Massachusetts Vehicle Registration Fee Calculator

Massachusetts registration itself is cheap and easy to state: a standard "Passenger Normal" plate costs $60 for a TWO-YEAR period, so about $30 a year, and a certificate of title is $75. Almost nobody's Massachusetts bill is actually about those numbers. The charge that matters is the municipal motor vehicle excise under M.G.L. c.60A §1: $25 for every $1,000 of valuation, billed by your city or town EVERY YEAR for as long as you own the car. Two details make it larger than people expect. First, the valuation is a percentage of the MANUFACTURER'S LIST PRICE — the original sticker — not the price you actually paid, so buying the same car used does not reduce it. Second, that percentage starts high: 90% in the designated year of manufacture (and 50% in the year BEFORE it, for cars sold early), then 60% in the second year, 40% in the third, 25% in the fourth, and 10% from the fifth year onward. On a $32,000 list price in the year of manufacture the valuation is $28,800 and the excise is $720 — roughly twenty-four times the annual registration fee. It falls quickly with age, reaching $80 a year once the vehicle is five. Separately, a purchase carries the ordinary 6.25% Massachusetts sales tax (c.64H §2). That sales tax and the annual excise are different taxes and are not in lieu of one another: you pay 6.25% once when you buy, and the excise every year thereafter. Because the $25-per-$1,000 rate and the depreciation schedule are both set by state law, this excise is uniform statewide — unusual for a locally billed tax, and it means we can compute it exactly rather than asking you for a local rate.