Motor carrier classes by state
Four Washington agencies hold four pieces of a new carrier’s file, and none of them tells you about the other three. The Secretary of State forms the company. The Utilities and Transportation Commission prescribes the permit fee. The Department of Licensing runs the registration program under a name that is not the one the program is called anywhere else. And the State Patrol issues a number it can switch off, which no federal agency issued and no federal calendar will remind you about.
A new venture is an authority applicant with no operating history, and most of the first year is federal and looks the same in every state. This page is about the part that does not. Everything below was read at primary source on September 2, 2026, and each figure is printed beside the date it was read, because one of the largest of them changes on October 1, 2026 — twenty-nine days after this page was researched.
What makes Washington awkward for a startup is not that its rules are severe. It is that they are distributed. The credential that lets you haul, the fee that buys it, the tax license that follows the fuel, the registration program that follows the plate and the safety number that follows the trucks are held by four different bodies, filed in four different titles, and named in vocabulary that does not match between them. Working out which body holds which piece is genuinely most of the work, and it is work no federal filing does for you.
Nothing here is a sequence. Washington conditions one thing on another in two places we read, and both are set out below as the conditions their own text states. A condition on issuing a permit is not an instruction about the order in which a business is built, and this page does not turn one into the other.
A Washington startup file is split across four agencies, and an underwriter reading it will notice which pieces are missing before you do.
Send us the equipment, the radius and the commodity, and we will tell you which of these credentials your operation actually touches.
The Washington Secretary of State fee and priority-services page carries a turnaround sentence twice, and neither instance describes forming a company. Both sit beneath the headings for apostilles and for certificates and records. The block headed Limited Liability Companies, on the same page, carries priority prices only and states no standard turnaround at all.
That distinction is the whole of the finding, and it is easy to lose. A reader who searches the page for a number, finds “Standard processing: Typically processed 7 to 10 business days of receiving your order (subject to longer processing times based on volumes)”, and writes it into a startup plan has taken a figure from the wrong section of the right page. Nothing on the page prevents that, because the sentence is genuinely there.
What the limited liability company block does say, read verbatim on September 2, 2026, is a price for moving faster than a baseline it never states: “Expedited service: $100 per business entity, generally processed within three working days.” For a mailed filing it adds, “To expedite by mail, include an additional $100 per business entity and label the outside of the envelope ‘EXPEDITE’.” And above that sits a faster tier again: “Same-day service: This service charges a ‘same-day’ fee of $150 per business entity. For front counter cutoff times, visit our Contact Us page.” The cutoff times themselves live on a page that was not opened for this reading, so no cutoff hour is asserted here.
The page also warns, at the top of the schedule, that “*All Filings are subject to additional fees depending on the priority requested and delivery method.” A quoted formation cost that omits the delivery method is therefore incomplete by the agency’s own account.
One further sentence is worth separating from the timing question rather than folded into it. The Secretary of State’s processing guidelines state that “Online Filing Confirmation: Online filing through the Corporations and Charities Filing System (CCFS) provides immediate submission confirmation ... which is the most reliable way to ensure timely submission on or before the due date.” That is confirmation that the office received the document. It is not a statement about when the document is processed, and treating it as one would convert a receipt into a turnaround.
The price sits in a table rather than in a sentence, and the label on the row is worth noticing. The limited liability company block prices “Original Filings” at $180 — the words “certificate of formation” do not appear in the block at all, which is a small thing until you are searching the page for them. Amendments are $30, reinstatement is “$140 + all missed annual report fees”, name reservation is $30, and dissolution or withdrawal carries no fee. Read September 2, 2026.
The recurring obligation is an annual report at $70, priced on the Secretary of State’s own list as “$70 – Profit Business Entity Types, including LLC”. Two qualifications travel with that number and both matter. The office states that the fee “includes an online processing fee”, so it is the price of filing online rather than a bare statutory charge. And the extra $25 is not a late fee in the ordinary sense — it is assessed once the entity’s status is listed as Delinquent, which is why the same schedule carries a separate line reading “Annual Report with delinquency fee — $95”.
The due date is the part a carrier should write down, because it is not a calendar-year date and it will not line up with anything else in the file. The office states it plainly: “An Annual Report is due by the expiration date, which is the last day of the month in which the business was first formed. An Annual Report may be filed within 180 days before the expiration date.”
So the renewal anniversary is an artefact of the day the company was formed. A carrier that formed in February renews in February, every year, regardless of when its registration year, its fuel-tax quarter or its insurance term begins. The 180-day early-filing window is generous enough that the practical discipline is to file it alongside something else you already remember, rather than to remember it on its own.
None of these figures is permanent, and the schedule does not claim to be. They were read on September 2, 2026 and should be re-read rather than assumed at the next renewal.
Washington requires a registered agent, and the section that says so is short enough to quote whole. RCW 23.95.405, headed “Entities required to designate and maintain registered agent”, reads in its entirety: “The following shall designate and maintain a registered agent in this state: (1) A domestic entity; and (2) A registered foreign entity.” The section carries a note worth naming rather than skipping — “Effective date—Contingent effective date—2015 c 176: See note following RCW 23.95.100.” The section text itself carries no operative date; the contingency lives in the note it points at, and it is exactly the kind of block that has to be read rather than assumed.
The near miss is the useful part. RCW 23.95.410 is a real, current, live section that returns cleanly and is titled “Addresses in filing.” It is not the registered agent requirement. A citation that resolves is not the same as a citation that says what you wanted it to say, and a formation packet pointing at the wrong live section produces no error message at all — the reader simply finds text, reads something adjacent, and moves on.
The chapter’s own table of contents settles it. Chapter 23.95 RCW runs 23.95.400 through 23.95.460 in this area; 23.95.405 is the requirement and 23.95.415 is the designation. If a document you are working from cites anything else for the agent duty, it is citing something else.
One practical note about reading Washington statutes at all. The legislature’s pages return well over a hundred kilobytes of markup for sections whose operative content is a dozen lines. Size is no guide to whether you captured the provision, and a reader who judges a fetch by how much came back will be satisfied by pages that contain nothing they were looking for.
New venture pricing turns on the operation, not on how many agencies are involved.
Send the equipment list, the radius and the commodity, and we will work the Washington-specific pieces into the submission.
Two chapters of Title 480 WAC sit next to each other and only one of them prices general freight. The title’s own chapter index, last updated June 25, 2026 and read September 2, 2026, lists chapter 480-14 WAC as “Motor carriers, excluding household goods carriers and common carrier brokers”, immediately above chapter 480-15 WAC, which is headed “Household goods carriers”. A fee read out of the second chapter is a household goods fee.
The general-freight fee lives in the first. WAC 480-14-140, headed “Fees”, provides: “Fees for applications are as follows: ... Permanent common carrier operating authority — Hazardous materials . . . . $275; General commodities . . . . $275; Armored car service . . . . $275. Extension of common carrier permit authority — ... General commodities . . . . $100 ... Reinstatement of authority (within 10 months of cancellation) — ... General commodities . . . . $100.” Read September 2, 2026.
The fee is not optional to the filing. WAC 480-14-180(2): “The commission will not accept an application unless it is accompanied by the required fee as shown in WAC 480-14-140.” An application arriving without it has not been made.
The statute above the rule sets a ceiling rather than a price, and the difference between the two is where the confusion starts. RCW 81.80.090, headed “Form of application — Filing fees”, provides: “Any such application shall be accompanied by such filing fee as the commission may prescribe by rule: PROVIDED, That such fee shall not exceed five hundred fifty dollars.” Five hundred and fifty dollars is the maximum the legislature allows to be charged. Two hundred and seventy-five is what the commission chose to charge for general commodities.
The agency’s own current blank corroborates the rule, which is a stronger position than reading either alone. The commission’s permit application for a common carrier of property, carrying the footer revision mark 4/25, prints a fee-selection grid reading “$275 General Commodities Only”, “$275 General Commodities, including Armored Car Service”, “$275 General Commodities, including Hazardous Materials*”, “$275 General Commodities, including Hazardous Materials* and Armored Car Service”, “$100 Permit Reinstatement – This may only be selected if the permit was cancelled less than 10 months before the date of application filing”, and “$275 Permit Reinstatement – If the permit was cancelled more than 10 months from the date of application filing, the full permit fee is required.” Paying by card adds a processor charge the form quotes as “2.5% or minimum of $3.95 ... charged by Official Payments”.
One adjacent charge is named here and deliberately not quantified. Washington also levies an annual regulatory fee on gross operating income under RCW 81.80.321 and WAC 480-14-150. Neither was opened for this reading, so no figure for it appears on this page.
Who needs the permit at all, and which operations sit outside it, is set out on our Washington hot shot page rather than repeated here.
A startup checklist that has a column for form numbers will stall on Washington, and the reason is structural rather than an omission by whoever wrote the checklist.
WAC 480-14-180(1) names the applications a common carrier must make, and then, in its second sentence, says where the paper comes from: “Common carriers must apply on forms furnished by the commission and must include all the information, documents and exhibits called for in the form or the form’s instructions.” A third sentence adds that “The commission may refuse to accept any application until all required information is supplied.” The rule prescribes a source and a completeness standard. It prescribes no number, and the commission’s published blank carries none.
In place of a number the document has its own identifiers, and they are what you cite. Its printed heading reads “PERMIT APPLICATION FOR COMMON CARRIER OF PROPERTY / Excluding Household Goods / New and Reinstatement”. Its footer revision mark is 4/25 and it is marked “Page 2 of 2”. It carries an internal accounting code in a block headed FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY. And it is published as a PDF whose own title metadata is absent, so even the file does not name itself.
The commission’s permit applications page lists it under the heading “Common Carriers” as the link “Apply for or reinstate a permit”, again with no number, alongside “Update the name or corporate structure on a permit”, “Transfer a permit to a new company”, “Hazardous Materials Supplemental Form (PDF)” and “Release of Permit- For Transfers Only (PDF)”.
The practical consequence for a new venture is small but real. Anyone assembling the application from a third-party summary will be looking for a designation that does not exist, and the risk is not that they file the wrong form — it is that they conclude the form is missing and stop.
The Department of Licensing publishes the International Registration Plan under the word prorate, throughout, in its navigation and in its page titles. Both programs sit under one tree — “International Registration Plan (prorate)” and “International Fuel Tax Agreement (IFTA)” — administered by the department’s Prorate and Fuel Tax Services, Motor Carrier Services unit.
That vocabulary is not cosmetic for anyone searching. A guess at a path or a site search built on the letters IRP returns very little; the state’s own word is the one that works. It is also a different agency from the one that issues the operating permit, and a different agency again from the one that holds safety, which is the recurring shape of this page.
The qualifying test is published on the department’s own register-for-prorate page and was read verbatim on September 2, 2026, under the heading “Who can apply?”: “You can apply for an IRP registration if you operate: Commercial vehicles over 26,000 pounds GVW in 2 or more jurisdictions. Vehicles with 3 or more axles, regardless of weight. A combination of vehicles whose total weight exceeds 26,000 pounds gross vehicle or registered GVW (doesn’t include recreational vehicles, restricted farm plates, government owned vehicles, and school buses). Vehicles that are titled in Washington State and operating in 2 or more jurisdictions.”
Read the second limb on its own. It carries no pounds figure. A three-axle straight truck operating in two jurisdictions is inside the plan on axle count, whatever it weighs, which means an operator who has checked only the weight of the equipment has answered one limb of a four-limb test.
One point of punctuation deserves attention because it changes the reach of the exclusions. The parenthesis naming recreational vehicles, restricted farm plates, government-owned vehicles and school buses sits inside the third bullet only — the combination-of-vehicles bullet. It is not a general exclusion running across the whole test. Reading it as one would carry an exclusion onto the axle limb and the weight limb, where the page does not put it.
Washington states both sides of its fuel-tax licensing line inside a single sentence, which is unusually clear drafting and makes the provision quotable rather than summarisable.
RCW 82.38.090(3), read September 2, 2026: “Fuel users operating motor vehicles in interstate commerce having two axles and a gross vehicle weight or registered gross vehicle weight not exceeding twenty-six thousand pounds are not required to be licensed. Fuel users operating motor vehicles in interstate commerce having two axles and a gross vehicle weight or registered gross vehicle weight exceeding twenty-six thousand pounds, or having three or more axles regardless of weight, or a combination of vehicles, when the combination exceeds twenty-six thousand pounds gross vehicle weight, must comply with the licensing and reporting requirements of this chapter. A copy of the license must be carried in each motor vehicle entering this state from another state or province.”
The exclusion and the inclusion are drafted as a matched pair, and the axle limb sits in the middle of the second half with no weight attached to it. A two-axle truck at or under the line is out. The same truck with a third axle is in, at any weight. That is the same shape as the registration test above, and the two are worth reading together rather than separately, because an operator who adds an axle changes the answer to both questions at once.
The rest of the layer is administered by the same department. The license carries a decal, and RCW 82.38.110(8) prices it: “A fee of ten dollars per set of international fuel tax agreement decals issued to each applicant or licensee must be charged.” Reporting is quarterly — RCW 82.38.150(2): “International fuel tax agreement licensees must file reports quarterly.” And the liability itself is stated at RCW 82.38.320, which makes agreement licensees “liable for and must pay the tax under RCW 82.38.030 to the department on fuel used to operate motor vehicles on the highways of this state.”
The administering agency is the one a reader is least likely to guess. RCW 82.38.020(8) defines it in four words: “‘Department’ means the department of licensing.” Title 82 RCW is the revenue title, and a chapter sitting inside it would ordinarily be administered by the Department of Revenue. This one is not, and it is not the Utilities and Transportation Commission either.
Washington takes part in the Unified Carrier Registration plan; that was read on the plan’s own participating states list on September 2, 2026.
The administering body is the Utilities and Transportation Commission. It is not the Department of Licensing and it is not the state transportation department, which are the two obvious guesses given that one holds the registration plan and the other holds the highways. That was read on the national registration system’s own per-state contact record for Washington, which identifies the jurisdiction the record belongs to in its own data rather than in a page title.
The fee itself is not a Washington decision. It is set nationally, adopted by federal rule, and it moves for every participating state on the same day — which is why a page written last month and a page written next month will disagree without either being careless.
As of September 2, 2026, bracket B1 — zero to two commercial motor vehicles — is $46.00 per entity for the 2026 registration year, for an exempt or non-exempt motor carrier, motor private carrier or freight forwarder. That is the figure a one-truck or two-truck Washington startup pays today.
Both numbers belong on this page for the same reason. Registering in September costs $46. Registering in October costs $55. The operative fact is the date, and a figure printed without one is not usable by anybody.
There is one conditioning relation in the Washington permit statute that a new operator should know about, and it is worth stating in the statute’s own terms rather than in a summary of them.
RCW 81.80.070(3): “Before a permit is issued, the commission shall require the applicant to establish safety fitness and proof of minimum financial responsibility as provided in this chapter.” The rule side restates the insurance half as a criterion for provisional authority, granting it where “The applicant has met the liability and cargo insurance requirements of WAC 480-15-530 and 480-15-550”.
Two things follow and a third does not. Fitness and financial responsibility are conditions of issuance, and they are conditions the commission is directed to impose rather than discretionary ones. What does not follow is an order for building a business. Washington nowhere sequences forming the entity against obtaining a federal number against applying for the permit, and this page asserts no such order.
The contrast with the federal scheme is the substantive point for a new venture, and it runs the other way from what most operators expect. The federal new entrant program audits a carrier after it has begun operating. Washington’s commission is directed to satisfy itself before the permit issues. A carrier used to thinking of safety scrutiny as something that arrives in the first eighteen months meets a version of it at the front door here.
A hedge belongs on the record. The provisional-authority language quoted above sits in the household-goods-framed chapter of Title 480 WAC, and this page does not claim to have resolved how far that framing reaches a general-commodity applicant. What is quoted is quoted; what is not resolved is said to be unresolved.
Washington runs a provisional authority before a permanent one, and the gap between them is measured in time rather than in tasks.
The rule provides that “A provisional permit lasts for a period of not less than six months”, and that “Once the applicant has held a provisional permit for at least six months, the commission will consider whether to grant the applicant a permanent permit ... The applicant does not need to file a second application for permanent authority.” Read September 2, 2026.
That is a time condition and it is worth naming as one. There is no second filing to prepare, no second fee described in the passage, and nothing for an operator to do at the six-month mark. What there is instead is a period during which the authority is provisional, which is a fact about the account rather than about the paperwork — and it is the kind of fact a contract counterparty asking for evidence of authority may notice.
Cancellation resets the position harder than a startup might expect. Where a permit has been canceled and the carrier applies for reinstatement after thirty days, “the application will be considered in all aspects to be an application for new authority and will be subject to all terms and conditions specified in WAC 480-15-302 for new entrants.” A lapse does not put a carrier back where it was; it puts it back at the beginning, with the new-entrant terms attached again.
The same hedge carried above applies here. This structure is written in the chapter framed around household goods carriers, and the tension between that framing and a general-freight application is recorded rather than resolved.
This is the Washington instrument least likely to appear on a startup checklist and most likely to matter, because it has no federal twin and therefore nothing in a federal compliance calendar surfaces it.
WAC 446-65-030 establishes a state-only high-risk carrier regime. Subsection (1): “Any intrastate motor carrier receiving a proposed unsatisfactory safety rating may be identified as a high risk carrier pursuant to RCW 46.32.080. They may also be identified as high risk through analysis of various data, including but not limited to the following: (a) Carrier safety management system (CSMS score); (i) A score of eighty-five or more in the crash, fatigued, or unsafe driving basic and one other behavior analysis and safety improvement categories at or above the ‘all other’ motor carrier threshold. (ii) Any four or more behavior analysis and safety improvement categories at or above the ‘all other’ motor carrier threshold. (b) Carrier requires or authorizes any driver or vehicle to operate in violation of an out of service order; (c) Carrier who consistently refuses to come into compliance with federal and state regulations.”
Identification has a consequence rather than being a label. Subsection (2): “If a motor carrier receives a high risk rating, they must undergo a compliance review by the Washington state patrol to determine compliance.”
The sanction attaches to a Washington credential. Subsection (2)(b)(iii)(A) provides that “The carrier will receive a letter from the Washington state patrol advising them their intrastate DOT number has been inactivated and what steps need to be completed to be considered for reactivation.” Subparagraph (B) adds that the patrol “will notify the department of licensing that they have placed an out of service order on the carrier’s intrastate DOT number and all vehicles registered to the carrier.” Getting it back requires a follow-up compliance review producing a satisfactory or conditional rating.
Read that against a new venture’s actual position. A small carrier with a short history has thin denominators, which is precisely the condition in which a percentile-based score moves furthest on a single event. The route into this regime for a startup is not usually a pattern; it is one roadside inspection landing on a two-truck fleet.
There is also a route that skips the review entirely. Subsection (3) allows an imminent-hazard out-of-service order “without going through any prior compliance reviews” under RCW 46.32.080(3)(e).
Inside the same rule sits the shortest clock on this page, and it is short enough that a carrier meeting it for the first time will be assembling documents rather than writing prose.
WAC 446-65-030(2)(b)(ii) requires the carrier to “Submit a carrier safety action plan within five days to the Washington state patrol outlining the action they have taken or will take to become compliant.” The subparagraphs beneath it set the form: on company letterhead, signed by the owner or an officer, accompanied by supporting documents, and — the operative words — “reviewed and agreed upon by the Washington state patrol”. It is not a filing that is complete on submission.
The follow-up schedule is fixed rather than negotiated. A first follow-up falls “within sixty to ninety days”. A third review falls “within one hundred twenty to one hundred eighty days”. And repeat violations have a financial tail: on repeat findings “all funds held in abeyance (suspended) from the previous audit will be reinstated along with any repeat violations/penalties”, so penalties that appeared to have been forgiven are restored rather than written off.
Five days is worth comparing with the notification clauses a carrier will already be operating under. Most insurance reporting conditions are measured in weeks or in a reasonableness standard. This one is measured in days, it begins from an event the carrier did not schedule, and the deliverable requires the counterparty’s agreement to be complete.
The appeal path is set out in WAC 446-65-040, headed “Compliance review hearing process”, and it is worth knowing before the notice arrives rather than after.
A written notice of penalty starts a twenty-business-day period in which the carrier may pay, seek mitigation, or request an administrative hearing under chapter 34.05 RCW, the state administrative procedure act.
Mitigation is the narrow door. It is unavailable “except as provided in RCW 46.32.100”, and a request for it requires a notarized signature — a requirement that quietly adds a trip to a notary inside a twenty-business-day window that is also being spent assembling the underlying documents.
Beyond that the process is conventional and the deadlines are short. An administrative law judge issues an initial order; a petition for review goes to the patrol within twenty days; the chief issues the final order.
For a new venture the point is not that the process is unusual. It is that the entire machinery — high-risk identification, compliance review, a five-day plan, a twenty-business-day appeal — runs on a Washington credential and a Washington rule, and a carrier watching only its federal file will not see any of it coming.
General property and household goods are separate permits under separate sections in Washington, and the difference is not a formality. It is a different waiting period, a different issuance standard and a different penalty ceiling.
RCW 81.80.075(1) requires a separate credential: “No person shall engage in business as a household goods carrier without first obtaining a household goods carrier permit from the commission.”
Subsection (2) then imposes a delay that has no federal analogue at all: “Applications for household goods carrier permits or permit extensions must be on file for a period of at least thirty days before issuance unless the commission finds that special conditions require earlier issuance.”
The standard is different too. Under subsection (3) the permit issues where “The applicant is fit, willing, and able to perform the services proposed ...; the operations are consistent with the public interest; and, in the case of common carriers, they are required by the present or future public convenience and necessity; otherwise, the application must be denied.” A public convenience and necessity test is a materially higher bar than a fitness finding, and the closing words make denial the default where it is not met.
The penalties are correspondingly larger. Operating without the permit exposes a carrier to up to $5,000 per violation, with each advertisement counted as a separate violation, and violation of a cease and desist order to up to $10,000 per violation.
This belongs on a general-freight page for one reason. A new carrier whose first substantial customer turns out to be a residential move has crossed into a different section, with a thirty-day clock in front of it and a different standard to satisfy — and has done so by accepting a load rather than by making a decision about scope.
Two of the largest questions a Washington startup asks are answered in detail on our Washington hot shot page and are not repeated here, and it is worth saying which and why.
The first is who the permit reaches — the trigger in the permit statute, the definitional route into it, and the exemption list that runs on geography and commodity rather than on weight. The second is the insurance filing: which rule sets it, which weight line it turns on, and how the tables above and below that line relate to the safety chapter’s own band.
Both are already set out at length there, with the reading that establishes them. Restating them here would add length to this page without adding anything a reader could act on, and it would put two versions of the same analysis into circulation, which is worse than having one.
What this page is for is the layer that sits around them: forming the entity and paying to keep it, the prescribed fee and the unnumbered form, the registration plan under the name Washington gives it, the fuel-tax sentence that decides licensing, the national fee that changes in September, and a state safety regime with a sanction the federal system does not mirror. Those are the Washington-specific facts a first-year carrier meets, and most of them are not written down anywhere in one place.
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 Washington 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 Washington 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.
$275, prescribed by WAC 480-14-140 and printed on the commission’s own application form, read September 2, 2026. The same $275 applies to hazardous materials and armored car service; an extension of existing authority is $100, and reinstatement within ten months of cancellation is $100. The $550 figure that circulates is the statutory ceiling at RCW 81.80.090, not a price.
No standard day count is published for a limited liability company filing. The 7-to-10-business-day line on the fee page sits under the apostilles and certificates-and-records headings, not under the LLC block. What the LLC block states is expedited service at $100 per entity, “generally processed within three working days”, and same-day service at $150.
Because the rule prescribes a source rather than a number. WAC 480-14-180(1) requires common carriers to “apply on forms furnished by the commission”, and the published blank carries no number. Cite it by its printed heading — “PERMIT APPLICATION FOR COMMON CARRIER OF PROPERTY / Excluding Household Goods / New and Reinstatement” — and its 4/25 revision mark.
Yes, on the axle limb. RCW 82.38.090(3) requires licensing for fuel users operating in interstate commerce with two axles over twenty-six thousand pounds, “or having three or more axles regardless of weight”, or a combination over twenty-six thousand pounds. The axle limb carries no pounds figure, so weight does not answer the question by itself.
The Department of Licensing, through its Prorate and Fuel Tax Services unit — and the department calls the program prorate rather than IRP throughout its own pages. It is not the Utilities and Transportation Commission, which issues the operating permit, and not the state transportation department.
Yes. Under WAC 446-65-030 a carrier identified as high risk must undergo a compliance review, and the patrol may inactivate the intrastate identification number, notify the Department of Licensing, and place an out-of-service order on the number and on all vehicles registered to the carrier. Reinstatement runs through a follow-up review producing a satisfactory or conditional rating.
Twenty business days from the written notice, in which the carrier may pay, seek mitigation, or request an administrative hearing under chapter 34.05 RCW. Mitigation is available only as provided in RCW 46.32.100 and the request requires a notarized signature. A separate five-day clock applies to the carrier safety action plan.
Yes, and it is written as a condition. RCW 81.80.070(3) provides that “Before a permit is issued, the commission shall require the applicant to establish safety fitness and proof of minimum financial responsibility as provided in this chapter.” That conditions the issuance of the permit; it does not order the steps of starting a business, and no such order is asserted here.
Yes, at $70 for profit entity types including a limited liability company, with an additional $25 if delinquent. It is due by the entity’s expiration date — the last day of the month in which the business was first formed or registered — and can be filed up to 180 days early. The date is an artefact of the formation month, so it will not align with any other renewal in the file.
No. RCW 81.80.075 requires a separate household goods carrier permit, applications must be on file at least thirty days before issuance absent special conditions, and household goods common carriers face a public convenience and necessity test. Operating without one exposes a carrier to up to $5,000 per violation, with each advertisement counted separately.
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.
