Rhode Island Freight Broker Bond$75,000 BMC-84 — No Second RI Bond

Quonset Point: A Top-10 Auto-Import Port Hiding Inside America's Smallest State

Quonset Business Park in North Kingstown runs the Port of Davisville, which the Quonset Development Corporation — the quasi-public state authority that operates the park — ranks among the ten busiest vehicle-import ports in North America. The port has four ship berths and more than 60 acres of terminal storage, and in a strong year it discharges well over 300,000 imported vehicles, up sharply from roughly 240,000 the year before. On peak unload days, terminal crews can move thousands of vehicles off ship in a single day.

Every one of those vehicles has to move again once it clears customs and dealer allocation — onto a car hauler, bound for a dealership somewhere in New England or further down the Eastern Seaboard. That inland leg is where a Rhode Island broker can build a real niche. Car-hauler dispatch is a different discipline than general freight: hauler capacity is specialized and comparatively scarce, damage-claim documentation on a $30,000 vehicle is far stricter than on a pallet of dry goods, and volume swings hard with new-model-year ship schedules rather than running level year-round.

Why Rhode Island's Size Turns "Regional" Freight Into a Statewide Book

Rhode Island runs about 48 miles north-to-south and 37 miles east-to-west — small enough that a Providence-based broker can realistically reach almost any pickup or delivery point in the state within roughly an hour's drive, whether that's Woonsocket near the Massachusetts line, Westerly on the Connecticut border, or Newport out on Aquidneck Island. Brokers in larger states build carrier networks around regional zones; a Rhode Island broker can treat the entire state as a single dispatch radius, which simplifies carrier scheduling but also means there's a real ceiling on how much purely in-state capacity exists.

That's why most Rhode Island brokers build their carrier bench around the I-95 corridor that runs the length of the state between the Connecticut and Massachusetts lines, plus I-195 feeding east toward Fall River and New Bedford. Both interstates connect directly into the same carrier pools serving Connecticut and Massachusetts, so a Rhode Island broker's practical capacity extends well beyond the state's own small trucking base — which matters, because relying only on in-state carriers would leave a broker capacity-constrained the moment volume spikes.

R.I. Gen. Laws § 39-12-27 Is a Carrier Bond, Not a Broker Bond

R.I. Gen. Laws Chapter 39-12, "Motor Carriers of Property," is the statute Rhode Island brokers most often stumble across when searching for state bonding rules — and it does contain a bond requirement. Section 39-12-27, "Security for protection of the public," requires any motor carrier holding a certificate of public convenience and necessity (common carriers) or a permit (contract carriers) to file either an insurance certificate or a $100,000 bond with the Rhode Island general treasurer, on top of minimum liability coverage. The table below separates what actually applies to a property broker from what applies to a Rhode Island-regulated trucking carrier.

Rhode Island Freight Broker Bond Cost

The $75,000 BMC-84 is priced as a percentage of face value — you never pay $75,000, only the annual premium. Pricing is driven by personal credit, not geography; see our freight broker bond cost by state guide and surety bond cost overview for broader context.

Getting BMC-84 Broker Authority From a Rhode Island Address

Rhode Island participates in the national Unified Carrier Registration program under 49 U.S.C. § 14504a, which covers brokers and freight forwarders alongside carriers. Brokers register in the lowest bracket (0–2 vehicles, since a broker runs no fleet of its own), priced at $46 for 2026 by the UCR Board — unchanged from 2025. That's a federal registration fee, not a bond, filed with Rhode Island as your base state.

Freight Broker Bond Resources