Motor carrier classes by state
In Texas the liability minimum is attached to the tow truck permit, not to the company that owns it — so a mixed fleet can carry three different state obligations at the same time. On-hook, garage liability and the storage yard license sit on top of that.
Most of what makes tow and recovery a difficult insurance class is federal in origin and applies the same way everywhere — the custody problem, the care-custody-and-control exclusion, the on-hook form that exists to close it. That material belongs to the class rather than to any one state, and it is set out on the tow trucking insurance page rather than repeated here.
What Texas adds is a licensing architecture that changes the shape of the insurance conversation. The Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation issues separate credentials for the tow company, for each individual tow truck, for the operator who drives it, and — under an entirely different chapter of the Occupations Code — for the vehicle storage facility and its employees. An operator who tows and stores is not one licensee with an endorsement. He is a licensee twice over, under two statutory schemes, with two different sets of obligations.
The consequence that matters commercially is that the state minimum liability limit attaches to the tow truck permit rather than to the business. A single Texas operator can hold trucks carrying three different insurance requirements simultaneously, and moving one truck from one kind of work to another changes what that truck is required to carry. Underwriting a Texas fleet begins with the permit inventory.
Everything below is sourced to the rule or statute that sets it, with the date that version took effect. Texas figures move on their own clocks — the private property fee schedule is amended by rule, the storage figures are adjusted on a biennial cycle — so a number without a date attached to it is a number that will quietly go stale.
Running a mixed permit fleet in Texas? Send the permit list rather than the truck list — the permit class is what sets each unit’s requirement.
The Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation is the licensing authority for towing, and it issues the credentials separately rather than as one bundle. There is a license for the tow company, a permit for each tow truck, a license for the tow operator who drives it, and — under Texas Occupations Code chapter 2303 rather than chapter 2308 — a license for the vehicle storage facility and a further license for VSF employees.
Separating the truck permit from the company license is what produces the per-truck insurance structure described in the next section. It also means a compliance problem can sit at any of four levels. A company in good standing can be running a truck whose permit does not match the work it is being dispatched to, and that mismatch is a licensing exposure before it is ever an insurance one.
Motor carrier registration is a separate matter again, handled by the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles under Transportation Code chapter 643. An operator can hold every TDLR credential and still have a registration gap on the carrier side.
Under 16 Texas Administrative Code § 86.400, adopted effective April 15, 2008, the required insurance is stated per tow truck per incident and varies by the permit that truck carries:
Read that as an underwriting instruction rather than a compliance footnote. The same physical wrecker carries a different state obligation depending on which permit is on it, and an operator who adds incident management work to a truck that previously ran consent calls has raised that unit from a $300,000 to a $500,000 requirement without buying a vehicle or hiring a driver.
The $50,000 cargo or on-hook floor deserves separate attention, because it is a permit-issuance threshold rather than a limit sized to the work. A heavy wrecker recovering a loaded combination is holding a customer vehicle worth several multiples of that figure. The distance between the state floor and the replacement value of what is actually on the hook is the operator’s exposure, and it is the single most common structural gap on a Texas tow account.
Texas sets a statewide maximum for private property tows and leaves the rest to local government. Under 16 Texas Administrative Code § 86.455, last amended effective November 1, 2021, the private property maximums are $272 for a light-duty tow, $380 for a medium-duty tow, and $489 per unit for a heavy-duty tow subject to a $978 aggregate. The maximum drop charge — collectable when the owner appears after hookup but before removal — is $135, $190 and $244 across those same classes.
Those are ceilings set by rule, and the rule has been amended in 2012, 2015 and 2021 since its 2010 adoption. Rates for incident management work are not capped statewide at all.
The local layer is real and it is where the remaining numbers live. Texas Occupations Code § 2308.201 permits a political subdivision to regulate tow truck operation to the extent federal law allows. A city may require registration of a truck performing nonconsent tows whether or not the operator keeps a place of business there, but may not require registration of a consent-tow truck unless the operator maintains a location in that jurisdiction. A local tow truck operator licensing fee is capped at $15 unless the operator performs nonconsent towing.
In practice that authority is exercised by the large metros — Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin and Fort Worth each operate their own registration and rate framework for nonconsent work. This page does not reproduce any city rate figure. Municipal schedules are adopted locally, revised on local calendars, and none of them was verifiable at primary source when this page was written. An operator quoting a job in one of those cities should be reading that city’s current adopted schedule, not a figure carried on a third-party page.
We place Texas tow and recovery accounts across light-duty, medium-duty and heavy wrecker classes, including operators running their own storage yards.
Vehicle storage in Texas sits under Occupations Code chapter 2303, separately from the towing chapter. TDLR publishes the maximum charges, and the figures currently published come from the 2023 biennial adjustment made under § 2303.1552: a maximum daily storage fee of $22.85 for a vehicle 25 feet in length or less, $39.99 per day for a vehicle over 25 feet, a maximum impound fee of $22.85, and a notification fee of up to $50. The current figures are published on the TDLR vehicle storage facility fees page.
The 25-foot length break is worth noticing on a commercial account. It is a length test rather than a weight test, which means a recovered combination and a recovered pickup fall on opposite sides of it for reasons that have nothing to do with how the towing itself was rated.
Because these amounts are adjusted biennially rather than fixed, they belong in a file with a review date attached. An operator working from a schedule two cycles old is quoting from a number the state has already moved.
The insurance consequence of running a yard is that the exposure changes character. Auto liability and physical damage on the wrecker do not respond to a customer vehicle damaged while parked on the operator’s lot. That is garage and premises territory, and it is where a large share of custody claims on tow accounts actually originate.
Texas Occupations Code § 2308.002, amended through Acts 2023 and effective January 1, 2025, defines a consent tow as one where the tow truck is summoned by the owner or operator of the vehicle, or by someone with possession, custody or control of it. Everything else is a nonconsent tow, and the statute names two kinds: an incident management tow, where the truck is summoned to a collision or incident scene including removal of commercial cargo and debris, and a private property tow, authorized by a parking facility owner without the vehicle owner’s consent.
Those three definitions are the hinge for the whole Texas framework. They set which permit a truck needs, which insurance minimum applies to it, whether a city may require it to register, and whether the § 86.455 fee ceiling applies at all.
The federal backdrop is 49 U.S.C. § 14501, which preempts state economic regulation of motor carriers but preserves state authority over the price of nonconsensual towing. That reservation is why Texas may publish a private property fee ceiling at all, and why the towing rulebook an operator answers to is a state and municipal document rather than a federal one.
The permit inventory comes first, because it determines the minimum on each unit. After that the questions follow the equipment and the work mix:
An account that can answer those five cleanly generally places without difficulty. An account that cannot usually has a permit-to-work mismatch somewhere in the fleet, and that is worth finding before a carrier finds it at claim time.
The state minimum is a licensing threshold. The program an operator actually needs is built from these lines:
We write tow and recovery as a named class rather than as an exception to general trucking, and we read each account against the licensing regime of the state it operates in. For a Texas operator that means starting from the permit list, sizing on-hook to the heaviest class actually recovered rather than to a state floor, and treating the storage yard as its own exposure rather than an extension of the wrecker.
If the operation also runs freight under separate authority, the Texas trucking insurance page covers the state’s broader motor carrier picture, and the tow trucking insurance page covers the class mechanics that apply wherever the operator runs.
It depends on the permit the truck carries, not on the company. Under 16 Texas Administrative Code § 86.400, adopted effective April 15, 2008, a truck permitted for incident management towing must carry a minimum of $500,000 in liability insurance per tow truck per incident. A truck permitted for private property towing or for consent towing carries a $300,000 minimum. Incident management and private property permits additionally require a minimum of $50,000 in cargo or cargo on-hook insurance; the consent class does not.
Because the minimum attaches per truck per permit. A Texas operator running a mixed fleet can hold three different insurance obligations at once, and adding an incident management permit to a truck that previously ran consent work raises that truck from a $300,000 to a $500,000 requirement. Underwriting a Texas tow fleet therefore starts with the permit inventory rather than the vehicle count, which is not how most states organize the question.
Only for private property tows, and only at the state level. Under 16 Texas Administrative Code § 86.455, last amended effective November 1, 2021, the maximum private property tow fee is $272 for light-duty, $380 for medium-duty, and $489 per unit for heavy-duty with a $978 aggregate. Incident management rates are not capped statewide. Those are ceilings as published in the rule, and the rule has been amended four times since 2010.
A drop charge is what an operator may collect when the vehicle owner arrives after hookup but before the vehicle leaves the property, and elects to take the vehicle back. Under 16 Texas Administrative Code § 86.455 the maximum drop charge is $135 for light-duty, $190 for medium-duty, and $244 for heavy-duty, as amended effective November 1, 2021. The drop charge is a distinct capped item, not a fraction of the tow fee.
No. A vehicle storage facility is licensed separately under Texas Occupations Code chapter 2303, and TDLR issues both a VSF company license and a VSF employee license in addition to the tow company, tow truck and tow operator credentials. An operator who tows and stores holds credentials under two different chapters, and the storage yard carries its own liability profile that auto liability on the wrecker does not reach.
Texas Occupations Code § 2308.201 lets a political subdivision regulate tow truck operation to the extent federal law allows. A city may require registration of a truck performing nonconsent tows whether or not the operator has a local place of business, but may not require registration of a consent-tow truck unless the operator maintains a location in that jurisdiction. A local tow truck operator licensing fee is capped at $15 except where the operator performs nonconsent towing.
TDLR publishes maximums from the 2023 biennial adjustment made under Texas Occupations Code § 2303.1552: $22.85 per day for a vehicle 25 feet in length or less and $39.99 per day for a vehicle over 25 feet, with a maximum impound fee of $22.85 and a notification fee of up to $50. Those amounts are adjusted on a biennial cycle, so they carry a review date rather than being fixed.
The state minimum and the commercially adequate limit are different questions. The $50,000 cargo or on-hook minimum in 16 Texas Administrative Code § 86.400 is a floor for permit issuance, not a limit matched to what an operator actually tows. A heavy wrecker recovering a loaded tractor-trailer is holding a customer vehicle worth many multiples of that floor, and the gap between the permit minimum and the replacement value is the operator exposure, not the carrier.
Every figure on this page was read at the source below on August 11, 2026, with the effective date of the version read. Treat each as current as of that date rather than as permanent.
Send the permit inventory and the heaviest class you recover. We will structure on-hook and garage limits against the work rather than against the state floor.
