Free help
I keep getting letters and calls about my UCR or MCS-150
Work out which of the two it is first, because one of them costs you nothing at all and the other is a real government fee with a price anyone can look up.
Do not pay anything yet. Look up your own record, and check the two real prices below. Both of them are public, and both are printed on the sites of the agencies that set them.
The MCS-150 costs nothing
FMCSA charges $0 to file or update an MCS-150. It is filed through FMCSA's own registration system at motus.dot.gov, or downloaded from fmcsa.dot.gov.
Third-party filers publish $150 for a standard filing and $350 for a "lifetime" update of the same form. Both of those things are true at the same time. The government charges nothing, and somebody else charges $150.
That is the whole tell. If a letter is asking you for money to file a form the government gives away, you are paying for somebody to type your own information into a free website.
The UCR is not free, but the price is set and it is the same for everybody
UCR is the Unified Carrier Registration. The fee is set by the UCR Plan, not by whoever sends you the letter. For the 2027 registration year, which opens on October 1, 2026:
- A 2-truck carrier pays $55.
- A 5-truck carrier pays $167.
- A 10-truck carrier pays $333.
Registration has to be completed and paid before January 1 of the registration year. It runs through the National Registration System.
So anyone quoting a 2 to 10 truck carrier several hundred dollars for UCR is marking up a government fee. It is the most common overcharge in this market and it is the easiest one to check.
The two tells worth remembering
- A price that is a range, not a number. If a company quotes you somewhere between nothing and tens of thousands of dollars, they cannot tell you what this costs. Nobody who knows the fee has to guess at it.
- Urgency on the phone. A deactivation happens automatically off a date, not off a conversation. Nobody can talk you into or out of it, and a payment taken today does not change the date.
Check with the people who set the prices
- UCR help desk: 1-833-UCR-PLAN (1-833-827-7526), or helpdesk@UCR.gov.
- FMCSA: 1-800-832-5660, 8AM to 8PM Eastern, Monday to Friday. For MCS-150 questions, press 1 and then 2.
Nobody legitimately acting for you will ask for a fee by phone for something the government gives away. If anyone does, ask them for the source, and then check it yourself.
Do not dismiss the problem because the sender is a scammer
This is the part that actually matters. The letters are usually junk, and the thing they are warning you about can still be real. An overdue MCS-150 is the most common reason a DOT number gets deactivated, and it does not come with a warning that reaches you in time.
So the useful move is not to ignore the letter. It is to look at your own record and see whether the deadline behind it is genuinely coming due.
That is what the free check on this site does, and it costs nothing and asks for nothing.
What this service does about it
The MCS-150 and the UCR are prepared and filed for you before the deadline. The MCS-150 filing costs nothing from FMCSA and it stays free. The UCR fee goes to UCR, not to us. What you are paying for is that the date does not arrive unnoticed, and that nobody has to sell you a form the government already gives away.
Where this comes from: the 2027 UCR fee brackets from plan.ucr.gov, the UCR filing deadline and help desk from the same page, and FMCSA's MCS-150 pages including the $0 filing cost and the MOTUS system. All read September 18, 2026, and recorded in this project's verified figures file. The $150 and $350 third-party prices are published by a third-party filer, without naming them.