Rhode Island Disabled Veteran Registration, License Fee Exemption and Plate

Section 31-6-8 exempts an eligible veteran from the payment of any fee for the annual registration of a motor vehicle and for a license to operate it, and directs the administrator of the division of motor vehicles to issue registration plates designated "Disabled Veteran". There are four alternative gates and they are genuinely alternatives. Any one of them is enough. Amputation. The veteran has lost one or both arms, hands, feet, or legs by reason of amputation, while engaged in, or as a result of engagement in, the wars or campaigns in which the United States has been engaged. Loss of use. The veteran has lost the use of one or both arms, hands, feet, or legs by reason of other permanent injury. Loss of use rather than loss of the limb, which reaches a veteran with a paralysed or non-functional limb. A VA vehicle grant. The veteran has been granted a motor vehicle under the 1946 federal act the section cites by its public law number, which is the ancestor of today's automobile and adaptive equipment grant. Or suitable VA documentation establishing either a combined service-connected disability rating of one hundred percent, or that the veteran is considered "individually unemployable" due to their service-connected disability. Two 2026 acts rewrote this section on the same day, June 19, 2026, each effective on passage and each written from the older text without reference to the other. Chapter 248 (House Bill 7096) adds a fifth gate: a veteran aged 75 or older with a combined service-connected rating of 70 percent. Chapter 250 (House Bill 8614) does not carry that gate, but lets the "Disabled Veteran" plates pass to the veteran's spouse during the veteran's lifetime once the veteran is certified unable to drive, and to the surviving spouse for life or until remarriage, with one set of plates per eligible veteran and spouse. The two do not contradict each other, and the Law Revision Office ordinarily prints both amendments together, but a print of either chapter alone is missing the other's change. A veteran of 75 or older rated 70 percent should cite chapter 248 when applying. That last pairing is the one to hold onto. Rhode Island writes individual unemployability in as an express equal alternative to a hundred percent combined rating, in the statute rather than in an agency policy. A veteran paid at the total rate through unemployability with a combined schedular rating of, say, seventy percent, is inside this section on the same terms as a veteran rated a hundred. Because of that, and because the amputation and loss-of-use routes involve no percentage at all, the rating filter does not hide this entry at a lower rating. The discharge test is an honorable discharge from the service of the armed forces "or the Merchant Marine" of the United States in any of the wars or campaigns in which the United States has been engaged. The merchant marine appears here as it does across Rhode Island's veterans statutes. The plate and the exemption have limits worth knowing. The plate is for use on an automobile, or on a commercial vehicle with a gross weight of twelve thousand pounds or less. Only one set of Disabled Veteran plates is issued to an eligible veteran, and only after certification of eligibility from VA or other satisfactory documentation. On the death of the holder, the plates may be transferred to the veteran's surviving spouse for the spouse's lifetime or until the spouse remarries. The fee exemption is written as attaching to "that motor vehicle", so it is one vehicle rather than a household exemption. Rhode Island's motor vehicle excise tax was phased out for most vehicles, so the older accounts of a disabled veteran excise exemption describe a tax that has largely stopped being levied. The registration and license fee exemptions in this section are the live ones. A free disabled veteran parking placard is a separate matter handled by the division of motor vehicles on a war-related disabled declaration letter from the Providence VA, and the state's summaries put that at a hundred percent service-connected rating.