The fee to get your North Carolina license restored is $83.50 for most revocations, and $167.25 if the revocation came from an impaired driving conviction. Those amounts are set by statute in G.S. 20-7(i1), and they are the same at every DMV office in the state.
That is the number people are looking for. The rest of this page is the part that actually decides whether you get your license back, because the fee is the last step, not the first one.
What the restoration fee covers
Almost nothing. It is an administrative charge for the act of restoring your driving privilege, and the statute is explicit that it is owed “in addition to any and all fees which may be provided by law.”
So it does not include, and does not replace:
- the fine on the underlying ticket
- court costs
- the fee for the license itself
- a failure-to-appear or failure-to-pay fee
- any DMV hearing fee
- a substance abuse assessment, education program, or treatment, where those are required
People are often quoted a single number by a friend or a forum post and budget for that. The restoration fee is one line on a longer bill.
Which fee applies to you
The $167.25 amount applies only where the revocation was under G.S. 20-17(a)(2). That means:
- impaired driving under G.S. 20-138.1, or
- impaired driving in a commercial vehicle under G.S. 20-138.2, but only where the alcohol concentration was 0.06 or higher
Every other revocation under Chapter 20 — unpaid fines, a failure to appear, too many points, a lapse in insurance, driving while revoked — carries the $83.50 fee.
Two situations where you do not pay it at all
Both are in the same subsection and both are easy to miss.
Medical or health surrenders. The restoration fee is not required from anyone whose license was revoked or voluntarily surrendered for medical or health reasons — whether or not the DMV ever ran a medical evaluation.
The ten-year rule. The Division may waive a restoration fee when both of the following are true: the fee has gone unpaid for more than ten years from the date it was assessed, and the DMV has since issued you a license anyway. If you have an old fee sitting on your record from a revocation more than a decade ago, it is worth asking about rather than assuming you owe it.
The fee is not what is keeping you from driving
This is the part that matters. The DMV will not restore your license because you paid $83.50. It restores your license when the reason for the revocation has been resolved and the revocation period has run.
So the real sequence is:
- Find out exactly why you are revoked. There may be more than one reason, and clearing one does not clear the others. Our guide on how to check whether your NC license is suspended walks through pulling your official record.
- Fix the underlying cause. Pay the fine, resolve the failure to appear, reinstate the insurance, complete whatever the court ordered.
- Wait out the revocation period, if one is still running.
- Then pay the restoration fee and get the license issued.
If you are driving in the meantime, you are risking a separate criminal charge on top of everything else — see our page on driving while license revoked.
If the revocation came from a DWI, there is an extra step
Under G.S. 20-17.6, a person whose license was revoked for impaired driving cannot simply wait out the period and pay the fee. The DMV must first receive a certificate of completion, which requires a substance abuse assessment by an entity authorized by the Department of Health and Human Services and, depending on what that assessment finds, either an alcohol and drug education traffic school or a substance abuse treatment program.
There is a trap in that statute worth knowing about in advance. Under subsection (e), once the revocation period has actually ended and the only thing still keeping your license revoked is that the DMV has not received the certificate, you are not eligible for a limited driving privilege. The privilege that would let you drive to work is unavailable precisely when the delay is administrative.
The practical lesson: start the assessment early in the revocation period, not at the end of it.
How to find out where you actually stand
Order your official driving record from the NCDMV rather than guessing. It shows every revocation on your record, what caused each one, and whether the period has run. That is the document a lawyer will ask for, and it is the only reliable answer to “what do I still owe?”
If the record shows something you do not recognize — a revocation from a county you have never lived in, or one tied to a ticket you thought was resolved — that is worth looking into before you pay anything.
The bottom line
$83.50, or $167.25 if it was a DWI. Those numbers are fixed by statute and nobody at the DMV can change them. What varies is everything underneath: how many revocations are stacked on your record, whether the periods have run, and whether a court still has something open in your name.
If you are trying to get your license back in North Carolina and cannot work out what is blocking it, we untangle these regularly. Start a case review at portal.cottenfirm.com, or see our page on suspended and revoked licenses.
This article is general information about North Carolina law, not legal advice, and does not create an attorney-client relationship. Fee amounts and statutes cited were current as of the date of publication; confirm current amounts with the NCDMV before relying on them.
