FMCSA Speed Limiter Rule Withdrawn: What It Means for Fleets

The FMCSA speed limiter rule is off the table: on July 24, 2025, FMCSA and NHTSA formally withdrew the September 2016 proposed rule that would have required heavy trucks over 26,000 pounds to carry a speed limiter set to a speed federal officials would choose. The proposal had sat in rulemaking limbo for nearly a decade without being finalized, and the withdrawal closes it out instead of leaving it technically pending. FMCSA also withdrew its May 2022 follow-up notice on the same subject.

Be precise about what that means. Trucks never had a federal speed limiter mandate in effect to comply with. The withdrawal ends a nine-year-old proposal, and since no such requirement ever took effect, it removes nothing fleets were already doing to comply.

FMCSA and NHTSA gave specific reasons in the withdrawal. First, the agencies cited significant data gaps on the rule's potential safety benefits, which left considerable uncertainty about its costs, benefits and other impacts. In plain terms, the case for the rule never got strong enough to finalize.

Second, the agencies pointed to wider adoption of safety systems such as automatic emergency braking and forward collision warning, which may deliver similar safety gains without a mandated speed cap. Third, they raised a federalism concern. The speeds under consideration were often below the maximum posted daytime limits on many roads, so the rule would have overridden state authority over heavy-vehicle speeds on roads where states have already decided higher speeds are safe.

Dropping the federal proposal changes nothing at the fleet level. Carriers remain free to run speed governors on their own trucks, and many large fleets already do so for fuel efficiency, reduced wear and internal safety policy, with or without any federal requirement.

State speed limits, insurance requirements and your fleet's own safety policy obligations stay the same too, and so do Canadian rules: Ontario and Quebec have required heavy trucks to have their speed limiter activated and set at 105 km/h since January 1, 2009. If your current speed-governing policy exists for operational or liability reasons, the withdrawal has no bearing on whether it should continue.

The proposal invites confusion because it has been in the news on and off for close to a decade, which made it easy to assume something was about to happen or already had. A driver or dispatcher who half-remembers a headline from 2018 or 2022 might believe a federal mandate is coming, or that one already exists.

The correction is short. Since the July 2025 withdrawal, no active federal rulemaking is working toward a mandatory speed limiter for heavy trucks, and you have no compliance deadline to plan around. Any decision to govern truck speeds remains a voluntary operating choice for your fleet.

With no mandate in play, governing speed becomes a fleet policy question, and telematics data is what lets you answer it well. Most fleets that govern do it for fuel first. The difference between 105 and 115 km/h on a loaded tractor shows up in the fuel report within a week, and fleets that install a governor usually set it where their own idle-and-speed report shows the cost curve bending. Safety comes second, and the speeding-exceptions report by driver tells you whether the problem is the truck's top speed or a few drivers' habits, which call for different fixes. A fleet that governs at the ECM can still watch posted-limit speeding through the platform: a truck limited to 105 is still speeding in a 70 zone, and that is where the coaching that counts happens. High Point GPS sets up the speed rules and reports for fleets across Canada and the United States, governed trucks or not.