GetCDLLicense

About GetCDLLicense

Our Mission

GetCDLLicense exists to give commercial driver’s license applicants and drivers a single, clear answer to one question: what does my state actually require to get a CDL?

Free. No sign-up. No lead-gate. A commercial driver’s license is issued and administered state by state — the permit fee, license fee, age minimums, and endorsement rules below come from each state’s own DMV, DPS, or BMV, not a single national schedule, though a handful of rules (ELDT, the DOT medical certificate, the interstate-21 minimum age, and the TSA hazmat threat assessment) are set federally and covered in full on our federal requirements page. We currently cover 51 of the 51 US jurisdictions (every state plus DC)— see which ones.

Authorship & Methodology

Every page on this site is produced by the same published methodology, applied by the GetCDLLicense Research Team— not by an individual writer claiming personal expertise we don’t have. The methodology is the author. We publish under the Research Team / organizational byline deliberately: no page on this site has a named human author, headshot, or personal credential, because none of that would be genuine. Concretely, the methodology is:

  • Primary sources only.Every factual claim on a state page traces to a primary source — that state’s own DMV, DPS, or BMV — or, for the handful of rules set federally, to FMCSA, TSA, or the eCFR directly. We never cite a driving school, a carrier recruiting site, or a competing directory as a source of licensing fact; those are the sites this project exists to be a neutral alternative to.
  • Cite-or-deny.If we can’t find a specific number (a fee amount, a holding period, a phone number) in a source we can actually verify, we leave that field blank — shown on a state page as —— rather than estimate, guess, or reuse another state’s figure. You’ll sometimes see a state page missing a figure other sites publish confidently — that’s usually because we couldn’t confirm it against a primary source, not an oversight.
  • Dated, per-state verification. Every state record carries its own lastVerified date and a verifiedBy flag (agent or human). On that state’s page, the date appears once near the top, under the headline, and again — paired with the verifiedByflag and a link to the source — at the very bottom, so you can see exactly how current that specific jurisdiction’s data is and how it was checked, not a single site-wide “updated” date standing in for all 51.
  • Source Notes, where one applies.When a source is stale, conflicting, or required a judgment call for a specific state, that state’s page carries a “Source Notes” section documenting it. As of this writing, 40 of 51published state pages carry a Source Notes section — it renders only on the pages where we genuinely have something to explain, and is absent everywhere else.

Article and page metadata credit GetCDLLicense— the publishing organization — as the author, with this published methodology linked (via schema.org publishingPrinciples) as the editorial standard behind every claim. We’re accountable for that process, and any error is ours to fix; we’d rather stand behind a transparent, primary-sourced methodology than invent a personal byline.

Our Data Sources

State-level licensing data — CLP and license fees, age minimums, testing rules, and all five endorsements — is sourced directly from official state licensing agency websites, forms, handbooks, and statutes: primary .gov sources, cited on every state page. We never cite third-party aggregators, driving schools, carrier recruiting sites, or competing directories as a source of record.

The federal rules that apply identically in every jurisdiction — Entry-Level Driver Training (ELDT), the DOT medical certificate, the interstate-21 minimum age, and the TSA hazmat security threat assessment — are sourced from FMCSA, TSA, and the eCFR, and covered in full, once, on /eldt-requirements rather than restated on every state page.

Editorial Standards

  • We link the specific source for every fact we publish, not just a homepage.
  • We do not publish specific dollar amounts, day counts, or dates we can’t confirm against a source we can actually cite — cite-or-deny, no exceptions.
  • When a source is stale or conflicting for a specific state, we say so directly on that state’s page, in a “Source Notes” section, and explain which figure we use and why, rather than presenting a single confident-sounding number.
  • We describe 51US jurisdictions (50 states plus the District of Columbia) accurately — we don’t round to “50 states” when DC is part of what a claim covers, and we don’t assert full 51-jurisdiction coverage until the data actually supports it. As of this writing we cover 51 of 51.
  • We keep the federal/state boundary clean: rules that are identical in every jurisdiction live once on /eldt-requirements, not repeated 51 times with the risk of 51 slightly different (and eventually stale) restatements.
  • Corrections are welcome and reviewed against primary sources before we change a page — see contact info below.

AI Transparency

Research, drafting, and verification on this site are performed with AI assistance under a documented process, not by an anonymous human staff. Where a state record is flagged verifiedBy: "agent", an AI research agent located and cited the primary sources for that page; where flagged verifiedBy: "human", a person independently reviewed it. We disclose this rather than implying a large editorial staff wrote every page by hand.

AI assistance does not change our sourcing standard: every published figure still needs a citable primary source, whether it was found by a human or an AI agent, and every field we can’t verify is left blank rather than filled in with a plausible-sounding guess.

How We’re Funded

GetCDLLicense is free to use. As of this writing we have not signed an affiliate partnership or accepted a sponsored placement for a training provider, testing company, or any other product referenced on this site — nothing on this site is currently monetized. If that changes, the relevant page will carry its own visible disclosure, and it will never affect which state requirements or federal facts we publish — the underlying licensing data is the same regardless of whether a page carries a sponsored link.

Corrections

Found something out of date or wrong? Email the page URL and the official source it should match to editor@getcdllicense.com. Because every claim links to its primary source, corrections are quick to verify — we review them against that source and update the page (and its lastVerified date) promptly.

Contact

Have a question, correction, or suggestion? Email the GetCDLLicense Research Team at editor@getcdllicense.com.