Motor carrier classes by state
Two Wyoming statutes decide most of what a first-year carrier here pays and files, and neither is where an operator would look for it. One is an insurance-eligibility test buried in the operating authority section. The other is a paragraph inside the limited liability company annual report that was written for carriers moving freight across state lines.
Wyoming asks a for-hire intrastate carrier for a letter of operating authority, prices the application at fifty dollars, and takes the insurance filing from the insurer rather than from the carrier. That much is ordinary. What is not ordinary is what the statutes do around the edges.
The Department of Transportation will not accept the insurance instrument most brokers reach for, and the statute behind that filing does not simply require insurance — it specifies which insurers are eligible to write it, by reference to the Wyoming insurance code. Meanwhile the Secretary of State charges an annual report that is calculated from assets rather than fixed, and the statute contains a paragraph that limits the asset base for a company carrying goods across state lines.
This page covers the Wyoming layer a new venture actually meets: the entity filing and its asset-based annual charge, the letter of authority and the repealed shell of a subsection it sits inside, the insurance filing and the eligibility test behind it, the bills of lading duty, where a Wyoming-based carrier registers for Unified Carrier Registration given that Wyoming administers none, and one place where two Wyoming sources point in different directions. The intrastate definition limbs and the way registered gross weight reads against them are on the Wyoming hot shot page, and size, weight and industrial road rules for vocational work are on the Wyoming dump truck page.
Wyoming does not accept a certificate of insurance for intrastate authority, and the statute limits which insurers may write the policy at all. That makes market selection part of getting the credential, not a step that follows it.
Send the operation and the equipment and we will place the program with the filing requirement in view.
Wyoming does not charge a flat annual fee for a limited liability company. W.S. 17-29-209(a) requires every company organized here, and every foreign company holding a certificate of authority, to file with the Secretary of State “on or before the first day of the month of organization of every year a certification, under the penalty of perjury, by its treasurer or other fiscal agent setting forth its capital, property and assets located and employed in the state of Wyoming.” The statement must give the principal office address.
The charge that accompanies it is calculated, not listed. The same subsection requires payment, in addition to all other statutory taxes and fees, of “a license fee based upon the sum of its capital, property and assets reported, of sixty dollars ($60.00) or two-tenths of one mill on the dollar ($.0002), whichever is greater.” A carrier whose only Wyoming asset is a tractor pays the sixty-dollar floor; a company that accumulates equipment, a yard and a shop in Wyoming crosses into the calculated figure at three hundred thousand dollars of reported Wyoming assets.
Then comes the paragraph that was plainly written with carriers in mind. W.S. 17-29-209(b)(i) provides that “[a]ny limited liability company or foreign limited liability company engaged in the public calling of carrying goods, passengers or information interstate is not required to comply with the provisions of subsection (a) of this section except to the extent of capital, property and assets used in intrastate business in this state.” An interstate carrier reports the Wyoming intrastate slice of its assets, not the whole balance sheet.
That is a genuine planning point rather than a curiosity. A Wyoming-domiciled carrier running predominantly interstate freight has a materially smaller reported base than the same company running the same equipment on Wyoming-only work. Two further provisions in the same subsection fix how value is measured: the assessed value of property “shall be its actual value”, and mines and mining claims are valued by reference to the assessed value of the previous year’s gross product.
The recordkeeping duty is short but real. Subsection (e) requires every company registered or authorized in Wyoming to preserve, for three years at its principal place of business, “suitable records and books as may be necessary to determine the amount of fee for which it is liable under this section”, available for examination by the Secretary of State or a designee during regular business hours except as arranged by mutual consent. Subsection (c) requires the financial information to be current as of the end of the fiscal year immediately preceding the date the report is executed, while all other information is current as of the execution date.
The formation fees sit a section later and are flat. W.S. 17-29-210(a)(i) directs the Secretary of State to charge “[f]iling the original articles of organization, one hundred dollars ($100.00)”. Amending the articles is a sixty-dollar filing fee under subdivision (ii). And issuing a certificate of authority for a foreign limited liability company is “a filing fee of one hundred fifty dollars ($150.00)” under subdivision (v).
A carrier already organized in another state therefore pays half again as much to come in as a Wyoming company pays to start, and then carries the same annual report obligation as a domestic company. For a startup with a genuine Wyoming base and no existing entity elsewhere, organizing here is the cheaper route on both charges.
Subdivision (iii) is the annual fee accompanying the report discussed above, due and payable on or before the date of that filing. Subdivision (iv) is a catch-all for filing, service and copying fees not otherwise established, with a limit worth knowing: “[a] fee shall not exceed the cost of providing the service.”
What the articles must contain is short. W.S. 17-29-201(a) allows one or more persons to act as organizers by signing and delivering articles of organization to the Secretary of State for filing, and subsection (b) requires the articles to state the company name, which must comply with W.S. 17-29-108, and “[t]he street address of the limited liability company’s initial registered office and the name of its initial registered agent at that office.” Wyoming uses both concepts — an office address and a named agent at it.
One penalty attaches to getting the paperwork wrong deliberately, and it is criminal rather than administrative. W.S. 17-29-210(b) provides that a person signing a document, including the articles of organization, that he knows is false in any material respect with intent that it be delivered for filing “is guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of not more than one thousand dollars ($1,000.00), by imprisonment for not more than six (6) months, or both.” The same subsection requires every document other than the articles to be signed by a member, manager or other individual authorized in the operating agreement.
The Department of Transportation issues what it calls a regulatory letter of operating authority — its own description is that a “[l]etter of Authority is a document issued by the department granting intrastate authority to a person to operate a motor vehicle as a motor carrier transporting people or property.” The published application file is named for form MC-100.
The statutory home is W.S. 31-18-209, and reading its subsection (b) is instructive about what survives. The subsection opens by fixing the replacement fee at ten dollars and requiring that “[a]pplications for authority shall be made in writing and verified”, then lists what they must contain. Paragraph (i) is the applicant’s name and address. Paragraph (ii) is a statement of the nature of the transportation service proposed. Paragraphs (iii) through (viii) each read “Repealed By Laws 1998, ch. 46, § 2.” Paragraph (ix) is a residual for additional information the department deems necessary. Paragraph (x) is “[a] filing fee of fifty dollars ($50.00)”. Paragraph (xi) is repealed too, by 2007 legislation. Seven of the eleven paragraphs are empty shells, and subsections (c) and (d) are repealed outright.
That matters for anyone reading the statute to learn what Wyoming asks. The surviving application content is thin — a name, an address, a description of the service, whatever else the department requires, and the fee — which is why the department’s own manual carries the operational detail instead. Subsection (e) then provides that as the department grants authority “it shall assign each motor carrier a docket number and shall notify the appropriate divisions within the department.”
The manual, revised December 2020 and read on September 3, 2026, prices the variants: fifty dollars for a private motor carrier application, fifty dollars for a contract motor carrier application, fifty dollars where both are applied for at the same time, fifty dollars for a name change or information update, and ten dollars for duplicate letters. If authority is revoked because insurance lapsed, “a new application and $50.00 filing fee must be remitted before authority will be reinstated” — the lapse resets the application rather than pausing the credential.
One asymmetry in the manual’s own document lists is worth flagging because it cuts against expectation. Under the private motor carrier heading the manual asks for a US DOT number without qualification. Under the contract motor carrier heading it asks for a “U.S. DOT # if the GVW is more than 26,000 lbs or the vehicle is a taxi hauling more than 7 passengers.” That is the department describing what it wants in its own application file; it does not displace any federal registration duty, and a carrier should not read it as one.
A cancellation notice suspends Wyoming authority on its effective date, and operations stop until a replacement is not merely filed but approved. That gap is a business-interruption problem before it is a compliance one.
Tell us how the operation runs and we will build a program that keeps the filing continuous rather than reactive.
This is the Wyoming provision with the most direct bearing on how a program is placed, and it is easy to skim past because it sits in a subsection about depositing insurance.
Under W.S. 31-18-209(f), what a contract carrier deposits with the department has to come from an insurer that is either authorized to do business here or is, in the statute’s words, “lawfully able to transact insurance without a certificate of authority pursuant to title 26” of the Wyoming statutes — and that second route is settled “as determined by the insurance commissioner of this state.” An alternative of other adequate security is allowed, and what the security has to reach is cargo, public liability and property damage, for the protection of the public generally. The eligibility test therefore lives in the transportation statute but is decided against the insurance code.
The continuity machinery in the same subsection is what a first-year carrier should plan around. Whatever is deposited has to be continuous, and it stays in force “unless and until cancelled on not less than thirty (30) days written notice to the department” — with the count starting, per the statute, from the day the notice reaches the department’s office rather than the day the insurer mails it.
The consequence is automatic rather than discretionary. On the cancellation’s effective date, the subsection provides, the filing “shall … suspend the operating authority of the affected carrier”, and no operations may be conducted on any highway until replacement security in the required form and amount “becomes effective and is approved by the department.” Those last words carry the weight: a replacement that has been filed is not yet a replacement that has been approved, and the truck waits for the second event, not the first.
The department states the minimum limits in its manual rather than in the statute, which carries no amount. Form E for liability is $750,000.00 combined single limit. Form H for cargo is $10,000.00. Form MC61E, the mobile home mover’s cargo filing, is $5,000.00. Private-only motor carriers are exempt from the insurance filing requirements altogether, and a contract motor carrier “must always have the Form E Liability filing.” The cargo filing is required when hauling commodities with appreciable salvage value, and Form K is the cancellation notice.
On who may make the filing and what will not be accepted, both the authority page and the manual are unambiguous. The forms “must be completed by a broker, underwriter or other authorized company representative”, filings go to the Regulatory Section by post or to the department’s motor vehicle services email address, and — in the manual — “[c]ertificates of insurance are not acceptable.” The authority page states the exclusion more broadly: “Wyoming does not accept ADCO or ACCORD certificates, binders, abstracts or insurance ID cards for intrastate authority.”
That last sentence is worth setting against practice in neighboring jurisdictions, because a broker working several states will otherwise apply the wrong habit. Some state offices ask for exactly the document Wyoming refuses — the Connecticut page covers a registration office that requires an Acord certificate naming itself as certificate holder. The instrument that opens an account in one state closes nothing in Wyoming.
The last sentence of W.S. 31-18-209(f) has nothing to do with insurance and is easy to lose because of where it sits. It directs the department to require contract motor carriers “to use and carry in their motor vehicles at all times uniform bills of lading”, each one “showing all property currently being transported”. Copies go out to consignor and consignee alike, and one stays behind “for the inspection of the department and the state highway patrol.”
Four distinct obligations are packed into that sentence: the bill of lading must be uniform, it must be carried in the vehicle at all times, it must show all property currently being transported, and copies go to both the consignor and the consignee with one retained for inspection. The inspecting bodies are named — the department and the state highway patrol — so this is a roadside document, not only an office record.
The manual restates the duty at section 14 in almost the same words, which is a useful confirmation that the department reads the statute as operative rather than vestigial. For a new venture running paper manifests or a lightweight dispatch app, the practical test is whether the document in the cab shows everything actually on the trailer at that moment, and whether a copy survives the delivery.
Two neighboring provisions round out the picture of a Wyoming credential once it exists. W.S. 31-18-209(a) directs the department to issue authority to qualified motor carriers, and lets that authority stand “unless revoked or suspended by the department for good cause” — the example the statute gives is a violation of the act — or canceled at the holder’s own request. And the exemptions at W.S. 31-18-103(a) are agricultural, school, ambulance and hearse, government, mail and livestock-show categories — none of which reaches ordinary for-hire freight.
A first-year Wyoming carrier that starts by leasing a tractor, or by leasing its own unit to somebody with more work, walks into a set of requirements the department publishes in its manual at section 12 rather than in the statute.
The qualification rule comes first: all motor vehicles leased by a carrier holding a letter of authority “must be qualified by the lessee to operate under that Operating Authority”, and where vehicles owned by one authority holder are leased to another, “a copy of the lessee’s current letter of Operating Authority shall be carried in the power unit.” That is a second document in the cab alongside the carrier’s own authority and the uniform bill of lading.
Responsibility is allocated without ambiguity, which matters for how a program is structured. During the lease term “the lessee shall have complete control of the leased motor vehicle and shall be responsible for its operation, in accordance with the applicable statutes, law, and regulations, including the requirements of these rules and regulations concerning equipment safety, inspections, and insurance coverage.” Control and responsibility sit with the lessee for the whole term, not merely while the vehicle is loaded.
The lease itself has form requirements. All leases “shall be in writing and signed by the parties to it” and must specify the term and the consideration to be paid by the lessee. Throughout the term the authority holder “shall at all times carry an original, a certified copy, or a photocopy of the lease in each vehicle covered by the lease, so that it shall be available for inspection by Department representatives or other authorized persons.” A handshake arrangement between an owner-operator and a carrier does not satisfy this.
And the department keeps a veto. It “shall at all times have the right to examine all motor vehicle equipment leases and approve or disapprove them”, and where it appears a lease might be used to evade regulation, an investigation is instituted and a formal complaint issued if necessary; if the department determines that a lessor and lessee entered into a lease to avoid Wyoming statutes or department rules, it may ask the Attorney General to act. All read in the department’s operating authority manual on September 3, 2026.
Alongside the lease rules, the statutory exemption list at W.S. 31-18-103(a) is worth reading for what it does not reach. The live paragraphs cover a farmer or rancher moving produce or commodities for his own use to and from the farm or ranch in his own vehicle; the exchange of such transportation between farmers or ranchers in the immediate community; the exclusive noncommercial transportation of children to and from school; ambulance and hearse movements of the sick, injured or deceased; government-owned or operated vehicles; noncommercial vehicles carrying only United States mail; and the intrastate transportation of livestock for show, performance or competition for noncommercial purposes. Six further paragraphs are repealed shells. Nothing on that list reaches ordinary for-hire freight.
Wyoming does not appear on the Unified Carrier Registration Plan’s published list of participating states, read on September 3, 2026, on which forty-one states are named. That is a finding read off the list itself rather than inferred from absence elsewhere, and the state says the same thing about itself.
The Department of Transportation’s own operating authority manual carries the point in its foreword: “Since Wyoming is not a member of UCR, Wyoming based carriers must contact a member jurisdiction. To obtain information and filing instructions go to: http://www.ucr.in.gov/”. That is a state agency telling its own carriers to go and register through somebody else’s office, and naming a specific out-of-state site to do it at.
The Plan’s frequently asked questions point somewhere else. Their hierarchy sends a registrant first to its own principal-place-of-business state where that state participates, and second to a participating state where it keeps an office or operating facility. Only if neither applies does a third tier open, and Wyoming is named in it alongside Arizona, Hawaii, Nevada and Oregon together with a group of Canadian provinces and territories. What that tier offers is a choice: the registrant, in the document’s words, “may select one of the following states”, and the ten it lists are Alaska, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, New Mexico, South Dakota, Utah and Washington — a western set, none of them Indiana.
Both sources were read on September 3, 2026 and they do not name the same jurisdiction. This page does not resolve that. What it records is that the manual carries a revision line of December 2020 on every page, that the Plan document carries an internal revision stamp reading 12/9/2015 while its page was live on the read date, and that the two should be reconciled with the department or with the chosen base state before a filing is made rather than after. Choosing wrongly is not free: the registration is what a roadside inspection checks.
Price is not what the choice turns on. The Plan says the fee owed for a fleet of a given size does not move with the state that happens to be acting as base state, so the decision is about which office holds the registration and which office an inspector will find it at. The verb matters too, and is carried here as the document has it: the registrant may select from that group rather than being assigned to one.
The two credential classes are defined on the department’s intrastate operating authority page and the difference between them decides whether a first-year operator needs anything at all.
A contract motor carrier is “any person engaged in the intrastate transportation of people or property by motor vehicle on state highways for compensation.” A private motor carrier is “any person engaged in business and operating a vehicle which has a gross vehicle weight exceeding 26,000 pounds who, without compensation, transports intrastate over state highways their employees or property of which the person is the owner, lessee or bailee, used in the furtherance of any commercial enterprise.” The department also defines the qualifier: commercial enterprise “refers to activities of those people engaged in the exchange, purchase or selling of commodities or rendering a service in related financial transactions.”
The manual works the classes through with examples rather than leaving them abstract. On the private side it names a welding truck, a service truck, a railroad vehicle transporting railroad employees and a sixteen-or-more-passenger Sunday school bus. On the contract side — described as “(You DO NOT own the property you are transporting and/or you are collecting a fee either directly or indirectly to transport property.)” — it names a taxi, a bus, a hot shot, a fishing or hunting guide, a daycare bus, a tour bus, towing and recovery vehicles and repossession companies.
For a startup the consequence is that the classification question comes before the weight question. A company hauling its own property in a light truck is outside the private carrier definition on weight. The same company hauling somebody else’s property for a fee is inside the contract carrier definition regardless of weight. How that plays against the intrastate definition limbs, and against registered gross weight in particular, is worked through on the Wyoming hot shot page.
Once authority exists there is a physical carrying duty. W.S. 31-18-301(b) provides that no motor carrier required to have authority “shall operate on the highways without a copy of the current authority carried in each power unit”, and subsection (c) requires the driver to present it on demand to field investigators of the department, members of the state highway patrol or authorized department personnel at ports of entry.
A page that reports a negative it did not read is worse than a page that names the gap, so both gaps are named here.
Whether Wyoming imposes a state motor carrier tax was not established. The banked national picture names other states as weight-distance or weight-mile jurisdictions and does not name Wyoming, but that is an absence from somebody else’s list rather than a reading of the Wyoming revenue title, and this page did not open that title. It is recorded as unverified, not as a negative, and a carrier planning a Wyoming-based operation should confirm it with the Department of Revenue rather than with this page.
Apportioned registration and fuel agreement thresholds for Wyoming were likewise not read. The department publishes both under its trucking and commercial vehicles heading, and the operating authority forms sit in the same document directory, but the qualifying tests themselves were not opened for this page. Nor was any Wyoming intrastate new entrant audit distinct from the federal new entrant program established.
One access note is worth recording because it would otherwise produce a false alarm on a routine check. The operating authority manual carries the metadata title “2006” while its first page header reads “2020 Operating Authority Manual — Wyoming Department of Transportation” and every page footer carries a December 2020 revision line. A verification keyed to the embedded metadata alone would flag the wrong document; the title block used here is the rendered first page.
Finally, on bonding: the statute offers “other adequate security” as an alternative to a policy under W.S. 31-18-209(f), but no separate Wyoming bonding requirement for a motor carrier was read. That is the same kind of gap, and it is named rather than filled.
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 Wyoming 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 Wyoming 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.
Probably yes. The department defines a contract motor carrier as any person engaged in the intrastate transportation of people or property by motor vehicle on state highways for compensation, and that definition carries no weight threshold. The 26,000 pound figure belongs to the private motor carrier definition, which covers uncompensated carriage of the operator’s own property or employees.
W.S. 31-18-209(b)(x) sets a filing fee of $50.00. The department’s manual applies the same $50.00 to a private application, a contract application, both applied for at once, and a name change or information update, and charges $10.00 for duplicate letters. Read September 3, 2026.
No. The department states that certificates of insurance are not acceptable, and its authority page adds that Wyoming does not accept ADCO or ACCORD certificates, binders, abstracts or insurance ID cards for intrastate authority. The forms must be completed by a broker, underwriter or other authorized company representative.
Yes. W.S. 31-18-209(f) requires the deposited policies to be from insurance companies either authorized to do business in Wyoming or lawfully able to transact insurance without a certificate of authority under title 26 of the Wyoming statutes, as determined by the state insurance commissioner. Eligibility is decided against the insurance code, not by the transportation department.
The department’s manual states Form E liability at $750,000.00 combined single limit, Form H cargo at $10,000.00 and Form MC61E mobile home cargo at $5,000.00, and provides that private-only motor carriers are exempt from insurance filing requirements. A contract motor carrier must always have the Form E liability filing.
Cancellation runs on not less than thirty days written notice to the department, counted from receipt. W.S. 31-18-209(f) provides that on the cancellation’s effective date the operating authority is suspended and no operations may be conducted on any highway until replacement security in the required form and amount becomes effective and is approved by the department. If authority is revoked for a lapse, a new application and a fresh $50.00 fee are required.
W.S. 17-29-209(a) sets a license fee of $60.00 or two-tenths of one mill on the dollar of reported Wyoming capital, property and assets, whichever is greater, due on or before the first day of the company’s month of organization each year. The report is a certification under penalty of perjury by the treasurer or other fiscal agent.
No. W.S. 17-29-209(b)(i) provides that a company engaged in the public calling of carrying goods, passengers or information interstate need not comply with subsection (a) except to the extent of capital, property and assets used in intrastate business in Wyoming.
W.S. 17-29-210(a) sets $100.00 for filing the original articles of organization, $60.00 for an amendment, and $150.00 for issuing a certificate of authority to a foreign limited liability company. Read September 3, 2026.
Through another jurisdiction, because Wyoming does not appear on the Plan’s participating-states list read September 3, 2026. The department’s manual tells Wyoming based carriers to contact a member jurisdiction and names an out-of-state site; the Plan’s frequently asked questions say a Wyoming registrant may select from Alaska, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, New Mexico, South Dakota, Utah or Washington. The two do not name the same jurisdiction, so confirm before filing.
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.
