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Four States Have Permanent RUC Programs. Forty More Are Watching. Here’s What the Gap Tells Us.

Funding & Finance
3.25.2026
Aerial highway scene showing multiple lanes of traffic and road infrastructure for U.S. transportation networks

The Most Important Long-Term Story in Tolling Has a Scoreboard Problem

Ask most people inside the tolling industry what the biggest structural story of the next decade is, and you’ll hear some version of the same answer: Road User Charging. Ask them when it will actually happen at scale, and the answers get less confident.

The state-by-state picture in 2025 tells you why. Four states have adopted permanent RUC programs: Utah, Oregon, Virginia, and Hawaii. As of 2024, 40 states have conducted research into RUC, including pilots in states like California, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Kansas, and Georgia. Wa

Four states doing it. Forty states studying it.

That gap — between political consensus that RUC is necessary and operational reality of RUC at scale — is the actual story of where transportation funding reform stands right now. This post maps both sides of it.

Why RUC Is Inevitable in Theory

The case for road user charging starts with a funding crisis that is not in dispute. Fuel taxes account for 83% of the Highway Trust Fund’s revenue. But for decades, HTF revenues have been declining. Increased fuel efficiency and federal gas and diesel taxes that have not been raised since 1993 — cutting their inflation-adjusted values by over 50% — combined with surging road repair costs, have led to a steady decrease in the fund’s annual income. Electrification Coalition

The Congressional Budget Office has put a number on where this leads. Without fundamental changes, the Highway Trust Fund will be insolvent by 2028, with the deficit swelling to nearly $280 billion by 2034. In 2024 alone, the user-pay gap — the difference between dedicated revenues and outlays — was $26.7 billion, and it is projected to reach $40 billion annually by the end of the decade. Taxpayers for Common Sense

Gasoline tax receipts are expected to fall by 39 percent over the next ten years. The shift to electric vehicles — while good for air quality — is devastating for a transportation system that relies on per-gallon fuel taxes to pay for itself. Taxpayers for Common Sense

The math is simple and brutal. The federal gas tax has been fixed at 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993. 18.4 cents bought 53 percent less in 2023 than it did in 1993. Peterson Foundation Every year that goes by without reform, the gap between what drivers pay and what roads cost grows wider.

A mileage-based user fee — a road usage charge — addresses this structurally in a way that gas tax increases cannot, because it is fuel-neutral. An EV driver, a hybrid driver, and a gasoline driver all pay the same per-mile rate. The system is indifferent to what’s in the tank.

“In order to achieve parity with the gas tax, policymakers would consider the issues of mandatory participation and an RUC rate that effectively replaces revenues previously generated by the gas tax.” — Transportation policy researcher, GovTech

The Four States That Went Permanent

Oregon: The Pioneer

Oregon launched OReGO in 2015, making it the first state in the nation to establish a permanent RUC program. Oregon’s OReGO program allows electric vehicle and high-MPG vehicle owners to bypass the state’s supplemental registration fee and pay $43 per year plus 2 cents per mile. EVs not participating in OReGO pay a two-year registration of $316, which comes to $158 per year. Government Technology The program is voluntary and has enrolled over 2,000 participants across its decade of operation — a small number relative to Oregon’s total vehicle fleet, but a durable proof-of-concept.

Utah: The Cost-Efficiency Case Study

Utah launched its RUC program in 2020 and has become the most instructive operational case study in the country — not because of its scale, but because of how it has evolved. Utah currently charges 1.11 cents per mile and adjusts for inflation annually. Since implementation, adjustments have reduced administrative costs by over 60%, and mileage revenue is anticipated to exceed expenses for the first time in FY25. Electrification Coalition

The mechanism behind that cost reduction is worth understanding in detail. The state Department of Transportation cut costs by reducing mileage reporting frequency and by removing plug-in devices as a mileage reporting option. Drivers may now choose between OEM-connected telematics and odometer reading using a smartphone app. The program updates also eliminated any sharing of location data, addressing data privacy concerns. Electrification Coalition

That last point — eliminating location data sharing — is significant. Privacy anxiety is one of the most consistent obstacles to public acceptance of RUC programs. Utah’s pivot to odometer photos and OEM telematics demonstrates that mileage can be verified without tracking where drivers go. As of July 2025, the program has collected $1,531,116 in revenue Utah Legislature, with approximately 7,200 vehicles enrolled.

Virginia: The Revenue Generator

Virginia’s program — called Mileage Choice — is the only one among the four that is generating meaningful additional transportation revenue. The voluntary program allows drivers of fuel-efficient, hybrid, or electric vehicles to pay their Highway Use Fee per mile rather than as a lump sum. Virginians who drive less than 11,600 miles annually can save money by participating in the Mileage Choice program. Government Technology Virginia’s program is notable because it frames the RUC not as a new tax but as a more equitable alternative to an existing fee — a framing that has contributed to stronger enrollment than programs that lead with the per-mile charge.

Hawaii: The Most Aggressive Test Case

Hawaii’s HiRUC program launched July 1, 2025 — making it the most recently enacted of the four permanent programs and the one with the most consequential policy design. The new road usage charge in Hawaii is $8 per 1,000 miles — less than a penny per mile — and is capped at $50. Odometers will be read and recorded each year during annual vehicle inspections. Avalara

What makes Hawaii different from the other three is the mandatory deadline built into its legislation. Beginning July 1, 2028, all EV drivers will be subject to RUC. Hiruc That makes Hawaii the only state in the country with a firm date for mandatory participation — and it is the most direct test yet of whether the voluntary-to-mandatory transition can be made without significant political backlash.

Hawaii’s plan extends further: the state has a timeline to extend RUC to all vehicles by 2033. Washington State House Democrats If that holds, Hawaii will be the first state to fully replace the gas tax with a mileage-based system for its entire light-duty vehicle fleet.

Why 40 States Are Still Watching

The gap between four permanent programs and 40 states researching is not accidental. There are structural reasons why RUC adoption has been slow, and they deserve honest examination — because they are the same obstacles any new state will face.

The Mandatory Participation Problem

Every permanent RUC program in the United States is voluntary. And voluntary participation, by design, limits both the revenue generated and the policy impact. States that have moved forward with RUC programs are taking the approach of “let’s do what we can right now, and we will adjust as we need.” Government Technology That’s a pragmatic posture, but it also means that current programs are essentially large pilots, not functioning replacements for the gas tax.

The transition from voluntary to mandatory is where the political resistance concentrates. Mandatory mileage tracking for all vehicles requires public trust in government data stewardship that most agencies have not yet earned — and a legislative appetite for a direct per-mile charge on all drivers that few elected officials have shown. Hawaii’s 2028 mandatory deadline for EVs will be the first real test of whether that transition can be made.

The Data Privacy Concern

The most visceral objection to GPS-based mileage reporting is that it creates a government record of everywhere you drive. Interstate travel reconciliation requires a GPS reporting method, which many pilots found some of their participants felt unease toward due to privacy concerns. Eno Center for Transportation

The technical community has largely addressed this: for passenger vehicles, the GPS system is one-way — not two-way — just as it is on smartphones. The car knows where it is thanks to the GPS, but the GPS itself does not know where the car is. The OBU or other recording device that manages an RUC system would use the GPS signal to record where the car is traveling. Then, at the end of the month, mileage totals could be organized according to jurisdiction owed, and the OBU would ping the driver’s account to dispense payment to a central authority. ITIF

RUC legislation should include technical and operational measures to ensure privacy rights, including ensuring that there is no requirement for vehicle owners to provide location data by offering mileage reporting choices TRB — as Utah has done by pivoting to odometer photos. The privacy problem is technically solvable. The communication problem — convincing the public it has been solved — is harder.

The Interstate Travel Reconciliation Problem

This is the operational challenge that gets the least public attention and is arguably the most technically complex. If a Utah driver takes a road trip through Nevada, Colorado, and Wyoming, each state’s roads are being used but only Utah collects the RUC. The federal government will likely need to consider and regulate these interstate transactions of data and funds. In some programs, pilot participants who drove out of state could apply for a refund for those miles driven. This manual process will become overly burdensome when VMT-fee program participation is made mandatory. Eno Center for Transportation

Oregon and California have explored what complementary programs could look like through an interoperability study as part of the OReGO program; a cloud-based clearinghouse was used to reconcile funds across state lines. Eno Center for Transportation Two regional coalitions — RUC America (primarily western states) and the Eastern Transportation Coalition (primarily I-95 corridor states) — are working toward interoperability frameworks. But a national clearinghouse that handles cross-state mileage reconciliation at scale does not yet exist. This is the International Fuel Tax Agreement problem all over again, rebuilt from scratch for a new era.

The Commercial Vehicle Complexity Layer

The IRP — International Registration Plan — took decades to develop a workable interstate framework for commercial vehicle mileage-based fees. RUC advocates are essentially proposing to rebuild that infrastructure for passenger vehicles, at an order of magnitude greater scale and complexity. Interstate truckers are required to report mileage each quarter to the International Fuel Tax Association. IFTA balances payments among the states based on miles driven in each state. Motor carriers, however, have an incentive to underreport mileage in high-tax states. ITIF A VMT system for commercial vehicles would need to solve for the same gaming incentives that currently plague IFTA, with more sophisticated technology and tighter interstate reconciliation than anything currently in production.

What the Gap Actually Tells Us

The gap between four permanent programs and 40 states researching reflects an honest accounting of where the technology, policy, and public trust are relative to where they need to be.

It is not a failure. Oregon has been running OReGO for a decade. Utah has cut administrative costs by over 60% and is projecting revenue to exceed expenses for the first time. Hawaii has put a mandatory date on the calendar. These are real milestones. What they aren’t is a national system. And the distance between a functional four-state voluntary experiment and a mandatory per-mile fee on all vehicles in all 50 states is, to use an industry term, significant.

The 2026 surface transportation reauthorization debate will be the next major federal pressure point. The April 2025 proposal to create a federal vehicle registration fee was considered as part of the 2026 surface transportation reauthorization, and while it did not make it into the final version of the legislation, the idea is still being considered. Utah Legislature Congress is circling the funding gap but has not yet landed on a durable solution.

Studies show that by 2030, as much as half of the gas tax revenue that could be collected will be lost to fuel efficiency. States need to explore more sustainable transportation funding models, like RUC, to generate adequate revenue to support their road maintenance and improvement needs. Rucamerica

The question is no longer whether road user charging is the right long-term answer. The structural math makes that case on its own. The question is who moves from research to permanent program next — and whether Hawaii’s mandatory 2028 deadline produces a workable model or a cautionary tale that slows the rest of the field down.

Forty states are watching to find out.

State-by-State Snapshot: The Four Permanent Programs

StateProgram NameLaunchRateParticipationNotable Feature
OregonOReGO20152¢/mile~2,000+ vehiclesFirst in the nation; gas tax credit for participants
UtahUtah RUC20201.11¢/mile~7,200 vehicles60%+ admin cost reduction; OEM telematics + odometer photo
VirginiaMileage Choice2022Variable (HUF-based)~32,000 vehiclesStrongest enrollment; framed as fee alternative, not new tax
HawaiiHiRUCJuly 20250.8¢/mile ($8/1,000 mi)EV drivers statewideMandatory for EVs in 2028; all vehicles by 2033

Sources

  1. Electrification Coalition — Utah’s Road Usage Charge: Paving a Road to the Future (May 2025) — electrificationcoalition.org
  2. Washington State Transportation Commission — Road Usage Charge FAQ — wstc.wa.gov
  3. Utah Legislature — Utah’s Road Usage Charge Program Report (September 2025) — le.utah.gov
  4. HiRUC — Hawaii Road Usage Charge: What Do I Need to Know — hiruc.org
  5. Avalara — Hawaii Road Usage Charge for EVs Begins July 1, 2025 — avalara.com
  6. GovTech — Miles Driven a Key Metric for Road Usage Charge Programs (February 2025) — govtech.com
  7. Eno Center for Transportation — The Current Status of State VMT Fees — enotrans.org
  8. ITIF — A Policymaker’s Guide to Road User Charges — itif.org
  9. Peter G. Peterson Foundation — The Highway Trust Fund Explained — pgpf.org
  10. Taxpayers for Common Sense — Road to Insolvency (April 2025) — taxpayer.net
  11. TRB / National Cooperative Highway Research Program — Privacy Protection: Road Usage Charge Guide — crp.trb.org
  12. RUC America — FAQs — rucamerica.org

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FAQ

Browse our most frequently asked questions below to get the answers you need. For our full list of FAQs, check out our FAQ page:

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Yes — for two reasons that go beyond the obvious policy overlap. First, the back-office infrastructure for RUC programs — account management, mileage verification, payment processing, dispute resolution, enforcement — looks a great deal like existing tolling back-office infrastructure. The vendors, integrators, and agency operators who already manage toll-by-plate collections are natural candidates to build and operate RUC systems. Second, as gas tax revenue declines and state transportation budgets tighten, the political and fiscal pressure to expand tolling on existing and new infrastructure will increase in parallel with RUC development. These are not competing solutions — they are complementary ones, and the organizations that understand both will be better positioned for the decade ahead.

A significant one that is currently unresolved. The 2026 surface transportation reauthorization debate is the next major federal pressure point. A federal vehicle registration fee for EVs was proposed in April 2025 as part of the broader tax bill but did not make it into the final legislation — the idea remains under consideration for the reauthorization. The federal government has funded state RUC pilots through the Surface Transportation System Funding Alternatives Program, and two things are clear: without a federal framework for interstate mileage reconciliation, state programs will remain isolated experiments rather than a coherent national system; and without either a federal RUC or a meaningful gas tax increase, the Highway Trust Fund insolvency projected for 2028 will force a congressional response of some kind regardless.

A road user charge is a per-mile fee that drivers pay based on the number of miles they travel — on any road, not just specific highways or bridges. Tolling, by contrast, applies to designated infrastructure: a specific highway, tunnel, or bridge. A toll is a facility charge; an RUC is a system-wide mileage fee. The underlying goal of both is “user pays,” but RUC applies universally across an entire road network, regardless of which roads a driver uses. An EV driver who never touches a toll road still uses roads that need maintenance — an RUC captures that use in a way the gas tax increasingly cannot.

Three compounding forces. First, the federal gas tax has been fixed at 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993 — meaning its inflation-adjusted value has fallen by more than 50% over 30 years. Second, vehicles have become dramatically more fuel-efficient, so each mile driven generates less gas tax revenue than it used to. Third, EV adoption is accelerating, and electric vehicles pay no gas tax at all. The Congressional Budget Office projects the Highway Trust Fund will be insolvent by 2028, with a cumulative deficit of nearly $280 billion by 2034. The fund has only stayed solvent this long because Congress has repeatedly transferred money from the general treasury to cover the gap — $275 billion in general fund transfers since 2008 alone.

As of mid-2025, four states: Oregon (since 2015), Utah (since 2020), Virginia (since 2022), and Hawaii (launched July 1, 2025). All four programs are currently voluntary and limited to EVs and high-efficiency vehicles. Hawaii is the only state with a mandatory participation deadline — all EV drivers will be required to participate starting July 1, 2028.

Three are worth taking seriously. First, rural equity: drivers in rural areas tend to drive more miles than urban drivers, so a flat per-mile fee without income adjustment can be more burdensome proportionally for rural households. Second, low-income equity: the gas tax, while regressive in some ways, is collected invisibly at the pump — a per-mile bill that arrives monthly makes the cost visible and potentially harder to absorb for lower-income drivers. Several programs are exploring income-adjusted rate structures to address this. Third, administrative cost at scale: current programs work partly because they’re small. Billing, dispute resolution, and enforcement for a mandatory program covering tens of millions of vehicles is a fundamentally different operational challenge than managing 7,200 voluntary Utah participants.

The four programs differ in rate and structure. Oregon’s OReGO charges 2 cents per mile, with participants receiving credits for gas taxes paid at the pump. Utah charges 1.11 cents per mile, capped at the state’s annual EV registration surcharge of $143.25, with mileage reported via OEM telematics or odometer photos through a smartphone app. Virginia’s Mileage Choice program lets drivers pay their existing Highway Use Fee on a per-mile basis rather than as a lump sum annual charge. Hawaii’s HiRUC charges $8 per 1,000 miles — less than a penny per mile — currently capped at a $50 flat fee alternative, with mileage verified at annual vehicle inspections. All programs offer participants a way to pay less than they would under a flat EV registration surcharge if they drive below a certain annual mileage threshold.

This is the most common public concern, and it has a more reassuring answer than most people expect. Mileage reporting options vary by program but typically include odometer photos via a smartphone app, OEM-connected vehicle telematics, or GPS-enabled devices. GPS is one-way — it tells the vehicle where it is, but doesn’t transmit your location to a government database. Utah specifically eliminated location data sharing as part of its 2024 program redesign: the state now knows how many miles you drove, not where you drove them. Most RUC legislation includes legal requirements that location data, if collected at all, be destroyed after billing is reconciled and cannot be shared with third parties or used for any purpose other than RUC collection.

Three obstacles dominate. First, every current program is voluntary — and voluntary participation produces low enrollment numbers that don’t generate enough revenue to replace the gas tax, making the programs look modest compared to the scale of the problem. Second, the transition from voluntary to mandatory requires a level of public trust in government data handling that most agencies have not yet built, and a political willingness to impose a direct per-mile charge on all drivers that few legislators have shown. Third, the interstate travel problem: if you drive across state lines, the reconciliation of which state gets paid for which miles is a technically and administratively complex problem that has no national-scale solution yet.

Imagine you’re a Utah RUC participant and you drive from Salt Lake City to Las Vegas. You used Nevada roads, but Utah is billing you. Under current voluntary programs, participants can apply for a refund for out-of-state miles — but that’s a manual process that works only at small scale. For a mandatory, all-vehicle national system, you’d need an interstate clearinghouse that automatically attributes mileage to the correct state and transfers funds accordingly. Oregon and California explored a cloud-based clearinghouse solution through the OReGO interoperability study, and regional coalitions like RUC America (western states) and the Eastern Transportation Coalition (I-95 corridor states) are developing frameworks — but a national system doesn’t exist yet. This is functionally the same problem the International Fuel Tax Agreement solved for commercial vehicles 30 years ago. RUC has to solve it for passenger vehicles, at far greater scale.

Two things. First, Hawaii is the only state with a mandatory participation deadline already written into law — July 1, 2028 for all EVs. Every other program is indefinitely voluntary. Whether Hawaii makes that transition without significant political reversal will tell the rest of the country whether the voluntary-to-mandatory step is achievable. Second, Hawaii has published a plan to transition all vehicles — not just EVs — to RUC by 2033, making it the only state explicitly aiming to fully replace the gas tax for its entire light-duty fleet. If that holds, Hawaii will have a decade of mandatory all-vehicle RUC data before most states have finished their second pilot study.

Because it’s the only program that has published detailed before-and-after operational cost data — and the trend is significant. Since launch, Utah has cut administrative costs by more than 60%, primarily by eliminating plug-in OBD devices as a reporting option and switching to OEM telematics and smartphone-based odometer photos. This reduced both hardware costs and the administrative overhead of managing physical devices. Mileage reporting frequency was also reduced, cutting processing costs further. The result: for the first time in FY2025, Utah’s RUC revenue is projected to exceed program expenses. That’s a meaningful milestone — it demonstrates that a state RUC program can become self-sustaining operationally, even at relatively modest enrollment numbers.

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