A Trucking Group Asked the D.C. Circuit to Throw Out the 2027 UCR Fee Rule and Rebuild the System Behind It. The Plan's Director Says State Enforcement Funding Could Be Affected. Both Sides Agree on One Thing: Register Before January 1

The annual registration fee that interstate carriers, brokers, freight forwarders and leasing companies pay is now the subject of a federal appeals case. On October 20 the Small Business in Transportation Coalition filed a petition for review in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit against the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's September 1 final rule setting Unified Carrier Registration fees for 2027 and the years after it. The case is docketed as No. 26-1297, Small Business in Transportation Coalition v. FMCSA, with the Department of Transportation and the United States as co-respondents. The coalition wants the fee rule set aside, collections halted and the UCR system established through formal rulemaking. The people who run the program say that if the court agrees, money that many states use for truck enforcement could be affected. FreightWaves reported the dispute on November 3, with comment from both sides.

What the petition argues

The coalition's theory is structural rather than about the size of the increase. The petition argues that FMCSA never promulgated regulations formally establishing the UCR system as 49 U.S.C. §13908 requires. Its executive director, James Lamb, told FreightWaves that everything built on top of that omission falls with it.

Because the UCR system was never lawfully established, the UCR Board of Directors, the UCR Agreement that the Board wrote, and every single fee rule ever set under the authority of the UCR Agreement are all illegal.

Section 13908 of Title 49, titled 'Registration and other reforms,' directs the Secretary of Transportation, within a year of the 2005 Unified Carrier Registration Act, to issue regulations establishing an online federal registration system to replace the old DOT-number system, the single-state registration system and several other filings. The UCR Plan and its board, the state agreement and the fee brackets live in a different section, 49 U.S.C. §14504a. The coalition's argument rests on the first section's rulemaking mandate. The plan and FMCSA point to the second. Avelino Gutierrez, the UCR Plan's executive director, put it this way in written answers to FreightWaves: 'Without arguing the merits of the case here, the UCR Plan strongly believes it was lawfully established under 49 U.S.C. Section 14504(a) et seq.' (The section is §14504a in the code's numbering.) FMCSA said the same in the September rule, citing §14504a as the statute under which Congress established the plan and its fee collection.

According to the docket summary published by A Driver's Perspective on October 24, the petition asks the court to set aside the 2027 fee rule, stop further UCR collections, require DOT to establish the UCR system lawfully, and stop transfers of truckers' personally identifiable information, including Social Security numbers, to the UCR system and its technology contractor. CCJ reported that it also asks the court to disband the UCR Plan's board of directors.

What the plan says would happen

The UCR program requires interstate motor carriers, brokers, freight forwarders and leasing companies to register every year and pay a fee based on fleet size or business classification. Participating states receive the money and, Gutierrez said, many of them spend it directly on motor carrier safety and enforcement, such as roadside inspections and commercial vehicle enforcement.

If the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit were to set aside the 2027 fee rule and/or halt UCR fee collections, then registration operations, fee collections and the distributions of funds to the states could be greatly affected.

The 2027 schedule itself was covered here when it was finalized: every bracket rises about 20%, from $46 to $55 for carriers with up to two power units, and for every broker, freight forwarder and leasing company regardless of size, up to $54,165 from $44,836 for fleets of 1,001 trucks or more. FMCSA justified the increase with a $21.79 million shortfall against the $118 million owed to the states, and said in the rule that the 2027 fees are still lower than those charged from 2019 through 2022. Of 33 public comments, 31 opposed the increase. The rule took effect October 1, the day 2027 registration opened.

The timeline, and why nobody is telling you to wait

On October 26 the coalition filed a motion to expedite. Lamb was explicit with FreightWaves about what it is not asking for: 'We are not seeking an emergency stay but we are seeking emergency expedited merits review.' As of October 24, per the docket summary by A Driver's Perspective, the coalition's preliminary submissions are due November 19 and dispositive motions, along with FMCSA's certified administrative record, are due December 4; the October 26 motion to expedite could change that schedule. No stay or injunction appeared on the public docket as of that summary, so the 2027 fees remain in force.

That is why both sides give carriers the same practical advice. Lamb: 'If it doesn't rule before then, carriers should pay their 2027 UCR fees by December 31st to avoid civil penalties.' The plan's guidance, as FreightWaves quoted it: 'As neither the Court of Appeals nor any other court has ruled otherwise, the UCR Plan's current guidance is to register for UCR prior to enforcement beginning on January 1, 2027.'

The coalition has been to the D.C. Circuit over UCR before. An earlier petition, No. 25-1290, filed in December 2025, challenged broader aspects of the system and tried to stop the 2027 fee rulemaking; the court denied that request on June 17, 2026, and FMCSA cited the denial when it finalized the increase. Lamb told FreightWaves the June ruling did not reach the merits of the coalition's legal arguments.

The Social Security number fight

The second half of the petition is about data. The coalition alleges that truckers' personally identifiable information, including Social Security numbers, is transmitted to the UCR Plan and its technology vendors, and on October 13 it asked the DOT Office of Inspector General to audit the system's IT infrastructure and its compliance with federal privacy requirements. Lamb said he discovered the problem in 2019, when he found his own Social Security number exposed through the UCR registration website.

Gutierrez disputed that FMCSA is giving the plan any such data now: 'Personally identifiable information, including social security numbers, has not been given by FMCSA to the UCR Plan since March 2019,' and 'The UCR Plan does not solicit nor receive PII from any entity, government or otherwise.' He acknowledged the 2019 incident: a 28-day window in March of that year when some tax identification numbers that were also Social Security numbers appeared in the browser status bar attached to registration receipts. The plan's investigation at the time identified roughly 30,000 registrant accounts potentially exposed, of which about 23,000 may have used a Social Security number as the tax ID. The plan said it found no sign of a mass export, fixed the flaw and arranged notifications and identity monitoring. The coalition says the incident and the current data-sharing arrangements warrant further federal scrutiny; the plan denies that it solicits or receives personal data at all, and the allegations of ongoing Privacy Act violations remain disputed. The coalition is separately complaining about the use of UCR funds for a board meeting planned for March 2027 in Florida.

What to do between now and January 1

A court denied the coalition's earlier request to pause this rulemaking in June. What is new is the target: not the size of the fee but the legal existence of the body that sets it. The D.C. Circuit now has a question of statutory structure, two sections of the same title with each side pointing to a different one, and a calendar that runs past the January 1 enforcement date. Until the court says otherwise, the fee is the fee.