Trucking Compliance Calendar 2026

The deadlines that actually bite, in one place — each one linked to the official source, refreshed quarterly.

Updated July 2026 Official sources linked Free — no signup

Form 2290 (Heavy Vehicle Use Tax) — when is YOURS due?

There is no single 2290 deadline. It depends on the month the truck first hits a public highway in the tax period (July 1 – June 30). The famous "August 31" only applies to trucks in service in July.

Why your 2290 date is not the same as everyone else's

Two things about the heavy vehicle use tax confuse people every single year, and they compound each other.

The first is the tax period. It does not follow the calendar year. The IRS period runs July 1 through June 30, which means the "year" you are filing for is already half spent by New Year's Day. A truck bought in February is not filing for next year; it is filing into a period that ends in four months.

The second is the deadline, which is not a fixed date at all. The instructions state it in one sentence — Form 2290 must be filed by the last day of the month following the month of first use — and that sentence hands the date-setting job to your own truck. Put a vehicle on a public highway in October and your deadline is the end of November. Put it on the road in March and your deadline is the end of April. August 31, 2026 is famous only because most trucks are already rolling when the period opens on July 1, so July is their month of first use and the end of August is their deadline.

Late entry into the period changes two things together, and drivers usually notice only one of them. The deadline slides forward, as above. The tax is also prorated — you are charged for the months remaining in the period rather than the full year. The full annual amount runs up to $550 for the heaviest category, over 75,000 pounds, and a truck first used in April owes a fraction of that rather than the whole figure.

One more mechanic worth knowing: when the last day of the month lands on a Saturday, Sunday or a legal holiday, the deadline moves to the next business day. The calculator above already applies that shift, which is why September first use in this period returns November 2 rather than October 31 — October 31, 2026 is a Saturday. Do not assume the shift; the calendar produced it.

Finally, the piece of paper that actually matters afterward is not the return. It is the stamped Schedule 1 that comes back to you. That is what a state will ask for at registration, and it is what a leasing carrier or a bank will ask for later. File early enough that a rejected return still leaves you time to correct it, because a truck without proof of payment can be a truck that cannot get plates.

Rule: "Form 2290 must be filed by the last day of the month following the month of first use" — IRS Form 2290 Instructions. Tax is prorated for first use after July; annual tax runs up to $550 (over-75,000-lb category). Weekend/holiday deadlines move to the next business day.

The 2026–27 dates, and what sits behind each one

Quarterly — IFTA returns

An IFTA return is due one month after its quarter ends. The ordinary due dates are April 30, July 31, October 31 and January 31, and two of the next four land on a weekend, so the printed date and the real date differ:

  • Q2 2026 (April–June) return: due July 31, 2026 — a Friday, and the nearest deadline on this page as of the July 2026 review
  • Q3 2026: due November 2, 2026 (Oct 31 falls on a Saturday — next business day; verify with your base jurisdiction)
  • Q4 2026: due February 1, 2027 (Jan 31 is a Sunday)
  • Q1 2027: due April 30, 2027 — a Friday, no shift
  • Details and rate matrix: see our IFTA page and iftach.org

The pattern repeats: the return for a quarter is due at the end of the month after the quarter closes, and it moves to the next business day when the last day falls on a weekend or holiday. The shift is the base jurisdiction's to confirm, not ours — jurisdictions have been known to handle a holiday differently from one another.

Two wrinkles that catch people who only ever ran one state before. A handful of jurisdictions apply a surcharge on top of the ordinary fuel tax — Indiana, Kentucky and Virginia appear on the rate matrix as separate surcharge rows, so a mile driven there produces two lines on your return rather than one. And Oregon has no IFTA fuel-tax rate at all; it runs a weight-mile tax instead, which is filed and paid to Oregon on Oregon's terms and does not disappear because you filed IFTA.

Annual — the October-to-January stretch

The back half of the year carries the annual obligations, and they overlap in a way that rewards doing them early.

  • October 1 is the effective date for the IRS transportation-industry per diem rate, currently $80 per day inside the continental United States and $86 outside it. When the rate changes, October 1 is when the change takes hold. Our per diem calculator is updated when the notice is published.
  • October 1 is also when UCR registration for the following calendar year opens at plan.ucr.gov, with recommended enforcement of the new registration year beginning January 1. That gives you a three-month window, and there is no advantage to spending all of it.
  • January 1 also starts the first IFTA quarter of the new year, so the rate matrix you use changes on that boundary.

On UCR fees, this page deliberately prints no dollar figure. The fee you owe depends on the bracket your fleet size puts you in, and the amounts are set by federal rulemaking — the current schedule sits in the Federal Register (document 2026-06726) and on the official portal. A stale fee table on a website is worse than no table, because it looks authoritative while being wrong. Register through plan.ucr.gov directly; several commercial sites will happily charge you a markup to type the same form on your behalf.

The standard mileage rate — on the calendar, but probably not yours

The IRS standard mileage rate for business use of automobiles was 72.5¢ per mile from January 1 through June 30, 2026, and rose mid-year to 76¢/mile from July 1, 2026. It is listed here because drivers ask about it constantly, and because a mid-year change is unusual enough to be worth flagging. It is a light-vehicle figure for gig work and personal-vehicle business miles. It is not a heavy-truck cost figure and it is not what a Class 8 truck costs to run — for that, see our cost per mile calculator, which asks you for your own numbers instead.

Sourcing note, July 2026: the mid-year increase comes from IRS Announcement 2026-11, which modifies Notice 2026-10. At the time of this review the IRS's own standard-mileage-rates summary page had not yet been updated past 2025, so the 76¢ figure here traces to the announcement rather than to that page. If the summary page and the announcement ever disagree, the announcement is the newer document — but check both before you rely on the number, and tell us if the summary page catches up and says something different.

Enforcement events are not deadlines

The CVSA International Roadcheck for 2026 ran May 12–14 and has already passed. It is listed here as completed, not upcoming. CVSA announces the following year's dates in its own time, and this page will carry the 2027 dates when they are official — as of this review they have not been published, so no 2027 date appears above.

Sourcing note on this one date. It is the weakest citation on this site and we would rather say so than let it look as solid as the rest. CVSA's own site returns a 403 to us, so we cannot quote its announcement text directly the way we quote the CFR elsewhere. What we have is CVSA's own page title — "CVSA's International Roadcheck Scheduled for May 12-14" — plus consistent reporting of the same dates across unrelated trade outlets. That is good enough for a past, informational date that nothing on this page depends on, and it would not be good enough for a filing deadline. If you need the 2027 dates for planning, get them from cvsa.org directly rather than from us.

It is worth being clear about what a blitz is. Nothing is due during Roadcheck. No form gets filed. What changes is the probability of being looked at closely, so a marginal item — a tire near the wear limit, a light that works intermittently, a logbook that would take explaining — is far more likely to be found that week than in an ordinary one. Treating an enforcement event as a deadline gets the logic backwards: the standard applied during the blitz is the same standard that applied the week before.

Carrier-specific dates only you can look up

The four items below are real obligations with real dates, and this page cannot print any of those dates, because each one is generated by your own record rather than by a calendar everyone shares.

  • MCS-150 biennial update — every registered carrier updates its census record on a two-year cycle, in a month determined by its USDOT number. Required even when nothing has changed. Your assigned month is on your own FMCSA record; look it up rather than working it out from memory.
  • IRP cab card renewal — the month varies by state and by account, and your base jurisdiction sets it.
  • DOT medical certificate — printed on the card in your wallet. Do not let dispatch discover the expiration before you do; a lapsed card takes a driver off the road faster than almost anything else on this page.
  • Annual vehicle inspection — measured from your last one, not from January.

A filing period and a deadline are two different things

Most of the pain in this calendar comes from collapsing those two ideas into one. The period is the stretch of time an obligation covers. The deadline is only the day the paperwork has to land. They are separated on purpose, to give you time to assemble the thing.

An IFTA return due July 31 covers April, May and June. Every mile and every gallon on that return happened weeks earlier. Whether the filing takes an hour or ruins a weekend was decided back in April, by whether you were capturing jurisdiction miles and fuel receipts as you went. The deadline is not when the work starts. It is when the work is already supposed to be finished.

Form 2290 works the same way from the other direction: the month of first use opens the obligation, and the end of the following month closes it. Between those two points you are supposed to know the truck's taxable gross weight and have the money set aside. Drivers who treat the due date as the start date are the ones filing at 11pm and paying a penalty on a return they had thirty days to prepare.

"My carrier handles it" — three different answers

This is the single most consequential question on the page, and the answer depends entirely on what your paperwork says.

If you are a company driver, it is mostly true. The carrier holds the operating authority, files the IFTA returns, pays the 2290s on trucks it owns, registers under UCR and maintains its own MCS-150. What is left to you is personal and still yours alone: your medical certificate, your CDL, your licence endorsements. Nobody files those for you.

If you are an owner-operator leased on to a carrier, "my carrier handles it" is a statement about a contract, not about the law, and the contract is the lease you signed. Commonly the carrier runs IFTA and the plates under its authority because you are operating under that authority. Who pays the 2290 depends on who titles the truck, and that is negotiable and negotiated. Read the lease specifically for the words that assign each filing. The question "who files my 2290" has a written answer in your own paperwork, and finding it in July is much cheaper than finding it during an audit.

If you hold your own operating authority, all of it is yours: UCR, MCS-150, IFTA licence and quarterly returns, IRP, 2290, and any state-level tax your routes trigger. There is no back office quietly catching what you miss. Notices go to the address on your FMCSA record, which is one more reason the biennial update matters.

The taxes that depend on where you drive

A few states levy a mileage or weight-distance tax that exists alongside IFTA rather than inside it. Filing IFTA does not satisfy them, and they keep their own schedules.

Kentucky is the one most drivers meet first. The KYU licence covers highway use in Kentucky for vehicles with a combined licence weight above 59,999 pounds, taxed at two and eighty-five hundredths cents ($0.0285) per mile under KRS 138.660. That is charged per Kentucky mile regardless of where you bought the fuel, and it is separate from the Kentucky surcharge line on your IFTA return. Kentucky publishes its own filing schedule for it, and that schedule does not move when an IFTA date moves. Oregon, as noted above, replaces the IFTA fuel-tax rate entirely with a weight-mile system. Before you add a lane through an unfamiliar state, check whether that state wants something of its own; the cheapest time to learn about a registration is before the first trip, not at a scale house.

What this calendar cannot know

This page lists what is scheduled. It does not know, and cannot know, your base jurisdiction, your authority status, your fleet size, the digits of your USDOT number, the terms of your lease, when your medical card expires, or — most importantly — whether you have already filed any of this. It does not certify that anyone has filed anything on your behalf. Everything above is a prompt to go check a record you control, not a verdict on your standing.

That is the same principle behind every other tool on this site. RecapHours shows you your numbers so you can act on them. It does not tell you that you are in the clear, because it has no way to know that and no business claiming it.

Where the authoritative date always lives

When a date here disagrees with an agency, the agency wins. Form 2290 rules and per diem notices are on irs.gov. IFTA rates come from iftach.org, but your return is filed with and governed by your base jurisdiction, which is the office to call about a holiday shift. UCR registration and its fee schedule are at plan.ucr.gov. Your MCS-150 month and your census record are on the FMCSA portal. IRP renewal and state mileage taxes such as KYU come from the state — for Kentucky, drive.ky.gov. This page is refreshed on a schedule; agencies change things on theirs. Confirm before you rely on a date, especially one that is close.

Read this as a prompt, not a clearance. A calendar can tell you what is scheduled. It cannot tell you whether you filed, whether your carrier filed, or whether the date applies to your operation. Verify each item against your own records and the issuing agency. Not legal or tax advice.
Sources: IRS Form 2290 Instructions (tax period, due-date rule) and the Tax Computation table on page 2 of Form 2290 itself ($550.00, Category V, over 75,000 lb) · IRS Notice 2025-54 (per diem $80 CONUS / $86 OCONUS, effective October 1) · IRS Announcement 2026-11, modifying Notice 2026-10 (2026 standard mileage rates, mid-year change) · iftach.org (quarterly due dates, surcharge jurisdictions, Oregon weight-mile) · plan.ucr.gov and Federal Register document 2026-06726 (UCR registration window and fee rulemaking) · Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, drive.ky.gov and KRS 138.660 (KYU rate and weight threshold) · FMCSA (MCS-150 biennial update) · CVSA (International Roadcheck 2026, May 12–14, completed). Weekday and holiday shifts computed, not assumed. Reviewed July 2026 — next scheduled refresh October 2026.