Modelled, not measured
How the wait estimate is produced
The short version: it is modelled, not measured. The figure on an office page describes how busy motor vehicle offices tend to be at that hour of that day — not how many people are in that particular building right now. Everything below explains where that figure comes from and what it cannot tell you.
- Hour20–55 min
- Day×0.85–1.30
- Week×0.90–1.30
- Open?yes / no
- Estimateto nearest 5
What goes into the figure
Four inputs, in this order. The first three are the same for every office in the country.
One more thing acts on the result, on three days of the year. On 1 January, 4 July and 25 December the model multiplies its figure by 1.5, on the assumption that the day around a closure is busier. Those three dates are hardcoded — no other holiday is recognised, and the rule takes no account of a state closing on a day the list does not hold.
There is a fifth multiplier, and it is the only one that depends on other people. When a figure is worked out on demand rather than read from the hourly refresh, an unusual number of visitors looking at the same office at once nudges it up, by at most half again. The busiest five minutes this site has ever recorded for one office would have moved a fifty-minute estimate to fifty-five.
Hour of the day
A fixed figure for each hour a motor vehicle office is typically open — highest around mid-morning and again at lunchtime, lowest in the late afternoon. The same table is applied to every office in the index.
The weekday table, hour by hour. Every hour outside 7am–5pm is zero. Base weekday wait in minutes by hour: 7a 30, 8 45, 9 55, 10 40, 11 35, 12p 50, 1 45, 2 30, 3 25, 4 30, 5p 20.Day of the week
Monday is treated as the busiest weekday and Wednesday the quietest, with Friday somewhat above average. Saturday uses a shorter, separate pattern.
Each weekday's multiplier against the 1.00 line, and the separate Saturday table below it. Day-of-week multipliers: Mon 1.3, Tue 0.9, Wed 0.85, Thu 0.9, Fri 1.1, Sat 1. Sunday is closed in the base pattern. Saturday's own table in minutes: 8a 40, 9 50, 10 45, 11 40, 12p 30, and zero from 1pm.Week of the month
The first and last weeks of a month are treated as busier than the two in the middle, on the assumption that renewal and registration deadlines cluster there.
Four buckets, and anything past the fourth calendar week is folded back into Week 4. Week-of-month multipliers: Week 1 1.2, Week 2 0.9, Week 3 0.95, Week 4 1.3.That office's own opening hours
The one genuinely per-office input, and it changes whether a figure applies rather than how big it is: if the office is shut at the hour you are looking at, the page says so instead of showing a wait. Where we hold no hours at all, the page says that too.
One office's day, including a lunch closure. Inside a gap the page says closed rather than printing a zero. An office open 8am to 12pm and again 1pm to 4pm: at 10am an estimate is shown, and at 12:30pm — inside the lunch closure — the page reports the office as closed rather than showing a zero-minute wait.
What it is not
It is not a queue reading
Nothing here counts the people standing in a particular building. No state publishes that figure and we have no other way to see it.
It is not specific to one office
Two offices open at the same hour on the same day get the same number. Across every office in the index the model produces only one or two distinct values in any given hour.
It is not live
It is not a live queue count and nothing here watches a door. The figure is refreshed hourly for every office, and a page loaded between refreshes may recompute it, so it can change more than once an hour — most visibly around an office's opening or closing time, which for 42% of the offices here falls partway through an hour rather than on it.
It is not broken down by service
We hold no record of which services each office handles, so nothing here separates a licence renewal from a road test.
The confidence number
A confidence value appears alongside the estimate in the index. It rises only with the number of recent visitor reports for that office, and since almost none have been submitted it currently sits at its floor almost everywhere. Read it as “how much evidence is behind this”, not as a probability that the figure is right.
Where the hours and addresses come from
Separately from the estimate, and much more reliable: office names, addresses and opening hours are taken from a state’s own open-data publication where it provides one, and from public listings where it does not. They are refreshed when the source changes.
We hold published hours for 3,046 of the 3,283 offices in the index. Coverage varies by state, because it depends on what each state publishes and how. California is at 157 of 195 and Virginia at 113 of 140: neither state includes hours in its open-data release. Most of those were read from the agencies’ own published office pages; the rest came from Google Places and have not been checked against the state. An office with no hours is listed with its address and says plainly that hours are unknown, and it is left out of search results rather than published as a thin page.
3,046 of 3,283
What would make this better
Reports from people who actually queued. A reported wait is the only observed figure anywhere on this site, and it is the only route by which anything here could become specific to one office rather than to motor vehicle offices in general.
Almost nothing has been submitted so far, so almost nothing published here is currently derived from a visitor report. Where an office does have recent reports, they are not kept apart from the estimate: the model blends them into the figure it publishes, weighting its own pattern at 70% and the reported average at 30%. The reported figures are also listed on the office’s page, so you can see what was actually submitted.
That blend only happens when the figure is computed on demand. The hourly job that fills the cache most pages read does not pass reports in, so on most page loads the number you see is the pattern alone. If you have just been to an office, the wait you sat through is still the most useful thing you can leave behind.