UCR Charges Two Trucks $55 Starting October 1
The 2027 UCR fee for two trucks or fewer is $55, not $46. It takes effect October 1 and every bracket rises with it.
If you run one truck or two, the Unified Carrier Registration fee you have been paying is $46. For registration year 2027 it becomes $55. The rule that does it was published on September 1, 2026, and it takes effect on October 1, 2026.
Nine dollars is not the story. The story is that every bracket moves at once, and the one at the top moves by $9,329.
The old table and the new one
UCR fees are set by brackets, and the bracket is decided by how many commercial motor vehicles you own or operate. Here is what changes.
Zero to two vehicles: $46 becomes $55. Three to five: $138 becomes $167. Six to twenty: $276 becomes $333. Twenty-one to one hundred: $963 becomes $1,163. One hundred and one to one thousand: $4,592 becomes $5,548. One thousand and one or more: $44,836 becomes $54,165.
Brokers and leasing companies are not sized by fleet, and they pay the lowest bracket fee. That means they go from $46 to $55 as well.
Where the twenty percent comes from
The preamble describes the change as averaging about twenty percent over the fee structure that was adopted for 2025 and retained for 2026, with increases that range between $9 and $9,329 per entity depending on the bracket.
Those two endpoints are worth holding on to, because they are the arithmetic check on the whole table. The smallest bracket rises exactly $9. The largest rises exactly $9,329. If a table you are reading does not do that, you are looking at the wrong column.
The agency also makes a point that softens the news a little: even after this increase, the 2027 fees are lower than the ones in effect during registration years 2019 through 2022. Higher than last year, still under what the same brackets paid five years ago.
Who asked for it
The UCR Board recommended the increase on September 18, 2025, for registration year 2027 and subsequent years. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration adopted the recommendation in this final rule.
Carriers commented against it, and the comments are in the document. Several cited the cost of doing business — fuel, maintenance, insurance, compliance — and argued the agency should be stabilizing the market rather than adding to the bill. The agency's answer was that the UCR Plan exists because Congress replaced a fragmented state-by-state registration system with a single one, and that consolidating state compliance is what the fee pays for.
The section numbers moved too
This part matters only if you keep your own compliance notes, but it will confuse anyone who does. The rule removes section 367.30, redesignates 367.40 as 367.30, redesignates 367.50 as 367.40, and then adds a brand new 367.50 that holds the 2027 table.
So the old fees did not disappear: they were renumbered and kept for the years they cover. If you bookmarked a section number, the bookmark now points somewhere else.
What to do with this before October
Count vehicles the way UCR counts them, not the way your insurance does. The bracket is built on commercial motor vehicles owned or operated, and a bracket boundary is a cliff: one truck can move you from $55 to $167.
Put October 1, 2026 on the calendar as the effective date. The same date closes the window for petitions for reconsideration, so if you intend to file one, that is the last day the agency will accept it.
If you sit close to a bracket boundary, count in writing before you register instead of from memory. The jump between brackets is a step and not a slope: the table goes from $55 to $167 to $333 with nothing in between, so a single vehicle decides which of those three numbers you pay for the whole year.
Budget the new number now rather than in December, because this is a fixed annual cost that does not scale with how many miles you actually run.
Check which state you register through and what it does with the money, since UCR is collected by participating states under one agreement rather than by the federal government directly.
A fee schedule is one of the few costs in this business that is published in advance and does not negotiate. The ones that do negotiate — maintenance, downtime, the second trip for the same repair — are where an owner-operator actually gets the money back, and that is the part The Truck Savers works on.