FMCSA Wants to Start Charging States for CDLIS Access

Most CDL news is about what drivers have to do. This one is about plumbing, and it is worth understanding because it sits underneath every commercial license in the country.

What CDLIS is

The Commercial Driver's License Information System is the national database that keeps one driver from holding licenses in several states at once. When you apply for a CDL, your state checks CDLIS. When you get a conviction, it lands there. It is run by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators on behalf of FMCSA.

The proposal

On May 18 FMCSA published a proposed rule to charge state driver licensing agencies a user fee for accessing CDLIS. Congress authorized the fee in the Strengthening the Commercial Driver's License Information System Act. AAMVA would collect it.

Note who pays: state agencies, not drivers. There is no line item here that shows up on your bill at the DMV counter.

Why it might reach you anyway

States set their own CDL fees, and when a state's cost of running the CDL program goes up, that cost tends to get recovered somewhere. Nothing in the proposal requires a state to raise license fees, and plenty of states will absorb it. But if your state's CDL or permit fees move in the next couple of years, this is one of the reasons that could be behind it.

This is still a proposal, not a final rule, which means there is a comment period and the details can change before anything takes effect.

What to do about it

Nothing, for now. If you are budgeting for a CDL this year, the numbers that matter are your state's current fees and the cost of training, not this. We keep a breakdown of what a CDL actually costs with the pieces that do come out of your pocket.