North Carolina's DMV generated $2.2 billion in 2024. It got $215.6 million back.

North Carolina's Division of Motor Vehicles does not compete for funding the way most state agencies do.▸ It collects the money first — highway use tax, title fees, registration, license fees — and hands most of it to its parent agency, the Department of Transportation, before asking for any of it back. In fiscal year 2024 that collection ran to roughly $2.2 billion, an amount DOT's own secretary confirmed in writing. What DMV got back to run its own offices was a much smaller number, and the gap shows up as a line of people standing in it.

The North Carolina Office of the State Auditor's performance audit of the DMV (PER-2025-4200, released August 4, 2025) traced every dollar DMV brought in for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2024.▸ Highway Use Tax — the state's version of a sales tax on vehicle purchases — was the largest piece, followed by vehicle titling and registration fees and driver license fees. Net of vehicle property tax (which is collected by counties and excluded from DOT's revenue totals for comparison purposes), DMV remitted $2,215,008,110 to DOT — about 30% of DOT's total FY2024 revenue of $7.3 billion.

DOT does not dispute the number.▸ In its formal response to the audit, dated July 16, 2025, Secretary J.R. "Joey" Hopkins wrote plainly that "DMV is responsible for $2.2 billion in revenue, which is a significant portion of DOT's budget" — citing the figure as a reason to keep DMV folded inside DOT rather than spin it off, not as a reason to send more of it back.

Against that $2.2 billion, DMV spent $215,554,884 running its own operations in FY2024 — licensing offices, vehicle titling, the License & Theft Bureau's sworn investigators, training, and its central offices.▸ That is 2.8% of DOT's total FY2024 expenditures of $7.6 billion, a department that collects three dollars in every ten DOT takes in but spends fewer than three cents of every dollar DOT lays out.

DMV does not control that allocation.▸ The audit found that DMV cannot submit its own budget directly to state policymakers — DOT decides which of DMV's funding requests advance. From 2019 to 2025, DMV asked for 130 new Driver Services positions through budget expansion requests; DOT forwarded 40 of them, 31%, to the state budget office. For the FY2024-25 cycle alone, DMV requested 80 new examiner positions and DOT advanced 40.

The positions that didn't get funded are examiner jobs — the people who administer road tests, check vision, and issue the license or ID a resident is standing in line for.▸ As of April 2025, North Carolina had 710 budgeted driver license examiner positions (568 permanent, 142 temporary) and 160 of them sat vacant — 63 permanent slots and 97 of the 142 temporary slots, a 68% vacancy rate on the temporary side alone.

Vacancies alone understate the daily gap: DMV leadership told auditors that since January 2025, only 62-75% of all examiners have actually been available to work on a given day once sick leave and burnout-driven absences are counted.▸ Some offices carry almost the entire burden alone — Harnett County, population over 56,000, had a single examiner as of the audit's fieldwork. Vacant positions also lapse salary that goes unspent: $4,653,639 in FY2024, concentrated in Driver Services and License & Theft. The audit found that money isn't banked or returned — it gets redirected within DMV's own budget, including to non-salary costs like equipment and travel, which is a fix for a spending category, not for the staffing gap that created it.

The disparity has a longer arc behind it.▸ Driver license examiner positions grew from 516 to 568 — 52 positions, about 10% — over the audit's comparison period. Over a comparable stretch, North Carolina's population grew by roughly 1.5 million people, about 16%, 2010 to 2024, per the U.S. Census Bureau estimates the state's Office of State Budget and Management cites. (The audit itself puts the state's own population estimate for the same stretch higher, at 2.5 million people; this piece uses the Census Bureau's independently published figure, which still shows the same direction — examiner staffing has not kept pace with growth, by either count.)

DMV reports its own statewide average wait time — the period from check-in to being called to an examiner's window — at 27 minutes for the portion of fiscal year 2025 the audit reviewed.▸ That metric excludes the time people spend in line before they're allowed to check in, which auditors and DMV customers alike describe as substantial; DMV leadership told auditors that customers regularly arrive as early as 4 or 5 a.m. for offices that open at 7 or 8 a.m.

To capture the time DMV's own metric misses, the auditor's subject-matter expert analyzed anonymized mobile-device location data covering 69 of North Carolina's 113 driver license offices over the same window.▸ The result: the statewide average customer visit — arrival to departure — exceeds 75 minutes, nearly triple DMV's official figure, with rural offices showing the sharpest deterioration since fiscal year 2019.

The auditors' central recommendation was structural: make DMV an autonomous agency, independent of DOT, with direct control over its own budget — the model North Carolina already uses for the State Ports Authority and the North Carolina Turnpike Authority.▸ DOT disagreed in its formal response, arguing separation would duplicate legal, HR, and IT functions DOT already provides and would distract from fixing DMV's operations directly. DOT instead asked the General Assembly to authorize a study of a "percentage-of-fees" funding model, under which DMV's budget would grow or shrink automatically with the fees it collects, rather than being fixed through the state's biennial budget process. As of this writing, that study has not been authorized and DMV's funding still runs through DOT's biennial budget.

Figures are drawn from the NC Office of the State Auditor's fieldwork as of April 2025 (staffing) and state fiscal year 2024 (revenue and expenditures), the most recent audited period available. Wait-time and visit-duration figures cover July 2024 through April 2025. The percentage-of-fees funding study DOT requested had not been authorized by the General Assembly as of this writing.