Traffic ticket guides

How these are written

Every guide here follows the rule the rest of this site follows: it explains a mechanism, and it does not invent a figure to illustrate it. There are no dollar amounts in any of these posts, and that is deliberate rather than an oversight. The numbers on this site come from one place — the verified state dataset behind the calculator, where each figure carries its own citation and its own retrieval date — and prose that repeated them would be a second copy that nothing keeps in step.

So a guide tells you what a traffic school course does to a conviction in law, and the calculator tells you whether your state allows one. A guide explains why an insurer's lookback period is not the same thing as your state's point expiry, and your state's own page links to the document that publishes the second. The division is the point: what is general goes in a guide, what is specific to a state goes in the data, and neither pretends to be the other.

You will also not find an answer here to the question of what you personally ought to do. Whether to contest a citation depends on your state, the speed, your record and what your licence is worth to you, and a page that gave every reader the same answer would not be answering anybody. What these do instead is lay out the options and the deadlines, so the decision is made with the whole cost visible rather than just the amount printed on the ticket.

Start with your violation

If you are holding a citation right now, the violation pages are the faster route. Each one covers what is specific to that violation, with a state-by-state table underneath it.

• DUI fines by state DUI / DWI
• Red light ticket cost Red light / stop sign
• Cell phone ticket fine Phone / distracted driving
• Reckless driving fines by state Reckless driving
• Construction zone speeding fines Construction / work zone

Or compare every state at once on the speeding ticket cost by state hub, and read the methodology for where each figure comes from.