Vermont DMV outlines $104 million modernization; vehicle services live, driver services slated for November

The Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles told the House Energy and Digital Infrastructure Committee on Wednesday that the agency is midway through a multi‑phase modernization of a decades‑old mainframe system that Commissioner Andrew Collier said the Legislature funded with a $104,000,000 life‑of‑contract authorization and a $50,000,000 upgrade component.

Collier, who identified himself as eight weeks into the commissioner role, told the committee the project’s first phase — vehicle registration, titling and VIN services — went live in November 2023 and “was on time and on budget.” He said Phase 2, which covers driver services (licensing, online scheduling and a MyDMV account), is planned to go live “this November” and that testing will begin in March with a broader test cycle in the summer.

The modernization aims to replace a roughly 50‑year‑old mainframe that Collier said made some routine processing take weeks or more: “we went from weeks, to over over a month to get documents processed,” he said, and the new system allows many transactions to be completed “at the counter” or online in a single visit.

Why it matters: committee members pressed that a statewide DMV modernization affects most Vermonters who hold a license or vehicle registration and shifts the department from a paper, back‑office workflow to an online, customer‑facing system. The committee discussed both the immediate service improvements and the budgetary implications of large IT projects across state government.

Key project details

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