Changelog
Fee schedules change, and so does this site. Every state launch, engine capability and correction is recorded here with a date — if a number you relied on has moved, this is where to find out when and why.
- Site
Navigation, site search and the pages that explain the method
Added a logo and header menu, live search across every published state and tool, and the about, contact, privacy and changelog pages. Search runs entirely in the browser against an index built at compile time — no search backend, no query leaves your device.
- Site
carfeecalc.com went live
The site moved from a local build to Cloudflare Workers, served as a static export with automatic deployment on every change. Ten states and the national hub became publicly reachable for the first time.
- Site
National hub with a working calculator on the homepage
The homepage stopped being a list of links. Pick a state and you get that state’s real calculator, above a comparison table computed at build time by the same engine — currently a six-fold spread, from South Carolina at 1.85% of the purchase price to California at 11.26%.
- State
Texas
Taught the engine that a fee can differ between purchase and renewal: a new EV pays $400 up front covering two years, then $200 annually. Separately stated manufacturer rebates are excluded from taxable consideration, so unlike almost everywhere else a rebate genuinely cuts the tax.
- State
Illinois
Added flat private-party tax tables (RUT-50), where the tax depends on the vehicle’s age rather than its price. Two findings that contradict most published calculators: home rule sales taxes exclude titled property, so Chicago’s 10.25% does not apply to a car, and the $10,000 trade-in credit cap expired on 1 January 2022.
- State
California
Added value-banded fixed fees for the Transportation Improvement Fee and a renewal-only Road Improvement Fee for zero-emission vehicles. California gives no trade-in credit at all — the CDTFA’s own worked example counts the trade-in as part of the purchase price.
- State
Florida
Added a cap on the base to which local surtax applies — the county surtax reaches only the first $5,000 of a vehicle’s price. Florida has no EV registration surcharge; the widely-republished “$200 rising to $250” came from a bill that never passed.
- State
Arkansas
Added used-vehicle price bands, where state tax falls away entirely below a price threshold, alongside a $2,500 cap on the local tax base.
- State
South Carolina
Added statutory tax caps and biennial registration cycles: the Infrastructure Maintenance Fee stops at $500 however expensive the car, and registration runs two years at a time, so the five-year projection only bills on cycle years. A trade-in does reduce the fee — the largest competitor states it could not confirm this.
- State
North Carolina
Added support for states with no local rate variation at all: the 3% Highway Use Tax is uniform statewide, so no ZIP lookup is needed.
- Site
What-if scenarios, sharing and export
Save several sets of inputs on a state page and compare them side by side with live differences. Added shareable result links, print styling and CSV export. Saved scenarios stay in your own browser.
- Site
Two themes
Added the “Highway” light palette as the default and “Midnight Ledger” for dark, both driven entirely by variables in one stylesheet so the interface itself never has to change to be re-skinned.
- Engine
Renewal mode and the five-year projection
Separated purchase from renewal, and added a five-year cost projection that understands depreciation schedules, first-year-only fees and multi-year registration cycles.
- State
Arizona, Missouri and Kansas
The first three states, and the three registration models the engine was built around: Arizona’s Vehicle Licence Tax, a percentage of MSRP that depreciates every year; Missouri’s taxable-horsepower brackets; and Kansas’s flat fee by weight. Establishing that a single national formula could not work came first — everything since has been built on that.
Spotted a figure that has changed since it was last verified? Tell me — corrections that cite an official source are acted on first.