
There is a structural reason this particular section is easy to miss in the other direction as well, which is worth knowing for anyone walking the chapter. Its number carries a decimal suffix, and this chapter is full of them — sections at .1, .2, .3, .4, .6, .7 and .8 appear scattered across the numbering. A plain sequential walk through whole numbers skips every suffixed section, including this one.
A second before-movement permit exists in the vehicle chapter, and its own caption says so: “Alternative permit to be secured before movement--Violation as misdemeanor”. Temporary thirty-day permits and temporary nonhire permits appear in the same chapter’s section list.
A negative is worth publishing only with its boundary attached, and this one has a boundary we can name.
The complete section list of the motor carrier regulation chapter was enumerated, section by section, and no bonding provision survives in it. The chapter is largely a graveyard of repealed sections with a small number of live ones, and none of the live ones is about security.
That is a real result for the chapter that would most naturally carry a carrier bond. It is not a statewide negative, and we do not present it as one. The highways and bridges title was not read in this pass, and a bond obligation attached to road use rather than to carriage would sit there rather than in the motor carrier chapter.
So the position is: no bond requirement was found in the chapter that would ordinarily contain one, and one title that could plausibly contain a different kind of bond was not opened. A carrier planning around this should treat the first half as established and the second half as unchecked.
We would rather record the edge of the search than let a clean-sounding sentence do work the reading does not support. A proved negative and an unexamined title are different things, and collapsing them is how a page acquires a claim nobody verified.
South Dakota carries two genuine conditioning relations and they have something in common that is worth naming: neither of them is about the enterprise. Both attach to a vehicle about to move.
The first is the single trip permit described above. The statute requires the permit to be secured “prior to beginning movement over the state’s highways.” That is a condition on a trip.
The second is the alternative permit in the vehicle chapter, whose caption states the same relation in its own words — the permit is to be secured before movement, and failing to do so is a misdemeanour. Again, a condition on a trip.
There is no authority-to-operation sequence in South Dakota of the kind several neighbouring states write, and the reason is structural rather than accidental. That analysis — what the motor carrier chapter used to contain, which session laws removed it, and what survives — is set out on our South Dakota hot shot page.
What follows for a new venture is that the state imposes no order on the tasks of starting a business. Nothing read says the entity must exist before the plates are obtained, or the plates before the fuel agreement license, or the registration before anything else. Two conditions exist, both are about a specific movement, and presenting the startup tasks as numbered steps would assert a sequence no South Dakota provision contains.
The one date that genuinely constrains planning is the annual report deadline, and as set out above, the rule that fixes it changes on January 1, 2027.
Several parts of the South Dakota picture are handled in detail on our South Dakota hot shot page, and repeating them would add length without adding anything usable.
The adoption sentence and what its carve-out does and does not remove for a light intrastate unit is one, and it is the sharpest reading in the whole state — the carve-out enumerates a range of parts and one adopted part sits outside that range in the same sentence.
The registration-refusal provisions are another, including the screen that reaches beyond the applicant to affiliation with a person ineligible for registration. So is the two-subject rulemaking power in the motor carrier chapter, and so is the treatment of indemnity clauses in motor carrier transportation contracts.
And so is the absence of any intrastate operating authority for a general-freight property carrier, together with the enumeration and the three successive session laws that establish it.
The South Dakota hot shot cell carries all of them with the provisions quoted in full. What this page covers is the surrounding layer: forming the company, the agent and the annual report, the due-date change already enacted for 2027, the national registration, the fuel agreement threshold, the vehicle registration ladder, the part that was never adopted, the chapter’s two freeze dates, and the permit whose caption is not its content.
Two provisions above have a known change date, and both changes are already enacted rather than proposed.
October 1, 2026 is the near one. The national registration bracket B1 rises from $46.00 to $55.00 for registration year 2027 and each subsequent year, the higher brackets move with it, and the federal section numbers holding the two tables are redesignated the same day.
January 1, 2027 is the state one, and it is the more consequential of the two for a company being formed now. The section fixing the annual report due date is replaced on that date by a provision requiring an election at formation between an anniversary month and a fixed January 31. A company formed before that date is on the current rule; a company formed after it makes a choice on its formation document.
The adopted federal safety edition is frozen at January 1, 2026, with a statutory duty on the Highway Patrol division director to review it annually, and a source chain showing an amendment every year since 1997. Expect that date to move, and read it rather than assume it.
The Secretary of State’s fee schedule identifies itself as effective July 1, 2016. It is current, and it is agency-published rather than statutory, which means it can change without legislation.
The remaining figures were taken from their sources on September 2, 2026. Where none of them is given a change date, that is because the documents opened did not supply one, and no wider assurance is intended.
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 South 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 South 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.
One hundred and fifty dollars filed electronically online, or $165 on paper. The fifteen-dollar difference is a separately listed paper filing fee for documents able to be filed online, so the document costs $150 and the channel costs $15. The agency form carries the paper figure in its own header. Read September 2, 2026.
The state publishes no turnaround at all. It offers an expedited fee of $50, and defines expedited service only as “completion sooner than the normal course of business upon request.” No hour count, business-day count or cutoff time appears anywhere on the schedule, so a fifty-dollar purchase buys a comparative improvement over an unpublished baseline.
That depends on when you ask, and the rule changes on January 1, 2027. Under the current provision the first report is due before the first day of the second month of the year following authorization, and on that same date each year after. From January 1, 2027 an entity files either in the month of its formation anniversary each year, or on or before January 31 each year, and indicates which it has chosen on its formation document.
Fifty-five dollars filed electronically online, or $70 on paper. A delinquent report attracts a further $55, listed separately on the schedule as a late fee for delinquent annual reports.
Because the contents are set in a general title rather than in the limited liability company act, and that title requires the report to state whether the entity owns any agricultural land and, if so, whether it has foreign beneficial owners, with the legal description or common location, total acreage and current use. The Secretary of State aggregates the answers into a public report each December.
No. The state statute is written permissively — the department “may participate in and comply with” the plan — but that word governs the department’s own participation, not the carrier’s obligation. South Dakota appears on the plan’s participating states list, and the carrier-side duty comes from federal law and the plan rather than from that section.
Yes, on axle count alone. The state handbook states the qualifying test as two axles over 26,000 pounds, or three or more axles regardless of weight, or a combination over 26,000 pounds. The middle limb carries no pounds figure, so a three-axle unit qualifies whatever it scales.
Not in the source read here. The phrase appears exactly twice in the state handbook and both occurrences are in its fuel tax material; the registration material describes apportionment, the federal heavy vehicle use tax and excise tax, and carries no qualifying-vehicle definition. That is a limit on what South Dakota has published, not a finding that the registration test differs.
A fee banded by declared gross weight, running from $85 under 4,000 pounds to $250 at 18,001 to 20,000 pounds, then forty dollars for each additional 2,000 pounds or major fraction above 20,000. A vehicle ten years old or more by model year on the first of January pays ninety percent of the prescribed fee, and a further seven dollars applies above seventy-eight thousand pounds.
No. The federal part that houses the new entrant safety assurance program is not adopted anywhere in the chapter — the adoption enumerates part 107 subparts F and G, parts 171 to 180, part 387 and parts 390 to 397, stepping from 387 straight to 390. All ten section entries of the chapter were read, and neither chapter creates a state audit or compliance review program in its place.
January 1, 2026 for the main adoption, stated twice in one sentence. But the chapter carries a second, older date: the storage-facility placarding section references an edition as amended through January 1, 2006. A single freeze date cannot be assumed to govern the whole chapter, and the Highway Patrol division director has a statutory duty to review the federal regulations annually.
It carries two conditions and both attach to a vehicle movement rather than to the enterprise. A single trip permit must be secured before movement begins over the state’s highways, and a second permit in the vehicle chapter carries the same before-movement condition in its own caption. Nothing read orders the tasks of starting a business against each other, and no numbered sequence is asserted.
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.
