UCR Fees to Decline by 27% in 2023, FMCSA Says
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Fees for Unified Carrier Registration Plan and Agreement participants in 2023 will be reduced by 27% compared with 2022 fees, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration said in a Jan. 21 announcement.
FMCSA said the fees for property motor carriers, brokers, freight forwarders and leasing companies will be reduced by $16-$15,350 per entity, depending on the number of vehicles owned and/or operated by the affected entities.
The 2023 UCR fees will be reduced for companies with up to two power units from the current $59 to $43. For companies with 1,001 or more units, fees will drop from the current $56,977 to $41,627.
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Created by Congress in 2005, the UCR Plan and the 41 states participating in the UCR agreement establish and collect fees from property motor carriers, brokers, freight forwarders and leasing companies — and then dish out the more than $100 million in safety enforcement programs annually to the participating states.
Federal regulations require that fee adjustments must be requested by the UCR Plan when annual revenues exceed the maximum allowed. Also, if there are excess funds after payments to the states and for administrative costs, they are retained in the UCR Plan’s depository, and subsequent fees must be reduced.
Because the state UCR revenue entitlements would remain unchanged, the participating states would not be impacted by this rule. The primary impact of this rule would be a reduction in fees paid by individual motor carriers, motor private carriers of property, brokers, freight forwarders and leasing companies.
There are up to 44,000 motor carriers who have not registered with the plan, failed to pay their fees or have been issued penalties for past violations. However, in August, the UCR board of directors approved an aggressive three-pronged strategy to identify and contact unregistered motor carriers.
In a telephone conference on Aug. 12, the board authorized three pilot projects that called for hiring a private contractor to contact, attempt to register and collect fees mostly from errant carriers from the nine nonparticipating UCR states to raise funds for the plan.
“Our motor carrier registration percentages from nonparticipating states historically lag well behind those of participating states for various reasons,” Avelino Gutierrez, executive director of the UCR Plan, told Transport Topics following the August meeting
“First, since nonparticipating states do not register their own UCR-eligible motor carriers for UCR, the nonparticipating motor carrier will not be actively solicited to register for UCR by anyone in their state,” Gutierrez said. “Second, few nonparticipating states enforce UCR roadside, which is certainly another effective method of getting motor carriers to register on their own.”
Since 2013, Commercial Motor Vehicle Alliance roadside inspectors have checked UCR registrations in participating states during inspections.
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