Car Transporters Time to Pay UCR Fees

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration recently established the Unified Carrier Registration (UCR) fees that car movers will need to pay. This means interstate owner operators conducting auto shipping duties in the United States will need to make sure they get their Unified Carrier Registration fees for 2010 in by July 15. They were hoping to have finished mailing out renewal notices to car hauling professionals by May 15, which gives automobile transport professionals about 60 days to get their UCR fees into the agency. The 41 states that have signed up for this program apparently started accepting online payments on May 5, so car transporters have had awhile to pay their fees.

If you haven't sent in your UCR fees it might be time to begin putting the wheels in motion, before the sand in the time glass runs out and things really start to get complicated for you. Car transport professionals based out of a state that isn't participating in the UCR fee program should probably contact the branch of the FMCSA in their operating state or if that doesn't work you might try contacting the agency in one of the states that is part of the program to see what they tell you.

The FMCSA completed a reworking of the UCR fee structure in April that changes the fee structure in two ways. First the fee structure is based on an interstate operator's commercial motor vehicle power units only and secondly the fees have been increased to around $76 for the smallest interstate operator to about $76,346 for operators with over a thousand power units. The increases might be in part due to the fact that the total amount collected through UCR fees has fallen short of the expectations of the designers and implementers of the program by almost $30 million for each of the past three years. The fee increase has of course been met with significant criticism during a time when the car shipping industry is already dealing with a rough financial road.