Three states have introduced some form of “road usage charge” (RUC), where motorists pay a set rate that more closely aligns with the miles they drive.
In the case of Utah, the western state also offers a voluntary road usage charge program where participants pay 1.11 cents per mile, up to an annual cap of $143.25, said John Gleason, Utah Department of Transportation public relations director.
“Currently, the program is voluntary,” Gleason said via email. “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.” Some 7,200 vehicles participate in the Utah RUC program, he said.
Farther north, Oregon also operates the voluntary OReGO program, which allows electric vehicle (EV) and high miles-per-gallon (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.
And in Virginia, the voluntary program is Mileage Choice, which allows drivers to pay their Highway Use Fee (HUF) per mile rather than as a lump sum, said Camila Barco, public relations and media liaison for the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles. The HUF program was adopted in 2020 to address the declining gas tax revenue resulting from high-MPG vehicles. The annual HUF applied to a vehicle is based on a formula tied to the vehicle’s gas mileage. The state has a partnership with Emovis, a highway tolling technology company, which will provide car owners participating in Mileage Choice with the required onboard equipment to gather telematics data.
Road usage charge programs are generally seen as a more fair system for revenue collection, in part, because vehicles using the roads more pay more, said Nate Bryer, senior director for road usage charging mobility operations at WSP, an engineering and professional services firm. A fuel-efficient vehicle like a Honda Fit may drive the same number of miles as a heavy-duty Ford pickup, but will pay substantially less in gas taxes.
“One of the beauties of road usage charging,” Bryer said, is it gives states the ability to use technology to structure fees and fee collection according to their own strategies and goals. “It’s probably a more fair way to make sure everybody pays something, and pays the same amount per mile.”
At least 39 states have some form of added registration fee for electric or hybrid vehicles, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). The added fees are aimed at making up the loss in gas taxes these vehicles naturally do not pay. As EVs grow in market share — there are nearly 5.8 million EVs currently on America’s roads — states may begin eyeing other approaches to more fairly capture revenue and support highway development and maintenance. EV sales grew 7.3 percent in 2024 compared to the year before, according to Cox Automotive, and are expected to continue the upward trend in 2025.
States may decide the flat fee is the easiest approach, Bryer said. But this option raises the question: “Is that fair?”
“The answer is no,” he said. “You get some people that maybe only drive a couple thousand miles a year. And you have some people that drive over 20,000 [miles a year].”
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,” Bryer said. These shifts will likely be based on which direction the market takes, and how vigorously drivers embrace high-efficiency vehicles like EVs and hybrids.
However, the telematics data associated with road usage charge programs can be put to other uses, broader than simply counting miles.
“If you do other things with it [the data], that defrays or spreads the cost out among multiple functions,” said Bryer, pointing to uses serving congestion pricing programs, or other forms of traffic management and analysis.
“You could do congestion pricing. You could do layered pricing. You could use that data for multiple things, and you can still do it in such a way to protect people’s privacy,” he said. “It’s a win-win for everybody.”
