A new law went into effect in Maryland on October 1, 2025 that changes how towing companies are required to notify vehicle owners after a tow. I want to walk through what it actually says because I think there is some confusion out there about what changed and what did not.
The law is HB191, which was also introduced in the Senate as SB40. It passed the General Assembly unanimously earlier in 2025 and was signed into law by Governor Wes Moore. The Towing Recovery Professionals of Maryland, which is the state’s main industry association, supported the bill and actually helped shape how the notification process was going to work.
Here is the problem the law was trying to fix. Under the old rules, a towing company that took a vehicle was required to notify the police within one hour and then send written notice to the vehicle owner by certified mail within seven business days. Seven business days is a long time. The Consumer Protection Division of the Maryland Attorney General’s Office testified during a House Environment and Transportation Committee hearing in Annapolis in January 2025 that this process was leaving vehicle owners not knowing what happened to their car for up to a week. That is frustrating for owners and it creates more storage fees building up in the meantime, which leads to complaints directed at us.
What HB191 does is require towing companies to notify the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration electronically after any tow. The MVA then sends an email notification to the vehicle owner using whatever email address the owner has on file with the MVA. If the owner does not respond within seven days, the certified mail process still kicks in as a backup. So the old mail requirement did not go away entirely. It is now a fallback rather than the first step.
One thing the Towing Recovery Professionals of Maryland worked out with the MVA during the interim period before the law passed was that the MVA would send the notification using its own records rather than having towers handle owner email addresses directly. That matters for privacy reasons and it also puts the responsibility for contact information accuracy on the MVA rather than on us.
From a practical standpoint, what this means for our operation is that we now have an electronic reporting step that has to happen after every tow, not just police-initiated ones. The notification has to go to the MVA, and that system has to be in place and working before we pull out of the lot. That adds a small amount of time on the administrative side of each call.
I think the law is reasonable overall. Most of the time when someone’s car gets towed they find out quickly because they go looking for it and it is gone. But there are situations where people park somewhere, come back much later, and genuinely have no idea what happened. An email notification that goes out within a few hours is better than a certified mail letter that arrives a week later. It reduces the number of phone calls we get from confused owners and it cuts down on storage disputes because people know sooner and can act sooner.
If you are running a towing operation in Maryland and have not yet set up your MVA electronic notification process, that is something to get sorted out. The law is now in effect and the reporting obligation applies to all companies towing in the state.
Leave a Reply