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Around 11 am on a recent Tuesday, a crowd of about 40 people formed a line outside the Raleigh West Department of Motor Vehicles office in the Avent Ferry Shopping Center.
They congregated in clusters of two to three people and made small talk as they waited, some sitting in folding chairs they had brought from home. By this point in the day, the line outside DMV stretched up a set of concrete stairs and all the way to the front doors of a neighboring beauty supply store.
One man in line, who preferred not to give his name, had recently moved to the state and now needed a North Carolina license. He had already tried unsuccessfully the Friday prior to make it in as a walk-in client.
Another had a commercial driver’s license that had to be renewed in person. He had been there since 5:30 that morning, arriving well over an hour before sunrise. Like the others, he waited in anticipation for the 12 o’clock hour, at which time a drivers license examiner would begin ushering them into the office to check in.
A DMV appointment is a rarity in North Carolina right now, especially in the state’s largest metro areas. None of the seven offices in Wake County have any availability for the next 90 days, according to the NCDMV website on Sept. 3.
Every drivers license office in the state accepts walk-ins each weekday after 12 p.m. on a first-come-first-served basis. However, the accommodation is not enough to meet the demand coming from the state’s largest metro areas.
“It’s become clear that we just don’t have enough people,” North Carolina DMV spokesperson Marty Homan told Carolina Public Press.
The agency says it needs the state legislature to allocate more entry-level positions, something that has not happened in the last 20 years. The DMV’s latest request for new positions was not included in the most recent state budget.
To compensate for the understaffing, the agency has occasionally let some offices “borrow” workers from larger ones. Commissioner Wayne Goodwin lamented the situation in an Aug. 31 post on X, formerly known as Twitter, after the DMV announced it had indefinitely closed two rural offices in Laurinburg and Raeford because of staffing shortages. Each office was meant to be staffed by two people but struggled to operate efficiently while dealing with vacant positions.
“The unfortunately necessary ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’ approach that has been used for two decades has reached its breaking point,” Goodwin’s post read.
“It’s clearer than ever that in a state experiencing explosive population growth over the last 20 years — almost 3 million new residents — more efficient operations require staffing that proportionally reflects that growth. The staffing concern has even impacted areas of North Carolina with stagnant population because folks travel from teeming metro areas to rural offices for DMV services.”
Homan told CPP that the issues are not the result of a high vacancy rate, which has actually dropped from around 25 percent just a couple years ago to just over 10 percent now. It’s simply that there’s not enough positions in the first place.
For example, the Raleigh East office was built to accommodate 14 full-time employees, but right now it only has eight positions. As a whole, the seven Wake County DMV offices only have one permanent vacancy out of 54 full-time positions.
The agency has introduced a number of solutions to ease wait times, which Homan said typically peaks in the summer and back-to-school seasons. For 12 weeks during the summer, the DMV introduced Saturday walk-in hours from 8 a.m. to noon at 16 locations across the state. 17,000 North Carolinians took advantage of those Saturday availabilities, which ended Aug. 24.
Eileen Gates is a Raleigh resident who considered traveling to a rural office in order to get her license renewed after having trouble finding an appointment near her. She told CPP that her license is set to expire while she’s planning to be on vacation in Europe later this month.
Because she last renewed her license online, she must go in-person this time around in accordance with a federal requirement. Getting that done, however, turned out to be much more difficult than she had anticipated.
She went to the Raleigh West location on a weekday in late August at around 11:15 a.m., but was turned away because the office was already at capacity for the day. She then returned the following Saturday at 7:45 a.m., only to witness a line that she estimated was at least 300 people long.
“I just wasn’t going to spend my whole morning sitting there with my fingers crossed hoping to get in, so I left,” Gates said. “I don’t think there was any way that half the people in that line were going to get through.”
After weeks of checking daily for appointments, she finally snagged an opening at the Avent Ferry location two days before she’s scheduled to board a flight to Portugal. Prior to that, she was prepared to drive over an hour to the Kinston office in rural Lenoir County to finally get her license renewed.
“I just don’t think anybody should have to go through the lengths that people are having to go through to get a license,” she said.
The DMV is going to once again request that state legislators during the 2025 General Assembly long session allocate funding for new positions, Homan said. Meanwhile, DMV is considering additional solutions that might temporarily ease the pressure, including extending the agency’s Saturday hours or staying open an extra hour or two in the evenings.
DMV already announced that, starting this week, five offices – Raleigh East, Hillsborough, Morehead City, Newton and Hendersonville – will begin opening at 7 a.m. to accommodate more people in the mornings.
At this moment, however, it feels to Homan like a small fix for a much larger issue.
“We’ve been trying things for, for a while and it’s just becoming clear that we just need more bodies.”
This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Lucas Thomae is a reporting intern for Carolina Public Press, focusing on coverage of government accountability and transparency issues. Lucas, who is based in Raleigh, is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Email Lucas at [email protected] to contact him.