ASHEVILLE, N.C. (828newsNOW) — North Carolina drivers will soon see a change in car registration protocol. The North Carolina Department of Transportation is developing a digital registration system for implementation by the end of the year.
From stickers to cyberspace
“This year will likely be the last year that you will, at your renewal, receive a registration card and a sticker in the mail,” said NCDOT Department of Motor Vehicles Communications Manager Marty R. Homan.
Homan said that the DMV is in the planning stages of building an online system that will include a digital registration database and a mobile driver’s license. State legislature has stated an intended implementation date for Oct. 1, 2026.
Currently, N.C. drivers are required by law to register their cars once a year. After passing a safety inspection and paying property tax, drivers receive a physical registration card and a sticker for their license plate with the registration expiration date. This process will remain in place, but will shift onto the digital platform.
“If you go past your expiration date, you will accrue fees and fines related to that,” Homan said. “Just because the sticker and the printed card are going away does not absolve people of paying their renewals.”
The decision to move registration online has been made after technological advancements have antiquated the use of physical materials.
“Technology has advanced to the point where the stickers aren’t even necessarily being used by anyone to tell if a plate is registered or not. That’s all done by a license plate reader in a law enforcement vehicle,” Homan said. “Everything’s going digital. The division is at work developing a mobile driver’s license or a digital ID to supplement the physical card that you may have in your wallet or your purse, and so, as a part of that, we’re developing a wallet that would be able to hold your registration card digitally.”
Details for the new system are still subject to change. Homan said that the policy change came as a surprise to the DMV when it was included in Senate Bill 257, the new N.C. state budget, which was signed into law by Governor Josh Stein on Tuesday, July 7.
“We just found out about it in the budget like everybody else did, and so we’re working to develop what that’s going to look like and make sure we meet the legislative intent,” Homan said. “Also, do our best to have it ready by the time that they specify it in the legislation.”
Until the official launch of the digital platform, Homan said to keep registering vehicles the old-fashioned way: the stickers should stay.
“We’ve had some questions on social media already, asking if people need to keep the stickers on their plates. The answer for now is, yes,” Homan said. “We do not have the electronic database and system built for the digital vehicle registration yet, and so the stickers need to remain on vehicles until we have this new system in place.”
