In Connecticut the title is only half the job, and it is the easier half. The other half is the registration, which under s. 14-16 expires the instant you transfer ownership - but stays alive on the department's books, accruing property tax and insurance liability in your name, until you go and kill it. Here is the whole thing, taken from the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles' own pages and the forms themselves.
Start hereHow to fill out a Connecticut titleA labelled diagram of the certificate, the department's own picture of the form that stands in for it, and the six entries that are yours.Open the walkthrough →Two model-year rules run through a Connecticut sale and they are twenty years apart in effect. One decides whether the car has a certificate of title; the other decides whether the mileage has to be disclosed. People collapse them into one, hear "twenty years", and leave a mileage box empty on a car that is nowhere near exempt.
The department itself states no odometer exemption anywhere - not on the seller page, not on the eight of its pages that use the word, not on any form. What the Q-1 prints instead is the federal instruction in the federal words: "Federal law requires that you state the mileage in connection with a transfer of ownership." So the governing rule is 49 CFR 580.17 and it has two arms with a twenty-year gap between them.
Model year 2010 and earlier, sold in 2026: Mileage exempt under 49 CFR 580.17(a)(3). Ten years past 1 January of the model year went by long ago, and the regulation's own worked example says so.
Model year 2011 and later, sold in 2026: Not exempt, and will not be until twenty years after 1 January of its model year. A 2011 car becomes exempt in 2031; a 2015 not until 2035. Whole miles, no tenths, with one of the two certifications ticked if the reading is wrong.
Any model year 2005 or earlier, in calendar year 2026: A separate question with a separate answer: this is the car Connecticut does not title at all. It still has an odometer rule - it is simply an exempt one this year - and it is sold on the registration certificate and a Q-1 instead of a title.
You, the seller: Everything you sign sits on the reverse of the certificate, and the DMV's whole instruction for it is one sentence: complete and sign the reverse side of the certificate of title and give it to the new owner along with a bill of sale. Write the buyer's name and address in before it leaves your hand - Connecticut requires it in block letters on the face of its own title - put the mileage in whole miles if the car is a 2011 or newer, write the price you were actually paid, and keep a photocopy.
The buyer: The buyer takes the assigned title, your bill of sale and a Connecticut insurance card in their own name to a DMV hub or branch office, fills in the H-13B, and pays $25 for the title plus the registration, the fees and the sales tax in one transaction. There is no online route for a private-party transfer.
AND or OR. Connecticut's conjunctions do the opposite of what most people guess. OR is joint ownership with right of survivorship and one signature transfers the car. AND is common ownership with no survivorship, and every owner named has to sign.
Read it off your own certificate before you agree a completion date. The DMV states it under "Definition of a joint or common ownership", and the H-13B prints the same rule as a pair of ticks in Section 1 - "JOINT/OR - Requires ONE signature to transfer ownership" and "COMMON/AND - Requires ALL signatures to transfer ownership". Where the certificate names two owners with no conjunction between them at all, the department's answer is that either party can transfer and only one signature is required.
Section 14-179(a) does not leave it to the seller to work out. It tells the commissioner what to print: the top of the certificate shall contain the following words in block letters, "NO SELLER SHALL ASSIGN TITLE OF A VEHICLE WITHOUT INSERTING THE BUYER'S NAME AND ADDRESS ON THE ASSIGNMENT AND WARRANTY OF TITLE." An open title - signed, handed over, buyer's block blank - is the one thing the statute singles out for a warning in capitals, and it is exactly what a car dealer buying for cash will ask you for.
Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles, title requirements
The full box-by-box walkthrough is here, with a printable checklist.
A signed reverse, a bill of sale, and the buyer's application. Four documents and one of them is not a form at all.
Connecticut lenders hold the paper and there is no electronic record behind it, so the first question is who physically has the certificate.
Lost, never delivered, unprovable, or held by a lender who has gone out of business. Connecticut answers each with a different single-page document.
Somebody signing for you, and the co-owner who cannot be found - which in this state depends entirely on one word printed on your title.
The designation that lives on the registration certificate, and the sixty-day window that closes on it.
The car worth less than $1,500 and the paperwork that says so, which is signed by somebody other than you.
The half of a Connecticut sale that is not about the title at all: terminating the registration, getting the receipt, and staying insured until you have.
Connecticut's seller page gives the instruction in one breath - remove your plates from the vehicle and cancel your registration with DMV - and the cancellation page then says what most sellers do not expect about the metal itself: plates can be discarded at your discretion. There is no plate-surrender counter visit in an ordinary sale. What there is, is a seven-minute online termination and a receipt, and the receipt is the document that matters afterwards.
The alternative to the bin is to move them. A plate transfers to another vehicle you own for a $21 fee under s. 14-49(i), and the unexpired time on the old registration carries across as equity against the new one - which the department describes as the reason to bother: "Time remaining from your old registration will be used. If your old registration has not expired, you have equity left on that registration that you may use." A third option exists for a seller between cars: hand the plates in at any DMV and ask for them to be placed on hold, which lets the insurance be dropped without a report being made.
Money comes back only if you ask in time and only in thirds. Section 14-49(z) refunds one-third of a triennial registration fee where one to two years are left at cancellation and two-thirds where two years or more are left, and both the cancellation and the refund request have to happen before the registration period expires. On a $120 passenger registration that is $40 or $80, claimed on the F-82.
Until the termination is recorded the car is still yours to the town assessor. The department's warning is flat: until you cancel your registration with DMV, the vehicle is subject to property tax assessment in the town of record for that vehicle. If a bill turns up anyway, the fix is a prorated assessment at the town hall with the cancelled plate receipt and a copy of the bill of sale in your hand.
There is no notice of sale in Connecticut and no release-of-liability form. The act that ends your ownership on the department's records is the registration termination, and s. 14-16(a) explains why it is worth doing the same day: the registration expires on transfer of ownership as a matter of law, but the commissioner enters that expiration only when the transferor cancels it or the buyer re-registers the car, whichever comes first. Until one of those two things happens, the record still says the car is yours.
Termination is free, takes about seven minutes online and needs your licence number, date of birth, plate number, address and social security number. Print the plate disposition receipt at the end. That receipt is the only proof you will get, and it is the document the insurance compliance unit, the town assessor and the F-82 refund all ask for by name.
Cancel the registration first, the insurance second. In that order, or it costs $200.
The department states the sequence as an instruction on its own seller page - you are expected to maintain liability insurance on the registration as long as it is active, and do not cancel the insurance on the vehicle until the registration has been canceled with DMV. Ring the insurer first and the insurer reports the cancellation against a registration that is still live, which is a lapse. Section 14-12g(b) prices it at a civil penalty of two hundred dollars; s. 14-12g(a) is the mercy clause, letting the commissioner decline to issue a notice where the gap cannot be shown to have run more than fourteen days. And s. 14-12g(c) is the part sellers never see coming: where a registration has been suspended and thirty days pass without a consent agreement, a cancellation or a transfer of ownership, the commissioner may suspend the owner's driver's licence. CT DMV, insurance and registration compliance.
Register at a DMV hub or branch office by appointment, and before they drive it - Connecticut publishes no day count for an in-state buyer, and s. 14-12(a) makes operating or parking an unregistered vehicle on a highway an infraction from the first mile. Sales and use tax is 6.35%, or 7.75% on a vehicle over $50,000, and Connecticut does not simply take your word for the price: the tax is worked on the NADA average trade-in value or the bill of sale value, whichever is higher. You collect none of it. The title itself is $25 under s. 14-192(a)(1). Around it sit a $120 three-year passenger registration, a $5 plate fee, a $10 administrative fee, a $15 Clean Air Act fee, a $24 Passport to the Parks fee and a $10 lien fee if the buyer is financing.
What they need to bring:
Connecticut has run an emissions programme since 1983 and it covers the whole state - there is no county map to check and no zone you can sell your way out of. None of it is yours. There is no certificate to hand over, no test to book before you list the car, and an unexpired test does not transfer as a favour to the buyer: the clock restarts when they register it. What does belong to you is telling them, because the department does not. Its own words on the transfer page are that you will need to have the vehicle's emissions tested within 30 days of the date of registration or you will get a late fee, followed by: you will not receive a notice for testing.
The programme's own late fee is a separate charge from the test and is handled by the DMV rather than the test centre. CT DMV, Connecticut Emissions Program overview.
Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles · figures and rules as of 2026-08-23. Plain-language help with paperwork, not legal advice.
See also: selling a car in Connecticut and the rest of the guides.