What Is IRP? Apportioned Registration and Apportioned Plates Explained

IRP, the International Registration Plan, is apportioned registration: it lets a carrier register a truck once, in its base jurisdiction, and run it across North America on one apportioned plate and one cab card. The cab card lists every jurisdiction the vehicle may operate in. Before IRP, a truck that ran through six states needed six registrations, or a stack of trip permits bought at each border. Since the Full Reciprocity Plan took effect in 2015, the cab card covers all of them: every apportioned vehicle is registered for the 48 contiguous states, the District of Columbia and the ten Canadian provinces, whether or not it ever goes there.

The fee is the apportioned part. Each member jurisdiction sets its own registration fee for a vehicle of a given weight. Your base jurisdiction works out your total by multiplying each jurisdiction's fee by the percentage of your fleet's distance travelled there, then passes the money on to the other members. A tractor that runs 60% of its miles in Ontario, 30% in Quebec and 10% in New York pays 60% of Ontario's fee, 30% of Quebec's and 10% of New York's, all on one invoice.

IRP and IFTA are separate agreements run by separate agencies, and carriers hold both. IFTA covers fuel tax: it settles the per-litre or per-gallon tax owed to each jurisdiction, and you file it quarterly with a revenue or finance department. IRP covers registration: it apportions the annual plate fee, and you renew it once a year with a motor vehicle or transportation department. Both use the same threshold (over 26,000 pounds gross or registered weight, or three or more axles, operating in two or more member jurisdictions), and both need distance by jurisdiction. They read that distance differently. IFTA wants the quarter just ended, while IRP wants a twelve-month reporting period ending the June 30 before the registration year begins.

In Quebec, the SAAQ administers IRP and Revenu Québec administers IFTA. In Ontario, ServiceOntario has handled IRP since March 3, 2025, and the Ministry of Finance handles IFTA. In most US states the DMV runs IRP and the revenue department runs IFTA, although Florida, Virginia and Vermont run both out of the DMV. Miss your IFTA filings and your IRP renewal can be held, so in practice the two are linked even where the law keeps them apart.

Your IRP renewal is built on a distance schedule: actual distance in each jurisdiction during the reporting period, for every vehicle in the fleet. A first-year registrant with no history uses the average per-vehicle distance chart published by IRP, Inc. instead. From then on, the fleet reports its own numbers, and the base jurisdiction can audit them for three years after the close of the registration year they support. Auditors look for individual vehicle distance records: trip-level distance by jurisdiction, tied to a unit, a date and a route.

IFTA audits ask for that same record, and telematics produces it as a report. A GPS tracking device logs each vehicle's position continuously, the platform assigns every stretch of travel to the province or state where it happened, and you pull the distance-by-jurisdiction report for any period, an IFTA quarter or the IRP reporting year, from the same data. Fleets that rebuild IRP distance from trip sheets once a year have a harder time showing an auditor the vehicle-level records behind their apportioned fees.

An apportioned vehicle carries its cab card, and a weigh station inspector checks it against the plate and the registered weight. Running over the registered weight in a jurisdiction gets a citation, and so does a non-apportioned vehicle operating across jurisdictions without a trip permit. Inspectors check the ELD, the IFTA decals and the IRP credential together, so a fleet that keeps all three current from one telematics dataset runs into fewer surprises at the roadside.

Here are the two agreements a cross-border truck operates under, compared on the points carriers confuse most.