There are two dates on your Indiana intrastate authority certification. Carriers write down the wrong one.
The one everybody knows is December 31. That’s when your certification expires, and it’s the date that gets repeated on forums and in dispatch offices all over the state.
The one that actually decides whether you keep running is November 30. That’s when Indiana stops accepting your renewal. The window opens October 1 and it closes a month before the date most people have circled.
So if you’re reading this in September, you have a filing window about to open and roughly nine weeks to use it. Let’s break down how Indiana actually works, because it doesn’t work like Ohio and it doesn’t work like Illinois.
The Rumor That Gets Indiana Carriers Shut Down
You’ve heard some version of this in a truck stop: Indiana doesn’t require intrastate authority for general freight.
That sentence is half right, and the half that’s wrong is the expensive half.
Here’s the real split. Indiana keeps operating authority and safety-and-insurance certification in two completely different chapters of its code, and most states glue them together.
So your buddy is right that you don’t need a CPCN for general freight. He’s wrong that you can run without a live certification, a Form IOA-1, and a Form E on file. Those aren’t the same thing, and only one of them is optional.
We file these. We watch people discover the difference the hard way.
What Indiana Intrastate Authority Requires for General Freight
If you haul somebody else’s property for hire between two points inside Indiana, the stack is four items deep.
A USDOT number, or an Indiana ID number
Form IOA-1 asks for one or the other on line 18. Carriers who never run interstate can operate on the Indiana ID number instead of a federal USDOT number.
Certification and acknowledgment from Indiana DOR
Under IC 8-2.1-24-15. Until DOR issues that acknowledgment, you are not legal to run intrastate. Not “at risk.” Not legal.
Form IOA-1, Intrastate Operating Authority
State Form 46918, currently on revision R14 dated 7-25. Three checkboxes live at the top: New Applicant, Renewal, and Information Change. Same form does all three jobs.
A Form E, filed with DOR by your insurance company
The form says it in one line: “Intrastate For-Hire carriers and/or Private Hazardous Materials carriers must file a Form E Indiana insurance filing.”
Note what item four does and doesn’t cover. Private carriers hauling their own non-hazardous freight don’t file. Private carriers hauling hazardous materials do. A lot of people read “private carrier” and assume they’re out of the system entirely. Line 30 of the IOA-1 says otherwise.
The Exemptions Are Real, and Narrower Than You Think
IC 8-2.1-24-3 does exempt some operations from the whole chapter. Mail-only vehicles. Government vehicles. Farm and agricultural hauling by the farmer or an ag cooperative. Armored cars under written bilateral contract.
And then there’s the one people actually try to use: vehicles operating exclusively in intrastate commerce at 26,000 pounds or less, by gross vehicle weight, GVWR, gross combination weight, or GCWR.
Read the next sentence of the statute before you get comfortable. That exemption doesn’t apply if the vehicle is used to provide for-hire transport, is designed or used to transport 16 or more passengers including the driver, or is used to transport hazardous material in amounts requiring a placard.
The weight exemption evaporates the moment you haul for hire
A 16,000-pound straight truck moving somebody else’s freight for money between two Indiana addresses is not exempt because it’s small. It’s not exempt at all. The exemption is built for private operations, and for-hire is the first thing carved out of it.
Indiana Intrastate Authority Renews October 1 to November 30
Now the date.
IC 8-2.1-24-16 lays out the annual renewal in three short subdivisions, and the middle one is the whole ballgame. An application for renewal “may be received by the department at any time after September 30 of the year preceding the year of certification and must be received before November 30 of the year preceding the certification year.”
Subdivision three then says “a certification expires December 31 of each year.”
Both dates are real. They do different jobs. December 31 is when the paper stops being good. November 30 is when the state stops taking your renewal. Form IOA-1 prints it right on the checkbox: Renewal (Due November 30th).
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| October 1 | Renewal window opens. DOR can accept your IOA-1 for next year. |
| November 30 | Renewal deadline. The statute says “before” this date, the form says “due” this date. Treat it as the outside edge. |
| December 31 | Current certification expires. |
| January 1 | You either have next year’s certification or you don’t. |
One mercy valve worth knowing: the same statute says “the department may extend the term of a certification for cause.” That’s a phone call to Motor Carrier Services, not a right, and not a plan.
A second thing that surprises people, in a good way. Line 30’s instructions on the IOA-1 say plainly: “If this is a renewal application no insurance filing is required.” You file the Form E when you come into the system. You don’t re-file it every November. What you do have to do is keep the underlying coverage alive and correct, because the filing is only as good as the policy behind it.
Not Sure If Your Indiana Filings Are Live?
We’ll pull them up with you and tell you straight. No sales pitch, no obligation.
The Indiana Form E Filing Your Insurance Company Has to Make
Form E is the uniform certificate of insurance. You don’t fill it out, you don’t sign it, and you can’t file it. Your insurance company files it with Indiana DOR Motor Carrier Services.
Four things underneath that matter more than the form name.
Your insurer has to be registered in Indiana. DOR states it without hedging on its Motor Carrier Insurance Coverage page: “All for-hire carriers must have an insurance carrier that has registered with the Indiana Department of Insurance.” They even publish a list of companies known to write motor carrier coverage, with NAIC numbers, as a courtesy. If your quote comes back from a market that isn’t registered in Indiana, it may not be able to support your filing. That’s a question to answer before you bind, not after.
Order of operations matters. If the Form E reaches DOR before your IOA-1 does, the filing doesn’t post. It sits marked Pending, and if the IOA-1 doesn’t show up within 30 days, DOR rejects the filing outright. Your insurance company did its job, your paperwork still died, and nobody gets a phone call about it.
The filing standard is 49 CFR Part 1043, not Part 387. Every proof-of-security checkbox on the IOA-1 reads “in accordance with 49 CFR Part 1043.” Small detail. It’s the one printed on the form.
Your federal filings don’t cover this. BMC-91 and BMC-91X live with FMCSA. Indiana Form E lives with DOR. One commercial auto policy can support both. They still fail independently, and they fail quietly.
“We’ll handle the Form E later”
Later is how filings die. Before you bind an Indiana risk, ask two questions out loud: can this market support an Indiana Form E with DOR, and who is going to confirm it posted? If the answer to the second one is a shrug, you don’t have an answer.
What Indiana Makes You Carry
These aren’t scraped from a summary. They’re the checkboxes on line 30 of Form IOA-1, which is the document you actually sign.
| Situation | Minimum public liability |
|---|---|
| Non-hazmat, operating only vehicles with GVWR of 10,000 lbs or less | $300,000 |
| Non-hazmat, general | $750,000 |
| Hazardous materials | $1,000,000 |
| Hazardous materials, higher-risk divisions | $5,000,000 |
| Passengers, seating capacity fewer than 16 | $1,500,000 |
| Passengers, seating capacity greater than 15 | $5,000,000 |
| Contract carriers transporting railroad employees (IC 8-2.1-22-46) | $5,000,000 |
| Private carrier of non-hazmat property, or private passengers | No filing required |
Two of those deserve a second look.
The hazmat split isn’t a vague band. Line 26 of the IOA-1 lists every hazardous materials division you might carry or ship, and the instruction under it is one sentence: “Divisions that are in bold require $5,000,000 in insurance.” You don’t guess which tier you’re in. You circle your divisions and read the typeface.
The railroad-employee line is real and almost nobody writes about it. If you’re a contract carrier hauling railroad crews in Indiana, your floor is $5,000,000 under IC 8-2.1-22-46. If you’ve been quoted at $1,000,000 for that work, somebody didn’t read the form. For what we actually place against these floors, see our Indiana trucking insurance page.
Household Goods and Passengers Play a Completely Different Game
If you move household goods or haul passengers for hire inside Indiana, everything above still applies and then a second process stacks on top of it. It isn’t a formality.
Here’s the actual sequence DOR publishes:
Sixty days is shorter than it sounds
A mover gets approved in March, celebrates, and books work for April. The insurance agent files the Form E in week two. The tariff, which nobody explained, never goes in. Sixty days later the authority is dismissed and the whole application starts over, minus the $100 and minus two months of booked jobs.
Two more things worth knowing. Indiana doesn’t use a Form H for household goods. Where Ohio wants a cargo certificate, Indiana wants a tariff, a published document listing every rate and charge. Per IC 8-2.1-22-23 you may not charge anything that isn’t in it, and DOR keeps it on file and hands it to the public on request. And rejections are rationed: three per year, and three consecutive rejections inside 365 days means you wait until the following calendar year to try again.
Household goods and passenger authority renews annually by November 30 too. Same date, different process.
Two Filings, Two Agencies, Two Ways to Fail
| Interstate | Indiana intrastate | |
|---|---|---|
| Credential | FMCSA operating authority | DOR certification and acknowledgment (IC 8-2.1-24-15). CPCN only for household goods or passengers. |
| Insurance filing | BMC-91 / BMC-91X | Form E |
| Filed with | FMCSA | Indiana DOR Motor Carrier Services |
| Filing standard | 49 CFR Part 387 | 49 CFR Part 1043 |
| Annual obligation | UCR, October to December | Form IOA-1, October 1 to November 30 |
| If it lapses | Interstate authority goes down | You aren’t legal to run intrastate |
One commercial auto policy can support both filings. That doesn’t mean both filings are healthy. We’ve seen carriers keep a spotless BMC-91X for years while nobody ever asked about the Indiana Form E, because the company “only did interstate” until the first Indianapolis-to-Fort-Wayne load board deal looked too good to pass up. If you’re standing up a brand new operation, our guide on getting trucking insurance with new authority covers the federal side first. If you run the neighbors, the same second-filing trap shows up in Ohio and in Illinois, and each state runs its own version of it.
Why $750,000 Is a Floor and Not a Plan
Look at what that number is actually doing on the form. It’s a checkbox certifying you meet a minimum. It isn’t an estimate of what a claim costs.
Here’s the practical test, and it has nothing to do with the statute. Pull up the last broker packet you signed. Most of them require $1,000,000 combined single limit before they’ll tender you a load. If your brokers already demand more than the state does, then $750,000 was never your operating number. It was just the lowest number that kept DOR from rejecting your paperwork.
That’s the honest way to think about every filing minimum. The state is confirming you’re insurable. Your customers are deciding whether you’re worth loading. Those are different bars, and only one of them pays your bills.
Two different questions
We’re not telling you to buy more limit because we sell limit. We’re telling you because the gap between a filing minimum and a catastrophic claim comes out of your equipment, your receivables and your house. An excess layer usually costs less than one month of a truck payment, and it’s the cheapest thing on your policy relative to what it does.
What You Should Do Right Now
Check today’s date against October 1
If the window is open, renew. If it isn’t, put October 1 and November 30 on the calendar in ink, and stop writing down December 31.
Sort your last twenty bills of lading by origin and final destination
Not by the miles you drove. Any load that starts and ends in Indiana needed a live certification, whether or not it ever needed a CPCN.
Ask your agent the filing question, not the policy question
“Is my Indiana Form E on file with DOR, and which company filed it?” If the answer you get is “your policy is active,” that’s an answer to a different question.
Check that your insurer is registered with the Indiana Department of Insurance
DOR requires it for every for-hire carrier. It takes one lookup, and it’s the thing most likely to blow up a filing you thought was handled.
If you haul household goods or passengers, find your tariff
If you can’t produce it in sixty seconds, or it doesn’t match what you actually charge, that’s a compliance problem sitting in plain sight.
The Bottom Line
Indiana isn’t a no-rules state for intrastate trucking. It’s a misunderstood one.
The CPCN rumor is half true and gets repeated as a full exemption. The weight exemption looks generous until you read the sentence that carves out for-hire. The Form E is filed by somebody else, so nobody watches it. And the deadline everybody memorized is a month later than the deadline that matters.
We read the filings. We know which markets can support an Indiana Form E with DOR, and we’ll tell you before you bind instead of after a load is already on the dock. That’s the whole job, and it’s the same way we handle every trucking insurance account we write.
If you’re hauling in Indiana, let’s go through it. Take a look at our Indiana trucking insurance page, or just call us at 800-885-6682 and we’ll pull your filings up with you.
