UCR Fees to Increase 25% in 2025
Inflation is a powerful thing.
That is probably what you were thinking when you read the headline for this article, but the situation at hand is significantly more nuanced than simply fees for the Unified Carrier Registration (UCR) going up because of rampant inflation in years prior.
Details
Created by Congress in 2005, the UCR is a coalition of 41 member states that attempt to make it easier to deal with registration fees on a state-by-state basis. If the UCR collects too much money, it is required to lower its fees in upcoming years, and the opposite if it does not collect enough.
As a result, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration anticipates a 25% increase in costs for fleets to register come 2025. This will lead to an increase in costs ranging from $9 to $9,000, depending on the size of the fleet registering.
This is likely to come as a massive sticker shock, especially when inflation has never been 25% in America’s history (the highest we could find was in 1946 at 18.1%). However, it is counterbalanced by decreases that occurred for the UCR in 2023 and 2024. Using the average cost changes for the three years, UCR fees are still about 78% what they were in 2022.
Conclusion
The only question that still remains is why the UCR fluctuates between massive price cuts and hikes instead of slowly increasing it year-over-year so as to avoid sticker shock. The answer is more bureaucratic red tape: the UCR is required to aim for a target of approximately $108 million in collected revenue every year, but the number of total registrants also fluctuates from year to year, creating surpluses and deficits.
With the price of registration, on average, still at around 78% of what it was in 2022, it will still be a number of years before the fees catch up with the passage of time, unless the UCR does something extraordinary such as another price hike of 30%.
Until the future years with their price increases come, we highly recommend enjoying the current UCR rates, at approximately 63% of what they were before the price cuts took place!
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