FMCSA Finalized a 20% UCR Fee Hike. Only Two Commenters Supported It — and Neither Would Sign Their Name.
31 carriers and owner-operators told FMCSA to kill the 2027 UCR fee hike. Two anonymous comments supported it. The agency finalized it anyway.
By Herman Armstrong
Thirty-one carriers and owner-operators told FMCSA to kill the UCR fee increase. The two comments in support were anonymous. FMCSA finalized it anyway.
Out of 33 public comments on the proposed 2027 UCR fee hike, 31 opposed it. The agency published the final rule on September 1, 2026 — a full twelve months after the UCR Board first recommended the increase. FMCSA had a year to absorb the opposition. It used that year to prepare the paperwork.
The increase averages 20% over the fee structure in place for 2025 and 2026. Depending on your bracket, the per-entity hit runs from $9 to $9,329.
FMCSA's defense is a masterpiece of regulator math: fees are still below what carriers paid from 2019 through 2022. So because the agency charged more before, the current hike gets presented as a concession. That's not a justification. That's a threat with a smile.
OOIDA called it straight in its formal comment to the agency: "Once again, the UCR Board has failed to properly justify how they determined the proposed 20% fee increase for 2027."
The justification problem runs deeper than fuzzy arithmetic. OOIDA also put on the record that several donor states are already keeping UCR revenues they aren't entitled to — money they're supposed to pass through, pocketed instead. If that's accurate, the claimed revenue shortfall isn't a math problem. It's a compliance problem inside the program itself. Raising fees on carriers doesn't fix donor states skimming the fund. It just refills the leak.
Same agency, same week, different squeeze
The UCR vote didn't happen in isolation. The same FMCSA that overrode 31 commenters on fees is the agency whose SafeSpect inspection software now hard-codes English Language Proficiency violations as automatic out-of-service events, with no override capability for the officer on scene. Industry pushed back on that too. The agency moved anyway.
Two policies, same logic: collect more, enforce harder, treat public comment as a procedural checkbox that satisfies the Administrative Procedure Act without actually influencing the outcome.
When the only people who supported a fee hike wouldn't put their names on it, that tells you everything about who this rule was written for.