Signing a New Jersey title takes about ninety seconds once you know which boxes matter. Getting one of them wrong sends the buyer back to a motor vehicle agency and the car back to your driveway. Here is the whole thing, taken from the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission's own pages and the forms themselves.
Start hereHow to fill out a New Jersey titleThe seller's section on the reverse, line by line - and the reason there is no photograph of a New Jersey certificate anywhere on the internet.Open the walkthrough →Searching for the New Jersey odometer exemption turns up nothing, and people read that silence as permission to skip the line. It is the opposite. The Commission's instruction to sellers carries no age limit in it, and the rule that lets an old car off is federal, not something Trenton publishes.
What the MVC says a seller owes is a true reading at the moment the car changes hands, and an estimate rather than a blank if the instrument is lying. The state regulation behind that, N.J.A.C. 13:21-5.8, puts the duty on the certificate itself: the date of transfer and the reading go on the certificate of ownership and the person transferring certifies they are true. Which cars escape it comes from 49 CFR 580.17 and turns on the model year, not on how tired the car looks.
A 2010 or earlier model year: Free of the disclosure ten years past 1 January of its model year, so anything on that side of the line is long clear in 2026.
A 2011 or later model year: Carries the disclosure for twenty years. A 2016 is not free of it until 2036, which catches most of what actually gets sold in a driveway.
Rated over 16,000 lb, or not self-propelled: Exempt on the same federal section whatever year is on it - which is where a boat trailer sits.
Any reading you do not believe: Write your honest estimate and mark it as not actual. Leaving it empty is the one answer the Commission does not offer you.
You, the seller: Turn the certificate over and sign in the seller's section. Then hand the buyer a bill of sale carrying four things the Commission lists by name: their name and address, the date, the odometer reading and the price. Take the plates off before the car goes.
The buyer: Signs the buyer's section on the same reverse side and writes in a driver licence number or an Entity Identification Number. From there it is their errand: a motor vehicle agency, in person, with insurance and the fee.
Nobody has to watch you sign. The Commission's instruction to a seller is two lines long - sign the seller's section, hand over a bill of sale - and a notary appears nowhere in it. New Jersey does demand a notarised signature in five other places, and every one of them is somebody standing in for a person who is not there or has died.
Notarised in New Jersey: a power of attorney used to sign for an owner; a company's letter of signature authority; the BA-62 sworn by a surviving spouse; the Transfer on Death Beneficiary Designation; a statement covering a car bought in a state that issues no titles; and an odometer statement being used to correct mileage with a wet signature.
New Jersey's certificate is form ISM/SS-1, printed on chemically sensitised security stock under armed guard to a State specification that runs to watermarks, invisible fibres and a pantograph that throws the word VOID across any photocopy. That is worth knowing before you reach for correction fluid, because the document is built to make an alteration obvious and the Commission's answer to a spoiled certificate is a fresh one at $60 rather than a tidy-up.
New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission, title requirements
The full box-by-box walkthrough is here, with a printable checklist.
The certificate carries the sale; these are the two pages that go with it - the application the buyer hands across the counter, and the mileage statement that backs up what you wrote.
One page, posted by you to the lender, that asks them to send the certificate to a named New Jersey vehicle centre instead of to you.
Before you can replace a lost New Jersey title you have to prove the car is yours. These two produce that proof from the Commission's own records.
Two different answers to not being in the room: a letter that lets somebody carry your paperwork, and a procedure for a New Jersey owner who is out of the state altogether.
A surviving spouse's sworn affidavit, and the designation that keeps a car out of an estate entirely if it was filled in while the owner was alive.
Salvage, junk, and the application an insurer files when a written-off car's certificate never came back - the last of which is not yours to fill in but is the one people find first.
The plates come off with you. This is the page that tells the Commission where they went when they did not come back.
First item on the Commission's list of what a seller must do: take the plates off and surrender them, unless you are moving them onto another vehicle of your own. The parenthesis after that sentence is the part people miss - plates can be transferred to another vehicle, but not to another owner. A buyer driving away on your tags is driving on your registration.
Surrendering them is deliberately easy. Hand them to staff at any agency, or drop them in the plate box outside it, and a receipt is posted to you. If you need the receipt in your hand that day - to clear a suspension, say - tell the greeter desk when you arrive. You can also post them, to one of the twenty named agencies the Commission lists, with a stamped addressed envelope so the receipt can come back.
Keeping them for the next car is the other legitimate answer, and it has two conditions: the new vehicle has to be registered in the same name, and it has to be the same class of vehicle - car to car, truck to truck. That is done at an agency with the new title and registration in front of you.
Two things New Jersey will not take. Out-of-state plates are not the MVC's to cancel and have to go back to the state that issued them; and no agency will accept plates handed in at an inspection station. If the plates went with the car and you cannot get them back, the RSC-6 is the form that says so in writing.
Here is the New Jersey surprise: there is no seller's notice of sale. No form, no deadline, nothing to file. The ten working days and the $25 penalty the Commission publishes belong to the person who bought the car, not to you - it is the buyer who has to get the assigned certificate in front of an agency.
What stands in for a release of liability, then, is the plate receipt. The plates are the registration; hand them back and the registration stops being live in your name, and the receipt is the paper that proves the date you did it. Keep it. If the plates left on the car, the RSC-6 tells the Commission the vehicle was sold and where the plates went, and that letter becomes your record instead.
Plates in first, then the policy.
The Commission's rule for a car that has been sold, junked or destroyed is a single sentence: turn in the licence plates to the MVC for cancellation. Do that before you ring the insurer, and you end up holding a dated receipt showing the plates were already gone - which is the whole of what a New Jersey seller gets in place of a release of liability. New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission, registration cancellation.
New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission, private party registration
Register at a motor vehicle agency within 10 working days of the purchase. Sales tax is 6.625% of what they actually paid, and it is collected from them at the counter, not from you. The title itself is $60, or $85 where they are financing it with one lien and $110 with two. Registration and plates are on top of that.
What they need to bring:
New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission · figures and rules as of 2026-08-23. Plain-language help with paperwork, not legal advice.
See also: selling a car in New Jersey and the rest of the guides.