A New Mexico title transaction is half a tax filing, because the MVD is a division of the Taxation and Revenue Department: the buyer's visit collects a 4% excise tax alongside the title work, and the sale price you write is checked against book value. The seller's half of the job is short, but two pieces of it - the plate and the Sold Unit notice - happen after the buyer has driven away. Here is the whole thing, taken from the New Mexico Taxation and Revenue Department, Motor Vehicle Division's own pages and the forms themselves.
Start hereHow to fill out a New Mexico titleWhat each block of the certificate's assignment asks for, drawn as a labelled diagram, with the completed Bill of Sale that mirrors it shown for real.Open the walkthrough →The Bill of Sale, the Odometer Disclosure Statement and the disclosure printed on the title application each offer exactly three choices - actual mileage (AM), mileage in excess of mechanical limits (EL), and not the actual mileage (NM) - with nowhere to mark a vehicle exempt. Meanwhile the division's own procedures manual, last revised in 2017, defines a fourth code, EX, as available 'when a vehicle is 10 years or older.' That is the federal rule as it stood before 2021, and following it on a 2012 car would skip a disclosure federal law still demands.
The current federal regulation, 49 CFR 580.17, splits the fleet by model year: a vehicle built as a 2010 model or earlier is exempt once it is at least ten model years old, which by now is all of them; a vehicle built as a 2011 model or later stays under the disclosure duty until twenty model years have passed. So in 2026, every 2011-or-newer car sold in New Mexico still needs the reading, the code, and both signatures.
Model year 2011 or newer: Disclosure required until the vehicle is twenty model years old. Write the reading in whole miles - every New Mexico odometer field says '(no tenths)' - and tick AM, EL or NM.
Model year 2010 or older: Exempt under 49 CFR 580.17. The three everyday forms have no EX box, so the MVD records the code from the newer affidavits or the clerk's entry; the gift affidavit (rev 11/2025) is the one seller document that prints Exempt (EX).
Off-highway vehicles: The one state-law carve-out the manual states plainly: the odometer statement is required on all motor vehicle title transactions, except off-highway vehicles.
MVD Vehicle Procedures Manual, Chapter 2 Section G, Odometer Mileage Certification
You, the seller: Complete the assignment on the certificate - most stocks carry it on the reverse - with the buyer's name and address, the price, the date, and the odometer reading in whole miles with one of the three mileage codes ticked. Sign it, print your name, and hand the certificate over with the plate already off the car. Nobody notarises any of this.
The buyer: The buyer signs the same odometer certification, then takes the certificate to an MVD field office within 30 days with the title application, proof of insurance, identity and two proofs of New Mexico residency - and pays the excise tax and fees there.
AND or OR. Read the connective between two owners' names before anyone signs. The division's own rule: joined by 'or,' only one signature is required to apply for, assign or encumber the vehicle; joined by 'and' or by 'and/or,' both owners must sign.
New Mexico clerks are instructed never to create a new title reading 'and/or' - the word going forward is 'and' - but old certificates still carry it, and it behaves as 'and': every named owner signs. Changing the connective on your own title later takes a bill of sale marked 'changing connective,' which is easier to get right before a sale than during one.
The division's prescreen instructions to its own clerks read like a customs inspection. Photocopies are not acceptable for processing any type of title transaction. A title with a sticker on it - any sticker, front or back - is handed straight back, and the clerk is told not even to peel it off. And the general order covering the whole packet: reject the transaction if there are any erasures, alterations, type-overs or discrepancies on any of the documents.
New Mexico Taxation and Revenue Department, Motor Vehicle Division, title requirements
The full box-by-box walkthrough is here, with a printable checklist.
One assignment on the certificate, an odometer certification with three boxes and no tenths, a bill of sale if the paper runs short, and a notice to the Sold Unit when it is done.
A New Mexico title will not move with a lien still printed on it. The lender releases it on the certificate itself, on one small form, or on notarized letterhead - and if the buyer is taking over your loan instead, that is a different form entirely.
Lost titles, titles that never arrived, a name the title spells one way and your licence another, a mistake in the assignment itself. Each has its own affidavit, and half of them need a notary.
New Mexico's motor-vehicle power of attorney is limited, durable, sworn before a notary twice - and expires 30 days after it is signed, which surprises everyone who files it in a drawer.
For an estate under $50,000 with no probate pending, New Mexico moves a vehicle on one notarized affidavit; a surviving spouse or heir has a parallel one-page route of their own.
Total losses, owner-retained wrecks and vehicles whose numbers do not match their paperwork - the forms here decide whether the next title says Salvage across it.
The MVD's Vehicle Titles page states the whole rule in three sentences: New Mexico is a 'Vehicle Plate to Owner' state. If the vehicle is sold, traded-in or given as a gift, the vehicle owner is responsible for removing the license plate from the vehicle. Within 30 days of the transaction, the vehicle owner shall take the plate to MVD to have it destroyed, or apply to have the plate assigned to another vehicle of the same class.
The Bill of Sale carries the instruction in capitals on its own face - SELLER MUST REMOVE PLATE BEFORE TRANSFERRING OWNERSHIP OF THIS VEHICLE - and the statute behind it is 66-3-101(B). 'Same class' matters: a passenger-car plate moves to another passenger car, not to a pickup registered in a truck class.
The buyer is not stranded by a bare bumper. Their trip to the field office is where a plate is issued or where a plate they already hold from a vehicle of the same class is reassigned, and the title, registration and excise tax are all one visit.
If you were in the first year of a two-year registration and you move the plate to another vehicle of the same class, the division's system now applies the unused second year automatically as a credit on your vehicle account - the old refund route was retired when that automation arrived.
New Mexico's notice of sale is a one-page form, MVD-10048, that goes by post to the Motor Vehicle Division's Sold Unit in Santa Fe. It describes itself as notification 'as required by Section 66-3-101(A) NMSA 1978' that the vehicle has been sold and is no longer in your possession, records the buyer, the date, the mileage at handover, and asks one pointed question: was the license plate removed from the vehicle?
What the notice does is put a date in the division's records: MVD is asked to update the record to show the vehicle as sold, which is what separates you from whatever the buyer does with the car while it is still titled in your name. The form prints no deadline, so send it as soon as the buyer leaves - the signature at the bottom sits under the Motor Vehicle Code's perjury warning, which grades a false affidavit a fourth degree felony.
The notice does not cancel anything. The plate and the insurance are separate errands.
Mailing MVD-10048 tells the division who has the car; it does not cancel the registration, move the plate, or end your insurance. The plate errand has its own 30-day clock - reassign it to a same-class vehicle or hand it in for cancellation - and only once the plate is off the car and dealt with should the insurer hear the vehicle is gone. New Mexico MVD, Vehicle Titles.
Register at an MVD field office - some state-run, some operated by counties, municipalities or the private MVD Partners the division licenses within 30 days of the purchase. The buyer pays the Motor Vehicle Excise Tax when they apply for title: 4% of the price paid, less any trade-in credit. On a sale between individuals the division does not simply accept the number written down - if the declared price is lower than 80% of the N.A.D.A. average trade-in or wholesale value, the book value is used instead. The other figures are modest: $5.00 for the certificate of title, and a registration that runs $27.00 to $62.00 a year for a passenger vehicle by weight and model year. Waiting costs more - a $20.00 late transfer fee after 30 days, and at 90 days a 50% penalty on the excise tax itself, which turns 4% into an effective 6%.
What they need to bring:
New Mexico tests in Bernalillo County only - Albuquerque and its surroundings - under a programme run by the county's Vehicle Pollution Management Division rather than by the MVD. The procedures manual states the ownership hook plainly: vehicles must pass an emission test every two years and at change of ownership, and a valid test certificate is required for registration. Elsewhere in the state, no test exists to fail.
Results flow to the MVD electronically - the division's system interfaces with the county's in real time - so a certificate on paper is the fallback, required only when the electronic check cannot confirm a pass within the last 90 days. MVD Vehicle Procedures Manual, Chapter 2 Section H, Emissions Test Requirements.
New Mexico Taxation and Revenue Department, Motor Vehicle Division · figures and rules as of 2026-08-23. Plain-language help with paperwork, not legal advice.
See also: selling a car in New Mexico and the rest of the guides.