Legislation signed permitting disabled veterans to roll with military license plates of their choice

Image via DHSMV.

Disabled veterans in Florida can soon celebrate their military branch on license plates instead of just their injury.

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a legislative package (SB 736) that updates a number of rules for the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles.

Among the changes is an update to the policy for disabled veterans, who under current law can get a “DV” license plate for free, with applications responsible for renewal fees down the road. Those red, white, and blue plates have been popular, with 97,994 adorning Florida vehicles as of January 2023.

But putting one of those on a car precludes use of a number of other military-themed plates pressed by the state.

Rather than locking disabled veterans into using these plates, the new law allows them to pick a license plate associated with a branch of the military. The veteran must be eligible to use that particular plate, of course. And unlike the disabled plates, these won’t have “DV” pressed into the plate number so the vehicles won’t have the same understood rights and protections such as disabled parking access.

The bill does several other updates to the law involving registration of various vehicles. That includes streamlining the transfer of titles on vehicles and mobile homes as an inheritance when the owner dies and has identified a specific heir to the vehicle in a will.

The legislation standardizes the regulation of small rental trucks to use the same process as rental cars.

It also allows for small license plates to be used on trailers, like those that exist already for motorcycles. Exact dimensions will be determined by the state agency.

The legislation also updates rules for temporary tags for vehicles in which titles are transferred to Florida from out of state or for service members deployed outside the state.

And in large Florida counties, the legislation also sets up a system where licensed insurance agencies can petition tax collectors about gaining the ability to issue registration certificates and license plates, along with validation stickers. That ability would only be available in counties with populations exceeding 1.9 million, so only Broward or Miami-Dade counties right now.

Most changes go into effect on July 1.