North Carolina spent the summer expanding automated license plate readers onto state highways. The part that got almost no coverage is that these cameras have had a rulebook since 2015, it is written into the General Statutes, and it is more specific than most people assume.
Here is what the law actually requires — and the one provision in it that matters most to ordinary drivers.
What changed in 2026
The 2026 Appropriations Act (S.L. 2026-41, Senate Bill 257, signed July 7, 2026) made permanent what had been a pilot program. It authorizes the State Bureau of Investigation to enter agreements with the Department of Transportation to place readers in the rights-of-way of state-owned roads, highways and interstates.
It also attached reporting to that authority. The SBI must report to the legislature annually by March 1, and for each agency operating cameras in a DOT right-of-way it must provide that agency's written policy, the number of requests for captured data, and the number of cameras in its system.
That is worth pausing on. The expansion came bundled with a disclosure requirement — policies, request counts and camera counts, delivered to lawmakers on a fixed date every year.
The rule most drivers should know
Article 3D of Chapter 20 governs these systems. N.C. Gen. Stat. § 20-183.31(b) says data obtained under the Article may be obtained, accessed, preserved or disclosed only for law enforcement purposes, and then adds this:
"Notwithstanding, data obtained under the authority of this Article shall not be used for the enforcement of traffic violations."
Read that plainly. A license plate reader cannot generate your speeding ticket. The cameras are not a traffic-enforcement tool under this statute, and data collected under its authority cannot be used that way.
People assume the opposite constantly — that these cameras are a ticket machine. Under Article 3D they are not, and the statute says so in one sentence.
Ninety days, and only three ways past it
Under § 20-183.32(a), captured plate data "shall not be preserved for more than 90 days after the date the data is captured."
Subsection (b) gives exactly three exceptions:
- A preservation request under subsection (c);
- A state search warrant issued under Article 11 of Chapter 15A; or
- A federal search warrant issued under the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.
Absent one of those, the data has a shelf life measured in months, not years.
A preservation request is not a casual lookup
Subsection (c) sets out what an agency must actually produce. The request has to be a written, sworn statement specifying:
- The particular camera or cameras and the particular license plate involved;
- The dates and time frames to be preserved; and
- Specific and articulable facts showing reasonable grounds to believe the data is relevant and material to an ongoing criminal or missing-persons investigation.
"Specific and articulable facts" is a familiar standard to anyone who works in criminal court. It is not a hunch, and it is not a name typed into a box. It is a sworn writing that has to identify the plate, the camera and the window, and say why.
Every agency must have a written policy first
Under § 20-183.31(a), an agency must adopt a written policy before its system is operational. The statute lists nine things that policy has to address:
- The databases the captured data is compared against
- Data retention
- Sharing data with other law enforcement agencies
- Training of operators
- Supervisory oversight of use
- Internal data security and access
- Annual or more frequent auditing and reporting of use and effectiveness to the head of the agency
- Accessing data from systems the agency does not itself operate
- Any other subjects related to the agency's use
Subsection (c) adds a quieter requirement that matters if the accuracy of a reading is ever in question: the agency must keep maintenance and calibration schedules and records for the system on file.
Misuse is a crime
§ 20-183.33 is two lines long. Anyone who violates the Article by obtaining, accessing, preserving or disclosing data in a manner the Article does not allow is guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor.
That is the same offense class as a number of charges this office handles routinely. It applies to the people operating the system, not the public.
What Article 3D does not cover
The definition in § 20-183.30(1) is narrower than the general phrase "traffic camera" suggests. An automatic license plate reader system means fixed or mobile high-speed cameras used with computer algorithms to convert plate images into machine-readable data — and it expressly excludes two things people routinely lump in with it:
- Red light cameras (a "traffic control photographic system" under § 160A-300.1(a)); and
- Open road tolling systems (under § 136-89.210(3)).
Those run on different statutes with different rules. If someone tells you the plate-reader rules apply to a red light camera, they are describing the wrong law.
Locally
Several departments in this area publish their own transparency pages — camera counts, how many searches have been run, how long data is kept, and what the system may and may not be used for. Fuquay-Varina's is public and worth reading if you live here.
That is the practical point of all of this. The statute requires a written policy, an audit cycle, a retention ceiling and a sworn writing before data is held past 90 days. Those requirements only do any work if somebody occasionally reads them and compares them to what an agency actually publishes.
Related reading
- DWI Checkpoints in North Carolina: What the Law Actually Requires
- Traffic Tickets in North Carolina
- Criminal Defense
This article is general information about North Carolina law as of September 2026, not legal advice, and it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Cotten Law Firm, PLLC — Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina.
