Why NC driver’s license offices scaled back hours

Ninety driver’s license offices across North Carolina scaled back hours at the start of the week.

2026-02-12

Beginning Monday, Feb. 9, the DMV will no longer offer extended early morning hours at 90 driver license offices statewide. Those locations had been opening at 7 a.m. instead of the standard 8 a.m. to help manage high demand.

North Caorlina has had to deal with population growth. The state has about 11,197,968 people as of July 1, 2025, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. North Carolina’s population was 9,535,483 as of April 1, 2010.

WRAL reporter Carly Haynes spoke Thursday with North Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles communications director Marty Homan about the changes.

WRAL News: What went into effect on Monday?

Homan: Yeah, so our early start, our 7:00 a.m. start at about 90 offices, those ended at the end of last week. So, we had used some COVID-era grant funding to pay for those over the last few years, and that grant funding has been exhausted and so now we're returning to our 8 a.m. start time.

WRAL News: How did those expanded hours help you during the pandemic era and then also the years that followed?

Homan: It helped us provide services and expanded services. Our population has been growing like gangbusters the last few years. It helped us with trying to meet the demand that we were seeing, and demand is still high, and we're going to do the best we can to serve everybody we can as soon as we can.

WRAL News: What are you expecting in terms of demand now that you've lost this additional hour?

Homan: Well, we've had a lot that has changed over the last six to eight months. We've had 64 additional employees that have been added. Those were added by the mini budget that passed in August [2025]. They've all been hired and are in place now, so those employees are helping.

Senate Bill 245 also helped us move a large amount of transactions online. It allowed for an extra renewal to be done online, and so that's going to move about 400,000 transactions online for the year. And so that has really helped with demand and as a result, our wait times have gone from … north of a couple of hours down to 30-45 minutes as a statewide average.

And so, things are getting better and so we'll try to do the best we can. Our employees are great and they're going to do the best they can to serve as many people as they can each day.

WRAL News: You've added staff. [Is] there still a vacancy issue or is it just building staff?

Homan: No, it's not been a vacancy issue. Our vacancy rate is very, very low, among the lowest in all of the state government, so we do a great job of … finding and hiring and training talent when we have those open positions, but most of our position positions are full.

It's just a matter of having enough to keep up with the demand. And, the 64 we got back in August absolutely helped.

Thirty-tree more [jobs] will be available to us to hire July 1 in the new fiscal year. And so, we'll be gearing up to be able to hire those folks as fast as we can.’

WRAL News: In that news release you mentioned, potentially expanded hours on Saturday in hopes you could get that over the finish line so long as there's funding involved. What's your confidence that you'd get that funding?

Homan: We're going to work with our legislative partners to try to make that happen. It makes more sense now. So, winter is typically our slower time. Summers are more busy time, and so it makes sense to sort of roll off the 7 a.m. start now to potentially be able to bring back the Saturday hours, but we're going to need legislative support and … we think we'll be there to … they'll be there to help us meet that.

WRAL News: Is the stalemate in the legislature right now on your minds as far as you know not getting that state budget right away? Do you think there could be an alternative, maybe side funding for the DMV separate from that state budget?

Homan: We'll take whatever we can get and we'll put it to work as fast as we can, and so that's something for them to figure out. They've been great partners over this last year in adding additional employees and helping us move additional transactions online. And so, we expect that to continue.

WRAL News: I want to focus on appointments now because when we've gone to the DMV in recent days, the waits are pretty much nonexistent. What do you think is contributing to the waits outside of DMV and the lack thereof?

Homan: We changed our process over the summer, so we’re stacking all the appointments first thing in the morning. We're taking walk-ins also in the morning, so that's getting that line to move right away at opening.

And then, we've also now staggered our appointment calendar throughout the day. Appointments are all throughout the day. They're not all crammed in the morning and so that helps with moving the walk-ins quicker and quicker.

We also are signing people in as soon as they get to the office, as soon as we can upon opening instead of waiting until noon to start taking walk-ins and that line just builds all day. We're signing them in. We have a new process where we get your phone number, we put it into the system, you get a text with a link and you can watch your place in line virtually, so you don't have to wait in line outside of the DMV building. You can watch from wherever, a coffee shop, go back home [or] go to work. We'll text you when it's time to come back to the office, and that's been working really well.

Then, the additional employees, of course, are helping drive down wait times, as are the additional transactions moving online.

WRAL News: When did the virtual option go into effect?

Homan: Over the summer, June or July  … but that's been in place since then, so you shouldn't be seeing long lines outside of DMV offices throughout the day anymore. That should be a thing of the past.

WRAL News: For booking appointments, how has the seven-day window been different compared to the previous three-month window?

That was a change.

With booking appointments  three months out, we were three months out from being able to make any changes to our calendar. We want to be an organization that's nimble, that adjusts to … changing demands in different places, and when you're booked three months out solid all across the state, you can't do that.

We went through a point in time where we shrunk the calendar to seven days out. So now, each weekday, appointments for the next week are available, and that's lot better being able to get an appointment next week, or sooner than three months out, and so that should be a good thing for customers.

Another thing to remind people of is you don't need to have an appointment. Over 85% of the people we serve do not have an appointment. They come as a walk-in. And so, that is an option for folks as well. As I shared, our wait times are way down in the 30- to 45-minute range across the state right now.

WRAL News: Do you have suggestions for when somebody goes online [to schedule an appointment] and all they're met with are places that are more than an hour away?

Homan: You do not have to have an appointment. You can come as a walk-in. Our walk-in wait time is between 30 and 45 minutes right now across the state, and so that is something that has improved over the last several months and so that is a great option for people

Appointments are added throughout the day. If someone has canceled an appointment, those appointments will appear within five or 10 minutes back on the website.

And then, each evening, appointments for the next week are added and that's thousands of appointments every evening that are added and so we do, we do have appointments that are available. They go quickly. They're very popular, but you do not have to have one.

WRAL News: So, do you suggest that people should try to get a walk-in and that's better than getting an appointment right now in terms of how soon they’ll get it?

Homan: I would suggest someone to show up at an office around the time that it opens, get your number put into the system and we'll text you when we can serve you if you're not able to find an appointment.

How do you think North Carolina's DMV shapes up just compared to what DMVs are faced with around the country right now?

Homan: We're not alone as a growing state that's being challenged by demand because of population growth, but we're doing everything we can to improve our services.

Things have gotten a lot better. We're not taking a victory lap.

We have a long ways to go, and we're going to keep working at it.

WRAL News: Anything else that you think we missed that's important when we're talking about progress made?

Homan: I don't think so. So, you know, I talked a little bit about, uh, things that have moved online. There's still more to come.

And so, one thing that we've heard from people is like, ‘Well, I can't renew my CDL online.’ That's coming. It's in the works.

Class A and B driver licenses. You can't do it right now. That's in the works.

We did recently move being able to move from Level 2 to Level 3 for teen drivers online.

We're also going to be working on moving from Level 2 to regular license when you turn 18. There are some people that don't get through the process to get to level 3 before they turn 18. If they did, they could do Level 2 to Level 3 online and Level 3 to regular license online, and that one's been available for several years, but you can't go from Level 2 to regular online at age 18, so that's something we're implementing as well and should be ready in a few months.

We're, we're constantly working and trying to get better, improved services, and so, that's, that's what we're all about. And, we endeavor to be a great customer service organization. We know we're not quite there yet, but we're working hard every day.

WRAL News: What about the kiosk that we're going to be like in Harris Teeter and [grocery stores] like where's that at and is that going to be a thing?

Homan: Yeah, so the kiosks, we’ll actually have an announcement in a media event on Monday, so we are expanding those. They have been expanded to another 10 locations and so that is a pilot that is growing and so we'll outside of Harris Teeter [stores]. We're adding Carly C's and some Publix in the Charlotte area and then we hope to be on base at Fort Bragg soon as well with a kiosk in their Soldier Support Center.

WRAL News: It’s a lot of work to improve with the population growth

Homan: Yeah, it's not going to be one thing. One thing didn't get us into the surging demand that we've seen, and it's not one thing that's going to sort of fix it. It's going to be a bunch of things and so we're hard at work trying to make it better.