Change is coming to New Hampshire. The northern state is famous for its political history, its beautiful foliage, and its mandated vehicle inspections. The latter will soon be a thing of the past, however, as the state looks to eliminate the safety regime from early next year.
Vehicle inspections are often a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they can help ensure a healthier population of registered roadgoing vehicles. This can reduce the chance you’ll buy a trashed lemon or get T-boned by someone’s rustbucket when the brake lines go out. On the other hand, they can make it tougher to keep your car on the road, as you regularly need to invest in maintenance to meet stringent state standards.
While vehicle inspections have long been a part of owning a vehicle in New Hampshire, it will all come to an end on January 31, 2026, as reported by WMUR News 9. It’s all thanks to measures implemented in the new state budget, signed into law by Governor Kelly Ayotte on Friday afternoon.
As things stand, New Hampshire vehicle owners have had to secure safety inspections on an annual basis. Windshield stickers are used as proof of a current valid inspection, with the process typically costing $20 to $50 at state-licensed inspectors or authorized independent workshops, according to the local government. It has also been a long-standing requirement that owners seek a fresh vehicle inspection within 10 days of purchasing a vehicle.
The budget measures will also go further than just ending inspections. The state will also end emissions testing by the close of September 2026, however attempts to gain a special waiver from the EPA could see it end even sooner.
Vehicle inspection repeal has been signed into law! Starting next year, no more sticker scam!
Want to show your appreciation? Take the 40 dollars you DON'T need to give to a sticker station, and send it my way. I promise not to tell you your bearings are shot.… pic.twitter.com/hnmMD99I23
— Rep. Michael Granger (@Granger4NH) June 28, 2025
House Republicans campaigned to end annual vehicle inspections in New Hampshire.
According to sources speaking to News 9, bringing an end to regular vehicle inspections was an “absolute condition” of passing the budget for House Republicans in New Hampshire. Speaking on the matter, Republican Representative Sam Farrington noted the measures were intended to bring an end to frustrating inspections for drivers. “It’s a scam, really, because the data shows that forcing car inspections doesn’t actually lead to safety,” Farrington told News 9. “It can lead to thousand-dollar bills that average people weren’t expecting.”
However, the move is not unanimously popular. As reported by NHPR, dealer groups have raised concerns. “The elimination of annual inspections is both reckless and shortsighted,” stated Dan Bennett, president of the New Hampshire Auto Dealers Association. “It’s hard to believe that despite facts and data, the ‘safest’ state in the nation just chose to eliminate vehicle safety inspections.” Meanwhile, local New Hampshire mechanic Brad Fournier told News 9 that every car has issues at one time or another that might need fixing. “At any given time, things can happen – one pothole, you could have a bad ball joint right then and there,” he said. He expects a short-term dip in business with the loss of regular inspections.
The state had previously moved its inspection stickers to a lower windshield location to better suit modern vehicles with advanced vehicle assists. Now, the stickers—and inspections—will soon be a thing of the past.
Across the US, automotive inspection regimes vary. Fourteen states require regular inspections for regular commuter vehicles, though that will drop to thirteen when New Hampshire eliminates its requirements next year. Some additional states require regular inspections for commercial vehicles or require emissions checks only. And eliminating inspections is not unheard of; the District of Columbia stopped requiring inspections for privately owned vehicles in 2009, and New Jersey did the same in 2010.
Ultimately, motoring life will be slightly more convenient for New Hampshire motorists in the short term. They’ll have one less errand to run to keep their cars on the road year after year. Whether this is outweighed by future safety issues or excessive junk cars on the roads will be a matter for future debate. In any case, we can rejoice that now you can drive any old piece on New Hampshire roads as long as it doesn’t obviously look like it’s unroadworthy from ten paces. Have fun out there.
Image credits: State of New Hampshire
Anyone who thinks state safety inspections are not a useful thing needs take a stroll around a WalMart parking lot in Florida and see how many people are driving around on “racing slicks”, often with cords showing. Or one in one of the rustbelt states in the upper midwest that has copious road salt but no inspections. Terrifying.
I do think that state inspections should be done by state facilities that are absolutely bared from doing repairs. There is SO much room for cheating and grift in BOTH directions when repair shops are allowed to do it. Maine at least takes inspection fraud very, very seriously, and I got my local Sears in serious trouble for failing my car fraudulently back in the day. And then there are the shops who will pass anything if you slip them some cash…
I just moved from NH from NY. My car passed in NY, but failed in NH. Honestly, if you want MOT or TÜV inspection standards, write it into law. Don’t leave it up to a repair shop to determine what’s roadworthy or not.
I’m an advocate of inspections, to ensure a car has tires with tread, brakes, working lights, and the safety gear working. And if the frame is rotted, we can’t have cars disintegrating on the road. I hated seeing cars in Oregon with bald tires and a goddamn flashlight used as a headlight. But NH? Inspections were arbitrary. Dealerships and repair shops lost the faith in the public to do an inspection properly, so it was taken away.
I’ve watched plenty of Internet videos about TUV, MoT, etc inspections to know that other countries manage to do vehicle inspections without corruption or abuse, but that’s not The American Way.
Having lived there for 20 years, the trouble with NH inspections was the entrenched abuse of the system. The inspection requirements were stringent enough that, if applied creatively, could probably fail a brand-new car straight off the lot for one thing or another. Obviously, new cars never failed. But even one-year-old cars could and did, if the shop needed the money. That was the crux of the problem — the inspection stations were regular repair shops licensed by the state. The state had to trust that they were doing their job correctly and ethically, and that’s were it got dicey.
The car dealers’ association in the state donated a lot of money to various politicians and causes to keep inspections going. After all, older cars running into inspection problems were a prime motivator of new and used car sales. Shops needed to recover the cost of time spent on inspections plus the cost of the computer diagnostic equipment they were required by the state to lease in order to do the smog tests. At every turn, there was a quiet incentive for inspection stations to be on the take.
And to illustrate how cozy the dealers’ association was with the Department of Safety, when a particular State Police colonel retired, he literally drove down the street to a dealership that was a leading member of the car dealer’s association and was offered a job as their service manager on the spot. Bad optics, at the very least.
A mechanic I trusted — whose shop didn’t do inspections — once advised that the only reliable inspection stations were the ones that did an honest business in the first place. Except that more and more of those honest shops were quitting doing inspections… Like he had several years before. A lot of the problem revolved around the OBD testing system the state used; it broke down frequently and for some cars, it was inaccurate because its parameters weren’t the same as the manufacturer’s ECM programming parameters, and could fail a car that was functioning within the manufacturer’s approved specs. (No, it wasn’t a VW Dieselgate problem — it was genuinely inaccurate or incompatible test gear.)
And then there were the general shakedowns, like how I had to replace pads and rotors annually on several of my family’s cars because they would inevitably get marked as failed on inspection. Every year, even with pads and rotors that were no more than a year old, on cars that did mostly highway mileage. Or the failure for the “cracked taillight” that was a 1/8″ hairline mark inside the taillight (not even all the way through the plastic to the outside, and so tiny you had to stick your eyeball up to it to see it, and only if the brake light was illuminated. Or the arbitrary parking brake fail, where they’d fail you if the parking brake lever or pedal had a varying amount of “too much travel” — essentially, if the parking brake wasn’t locking up hard with barely more than an inch of pedal or lever travel, it would fail. Even if the parking brake worked, but took “too long” to bite. After enough of those fails, everybody in my family just stopped using the parking brake. Automatic in park, manual in gear, wheels turned to the curb when possible, but the parking brake was verboten because using it too much would generate pointless inspection fails.
There had been attempts to repeal the inspections before, but what really put the nail in the inspection program’s coffin this time was that a retired member of the State Police who had been in charge of managing the inspection system for a time, delivered a thoroughly researched document detailing how the inspection system wasn’t contributing to lowering accidents and/or fatalities, and how the system had proven itself to be inconsistent and potentially scammy in spite of auditing attempts.
The system was simply irredeemably broken. Once that happens, it’s hard to gain back public trust. It’s likely to be well dead and buried once it’s sunset next January.
The flip side of the coin is that plenty people won’t main their cars anymore, either because they couldn’t afford to in the first place, or they just don’t care to.
Here in SC, the state doesn’t conduct inspections. Tons of people drive around with no bumper covers, broken or burned out lights, or mismatched wheels and tires. My favorites are the barely functioning mangled up wrecks with half the body missing.
Police are supposed to cite drivers for this crap, but it doesn’t happen. Hell, they don’t care if people do 100 on the interstate.
I‘m in a position to get my car serviced when it needs it, in the spirit of the law, but tons of people won’t do anything about their cars unless they have to. That makes the roads more dangerous for everyone.
Ditto in Washington. You’ll see plenty of cars broken down on the side of the road on any given day, and plenty that shouldn’t be on the road. I get that we live in a country that makes car ownership all but necessary, and there are lots of people who just can’t afford the upkeep. But there’s a point where it’s just dangerous for you and others to be driving your hooptie (I should know, I have a few) without anyone to tell you otherwise (cops also don’t care in WA). There’s definitely a middle ground to be had, but far be it from me to theorize on the best way to keep people safe without a punitive and corrupt system to enforce said safety regime.
Another point in NHs favor for me wanting to move there. If I never had to get inspection, I would only have to go in for alignments for my newer stuff. I already do my older vehicles anyway as nobody near me can align anything that still adjusts with shims.
Louisiana gets closer each year to getting rid of inspections. They don’t actually check anything more than that the horn works and the car can stop itself. Many people just call them “brake tags”. They also create a large black market for drivers with tinted windows (at least the state lowered that limit this year).
Despite inspection being a bit of a pain, I’m still on team inspection. They’ve caught issues I hadn’t noticed.
At least in NY, the DMV takes inspection fraud seriously. If a shop is committing fraud that can be proven, the DMV comes down like a ton of bricks. It took months, but I did get money back from a crooked shop when the inspection station auditor looked into the issue.
Interesting, didn’t even think of reporting a place that tried to scam me back in the day.
They failed my car claiming it needed the “flapper” in the gas tank fill. The car wasn’t that old, so I called the Honda dealer I bought it from. They said my car never had one, and NYS inspection isn’t looking for them. Took it somewhere else and no problem.
Get it in writing. In my case the shop was padding the inspection fee. Not by much. I didn’t notice until I paid. The DMV publishes the fee schedule online so proving the fraud was easy. The auditor who handled things seemed to enjoy their job keeping shops honest.
Maine is the same. A call to the State Police and they are ON IT.
If a shop in NY fails your car, are you stuck having them fix it? That isn’t the case in Maine, you can always take it elsewhere for a second opinion, or home and fix it yourself. They even have to do the re-inspection for free. And inspections are only $15.50 or $18.50 by law, depending on county.
Now that 2/5ths of my fleet is in Florida it’s kind of nice not having to bother, but at the same time the things I see teetering down the road are terrifying. Though actually, another 2/5ths are registered as Antiques in Maine so those get to skip it too. So only one car to get inspected annually. Next Monday, in fact.
But I very much think inspections should be done at state-run, impartial places that ONLY do that, no repairs.
I don’t mind the inspection here in PA. I also take both cars to dealers that give you visual video proof of anything that is a fail/safety concern as well as suggesting anything that is marginal or soon to be an issue so you can make your own mind up about those items. I have no idea if other dealers do this but definitely the VW and the Audi dealers do. They cant just fire off a stock video to you of a junker, they have to film your vehicle from the license plate and do the walk around to all the areas inspected while not cutting the video. I imagine taking my vehicles to Joe’s Auto Barn I’d be hearing “hey you need to replace your Johnson Rod” ever year.