If you live in one state, and you get a speeding ticket in another state, will that out of state ticket show up on your driving record in your home state? Based on our experience, the answer to this question is maybe.

There are three different interstate compacts in the U.S.: The Driver License Compact, the Non-Resident Violator Compact, and the Driver License Agreement. Most states participate in one or more of these compacts. These compacts are agreements between states to share information on traffic violation convictions. Here is how they are supposed to work. 

Let’s say a driver gets a speeding ticket in state A. The driver has a license out of state B. When the driver is found guilty or responsible for the speeding ticket, the court reports it to state

A’s department of motor vehicles. Then state A’s department of motor vehicles is supposed to make that information available to other states. If everything goes how it should, that speeding violation will show up on the driver’s record in state B. But things do not always go as they should.

The transfer of information between states can break down at various points. 

Sometimes the court does not report the violation to the department of motor vehicles. This is usually due to some clerical error or oversight. If the department of motor vehicles never gets the information, then there is nothing to share.

Sometimes the department of motor vehicles fails to process the information it receives from the court. We see this all the time. Here again a clerical error, this time on the part of the department of motor vehicles, results in the information never being shared with other states.

Sometimes the home state of the driver fails to process the information from the reporting state, again resulting in the information not appearing on the driver’s record.

Anytime you have a chain of bureaucratic government agencies processing information, there is a chance that the information might be lost somewhere along the chain. 

Not all states are members of these compacts. 

If a driver lives in a state that is not participating in a compact, or a driver gets a ticket in a state that is nor participating, the record of the violation may not be shared.

States may not have comparable violations.

A violation that exists in one state may not exist in another state, as the Traffic Law Guys can explain. This can affect how a state handles information about a conviction. If a driver gets a ticket in state A for a violation that does not exist in his home state B, then home state B may not do anything with the information. In other words, if the out-of-state violation does not match-up with an in-state violation, the state may not do anything with the conviction.