Signing a Delaware title takes about ninety seconds once you know which boxes matter. Getting one of them wrong sends the buyer back to a Delaware DMV facility and the car back to your driveway. Here is the whole thing, taken from the Delaware Division of Motor Vehicles' own pages and the forms themselves.
Start hereHow to fill out a Delaware titleSection 1 on the reverse, line by line - and the strip at the foot of the sheet that most Delaware sellers hand over by accident.Open the walkthrough →Look up the Delaware odometer rule and the answer you get depends on which Division page you land on. The Odometer Disclosure Requirements page draws the line at the model year. The odometer FAQ says twenty years flat. The used-vehicle buying guide says ten years flat. They cannot all be right, and the one that matches federal law is the first.
Work from the model year printed on the front of your certificate. Anything built for 2011 or later carries the disclosure for twenty years; anything built for 2010 or earlier was released ten years after its model year began and is long clear by now. That split is 49 CFR 580.17, and the Division's Odometer Disclosure Requirements page states it correctly. The other two pages each quote half of the federal rule as though it were the whole of it.
A 2011 or later model year: Mandatory, and stays mandatory for twenty years. A 2014 saloon is still inside it in 2034, which covers most of what changes hands in a Delaware driveway.
A 2010 or earlier model year: Encouraged, not required. The Division's word is 'encouraged' - a blank box will not stop the transfer, but a reading you are confident about is worth more to your buyer than an empty line.
Rated over 16,000 pounds gross, or not motorised at all: Off the hook whatever year is stamped on it. That is where a utility trailer sits, and Delaware titles trailers.
A reading you do not believe: There are two printed boxes and one of them has to carry your tick: the mileage has passed the mechanical limit at 99,999, or the reading is not the actual mileage. Ticking neither is a sworn statement that the number is true.
You, the seller: Section 1 on the reverse, headed Assignment of Certificate of Title. Buyer's name and address, date of sale, purchase price, the odometer reading, then sign and print your name on the seller's rows. Then tear the Seller's Report of Sale off the foot of the certificate and post it, and take the plate off the car.
The buyer: Signs the buyer's rows in the same Section 1 to acknowledge the mileage, then completes Section 4, the Purchaser's Application, with a driver licence number and date of birth for every applicant. If they are borrowing to buy it, their lender goes in Section 3.
AND or OR. Look at the join between the names on the FRONT of the certificate. Where the Division printed AND, every owner signs Section 1. Where it printed AND/OR - it appears on the document as (& OR) - one signature is enough.
The same join decides who has to turn up for the plate. Retention needs both owners present on an AND title and one on an AND/OR; the online sold-out-of-state application needs both owners to complete it on an AND title, and retains the tag in all names either way; and the MV72 prints the rule on the form, above a line labelled Signature of Co-Owner (if plate joined by AND).
A current Delaware certificate is not just the title. The Seller's Report of Sale - the notice that takes your name off the car in the Division's record - is printed as a detachable strip at the foot of the same sheet. So is the odometer disclosure, in Section 1. Hand the whole certificate over without tearing your strip off first and you have given away the only copy of your own release of liability.
Delaware Division of Motor Vehicles, title requirements
The full box-by-box walkthrough is here, with a printable checklist.
The certificate carries the sale on its own. These are the three pages around it - the notice that takes your name off the Division's record, the application your buyer hands across the counter, and the affidavit for a mileage figure that went in wrong.
Two forms, and only one of them is yours. The first fetches your certificate out of the lender's filing cabinet and sends it to a Delaware DMV facility you choose; the second is what a lender files after repossessing a car, and is here because people looking for the first one keep finding it.
Both of these come back with a fresh certificate in the post. One replaces a title that is gone; the other fixes a title that is wrong, defaced, or carries the wrong VIN - and the first of the two doubles as the paperwork for keeping your tag when the car leaves Delaware.
One page, notarised, that lets somebody else sign the certificate in your name. Delaware spells out how the signature has to read, and getting the wording wrong is the usual reason it comes back.
The application that keeps a car out of an estate if it was filed while the owner was alive, and the permission slip that lets the household keep driving the car until the sticker runs out.
The salvage certificate application, which is not a private owner's form at all. It is on this list because an owner keeping a written-off car goes looking for it and finds nothing else - and what they actually need is a counter, a letter and their plate.
Delaware treats a licence plate as a thing you own, and these three are the paperwork of owning one: releasing a retained tag to somebody else, sending a low-digit tag with the car on purpose, and giving up a plate number for good.
Take it off before the car goes. The Division says it twice in its own words - the license plate must be removed from the vehicle and returned to any DMV office - and 21 Del. C. s. 2507 says the same thing about a car being retitled in another state, in the imperative. There is no version of a Delaware sale in which the buyer keeps the metal.
Three ways to hand it back. Walk it into any of the four DMV facilities. Post it to the Uninsured Motorist Section at P.O. Box 698, Dover DE 19903, with a note saying why - sold the vehicle is one of the four reasons the Division lists. Or, if the buyer is out of state and your registration is still live, do the whole thing online through the Division's Sold Out of State application without going anywhere.
Retention is the other answer, and it is the one most Delaware owners want: the plate goes on hold in your name and waits for your next car. It costs $35 where the record shows no lien and $55 where it shows one, and $20 to bring it back out and put it on something. It keeps for 365 days past the expiry date on the sticker. The catch is the order of operations - retain it before the sale, not after. The Division's own line is that if you leave the plate attached to the vehicle and decide to sell, you will lose the plate if you do not retain it first.
Two Delaware particulars. A four-digit-or-lower pleasure plate can genuinely go with the car, but only on a notarised MV73 signed by the seller - the Division wants the original with a raised or stamped seal, because low tags are property people litigate over. And an antique plate cannot go anywhere: on a transfer of ownership the transferor surrenders the special plate to the Department, and the new owner starts the antique application again.
Delaware gives the seller a form and no number of days. 21 Del. C. s. 2502 says an owner transferring a registered vehicle shall endorse the transferee's name and address and the date of transfer on the registration card and shall immediately give or send it to the Department. Immediately is the whole deadline. The Report of Sale goes with it, and the Division wants both - the registration card and the report - unless you sold to a dealer, in which case the card goes to the dealer and the report still comes to Dover.
Read what the Report of Sale says about itself before you rely on it. In capitals, above the first box: the Division will flag the vehicle record, and this flag will not change the ownership of the vehicle nor will it stop law enforcement, the DMV or parking authorities from contacting the seller about it. The flag is a marker, not a discharge. What actually ends your exposure is the buyer retitling the car - which is why the Division recommends you walk into a DMV facility with them and watch it happen.
Plate first, policy second. In that order, on the same day if you can.
Delaware audits this and the arithmetic is brutal: $100 per vehicle for being uninsured one to thirty days, then $5 a day on top of that until the plate is surrendered, the registration expires or you insure it again. Miss the audit letter and the registration and every owner's driver licence go with it, at $50 a registration to reinstate. The Division prints the rule on the back of the registration card itself: keep the insurance running until the plate is physically out of your hands. Delaware Division of Motor Vehicles, registration cancellation.
Delaware Division of Motor Vehicles, private party registration
Register at a Delaware DMV facility within 30 days of the purchase. The Division's published fee schedule carries no sales tax line for a vehicle at all. What the buyer pays instead is the motor vehicle document fee under 30 Del. C. s. 3002 - 5.25% of the price you wrote on the back of the title or the current NADA average trade-in value, whichever is higher, with a floor of $8.00. The title is $35, or $55 if they are financing it, and the plate and registration are on top - $40 a year for an ordinary car under 5,000 pounds.
What they need to bring:
Delaware Division 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 Delaware and the rest of the guides.