A Wyoming sale finishes at two counters in the same courthouse and needs a third person present for the first of them. The county clerk issues the title, the county treasurer issues the plates and takes the sales tax, and your signature on the back of the certificate has to be made in front of a notary - which is why a Wyoming clerk will not stamp a title that has no buyer written on it yet. Get those three things straight and the rest of it is short: four numbered sections on one side of one document, a $15 fee that is the buyer's, and your plates coming off the tailgate before the car leaves. Here is the whole thing, taken from the Wyoming Department of Transportation, Motor Vehicle Services' own pages and the forms themselves.
Start hereHow to fill out a Wyoming titleThe four sections the certificate numbers itself, the one that has to be sworn in front of a notary, and the signature rule that changed for titles issued after 2019.Open the walkthrough →Plenty of state titles still carry the ten-year sentence that stopped being the whole rule at the end of 2020, and a seller reading one of those is being told something false by the document in their hand. Wyoming's is not one of them. Section 2 on the back of the certificate opens with a NOTE that names the change by date, gives both halves of the split, and then says who the requirement binds - so the argument about whether an eleven-year-old pickup still needs a reading is settled by reading the paper you are about to sign.
The certificate's own words: effective 1/1/2021 the federal odometer statement exemption is for vehicles with twenty years or more of service for vehicles of a model year of 2011 and newer, while vehicles of model year 2010 and older remain under the ten years or more of service exemption. The disclosure is made on the title itself - Wyoming has no separate mileage sheet in an ordinary sale - and it is not finished when you sign it, because the certificate also prints a line for the purchaser to sign acknowledging the reading.
Model year 2011 or newer, under twenty years of service: Section 2 gets a reading in whole miles, no tenths, and no tick unless one applies: mileage in excess of mechanical limits, or odometer reading is NOT the actual mileage.
Model year 2010 or older: Ten years of service ends the requirement, so anything from that half of the split is long past it. The section stays empty rather than getting the word exempt written across it.
Either way, the buyer signs: The line reads Signature of Purchaser (Required to acknowledge odometer), and it sits below the notary block in section 3 - a completed odometer statement with nobody's acknowledgement under it is an incomplete section, and the counter reads it as one.
Wyoming Department of Transportation, Motor Vehicle Services, odometer disclosure
You, the seller: You sign twice on the back of the certificate and one of those signatures is sworn. Section 3, Seller's Transfer, carries the warranty that you are the lawful owner and that the liens noted on the front are the only ones, two brand questions, the sales price and the date of sale - and directly under it the Seller's Notary Statement, which the form marks MUST BE NOTARIZED. Section 2, the odometer disclosure, is signed too but not sworn. Do not sign either one at the kitchen table: a notarial officer can only acknowledge a signature made in front of them.
The buyer: The purchaser's half is section 4, and it is not notarised - it is a sworn statement in the ordinary sense, signed under penalty of perjury, that they are lawfully applying for a Wyoming title. They then have forty-five days to take the certificate to the county clerk of their own county, pay the $15 title fee, and settle the sales tax with the county treasurer before the clerk will hand the new title over.
AND or OR. Two owners on a Wyoming title do not automatically mean two signatures, and the answer turns on the word between the names and the date the title was issued. On a certificate issued on or after 1 January 2020, names joined by OR - or with no conjunction at all - let one owner sign alone, while AND requires every owner, and joint tenancy with rights of survivorship requires every owner whatever the connector says. On a certificate issued before that date, every owner signs regardless.
The certificate prints the short version above the signature lines - all owners shall sign at the time of sale unless owners' names on the reverse are joined with no conjunction or with the word or, JTWROS requires all signatures - and W.S. 31-2-104(m) is the long version behind it. The Fremont County Clerk publishes the table its counter staff work from, including the pre-2020 line, which is the part that catches people selling an older pickup that has been in the family for years.
Wyoming's notary requirement quietly forecloses the commonest way a private sale goes wrong. A county clerk's office will not stamp a certificate whose section 1 has no purchaser written in it and whose section 2 has no reading in it - the Fremont County Clerk states the policy in one line, that it never notarises signatures unless the assignment of ownership and the odometer disclosure statement are completed, and that it does not notarise open titles. So the sequence is fixed for you: fill sections 1 and 2 with the buyer standing there, then sign section 3 in front of the notary.
Wyoming Department of Transportation, Motor Vehicle Services, title requirements
The full box-by-box walkthrough is here, with a printable checklist.
Two documents cover an ordinary Wyoming sale, and the first of them is the title itself. These are the application the counties hand out when the back of the certificate cannot carry it, and the notarised bill of sale the clerks ask for.
A Wyoming lien lives at the county clerk and is released there. This is the lender's own filing document - the one a seller keeps meeting and never signs.
No statewide duplicate-title form exists: each county clerk publishes its own, all of them notarised, all of them $15, and all of them filed with the county that issued the certificate rather than the county you live in now.
When the previous owner cannot be found to sign, Wyoming runs a three-document chain: the department's record search to name who is on the title, a sworn affidavit of ownership, and a surety bond for twice what the vehicle is worth - or no bond at all under $2,500.
Wyoming lets an owner name a beneficiary on a form recorded with the county clerk, so the car passes without probate. The instruction sheet beside it is the statute in plain order.
A brand is the seller's disclosure to make, on the department's form, before money changes hands. The other two are for a rebuild that is going back on the road and a vehicle whose identity has to be re-established.
Your plates come off the vehicle immediately and there is no refund - only a transfer onto the next one. This is the application for when a plate you are required to surrender has gone missing.
W.S. 31-2-214(a) does two things in one sentence: upon transfer of ownership the registration of the vehicle expires, and the original owner shall immediately remove the license plates from the vehicle. Immediately is the statute's word, not a suggestion - the buyer is not driving away on your plates, because the registration those plates belong to stopped existing at the moment you both signed.
What Wyoming does not do is refund you. There is no application for a refund of the unused months, because W.S. 31-3-103(d) allows a refund only where a fee was paid and collected by mistake. What exists instead is a transfer: within sixty days of acquiring another vehicle the plates would suit, you may apply at the county treasurer to move the license registration number onto it, and the fee due on the new registration is reduced by credit for the unused portion of the old one. Move down in value and the credit simply stops - the same section says there shall be no refund of fees paid.
Two families of transfer keep the plates on the car instead, and both are in the same section. A transfer between joint owners, or from a person to their spouse, child, brother, sister or parent, is handled at the county treasurer as a new registration for a $4 fee, and the vehicle may then be operated with the same license plates for the remainder of the registration year. Everybody else removes them.
So how does the buyer get home? On your signed title, legally, for forty-five days - W.S. 31-2-201(a)(ii)(D) lets a transferee operate the vehicle during that period when accompanied by a properly executed title transferring interest to them. Wyoming numbers its plates by county, the first digit or two being the county of registration, so a Sheridan plate on a car that has moved to Buffalo is visible to any trooper long before the paperwork catches up.
Wyoming publishes no notice of sale and no release-of-liability form. We looked for one rather than assuming it: every PDF linked from WYDOT's Titles, Plates and Registration section and its twelve subpages was enumerated - the MV series from MV-100 through MV-604, the surety bond and the compliance memoranda - and none of them is a seller's notification, while the title chapter puts the obligation on the transferee and never on you. The registration ends by operation of law, the plates come off, and the department is told nothing.
Which means your protection is the record the sale itself made. A Wyoming assignment is notarised, so the date you signed is witnessed by an officer with a commission number and a seal - a stronger record of when the car stopped being yours than any state form. Photograph the completed back of the certificate before it leaves your hands, keep the signed bill of sale, and note the plate numbers you removed and the day you turned them in or moved them onto the next vehicle.
Do not cancel the insurance while the plates are still in your name.
The registration expires with the sale, but the plate number and its unused months live on until you either transfer them to a replacement vehicle or turn them in - and a Wyoming owner must keep liability coverage in force on a vehicle that is registered, with the second offence carrying the loss of registration and plates to the county treasurer. If the truck is gone but the registration number is being carried to the next one, keep the cover running until the transfer is done at the counter. W.S. 31-4-103, failure to maintain liability coverage.
Wyoming Department of Transportation, Motor Vehicle Services, private party registration
Register at the county clerk for the title, then the county treasurer for the plates within 45 days of the purchase. Wyoming taxes a private sale. The county treasurer - not the seller, and not a dealer - collects the sales or use tax before the first registration, at 4% state plus whatever the buyer's own county adds, and W.S. 31-2-103(d) stops the clerk delivering the title until that receipt is produced. The clock is sixty-five days from the date of sale: past it, interest runs at 1% a month and the treasurer assesses a civil fee of $25, rising after the seventy-fifth day to the greater of $25 or a tenth of the tax. The title is $15 whether it is the first one or a replacement, and the annual registration that follows is two fees at once - the state's $30 for a passenger car, plus a county fee worked from the factory price and how many years the vehicle has been in service, at 3% of a percentage that steps down from 60% in year one to 15% from year six.
What they need to bring:
Wyoming asks a seller for no test certificate of any kind. The chapter that governs what a county clerk must see before a certificate of title is issued lists nine things, and neither a safety inspection nor an emissions test is among them; the word emission appears once in the whole of title 31 and it is in a dealer’s labour-rate calculation, not in a titling requirement. What the titling law does ask for is a check of the number rather than of the vehicle. W.S. 31-2-103(a)(vi) wants a Wyoming law enforcement officer’s statement that the vehicle identification number has been inspected, and only where the prior title is from a state other than Wyoming, or for a homemade, rebuilt, reconstructed or kit-assembled vehicle, or where a bond is required. The fee for that is set at $10 by W.S. 31-3-102(b). Selling a Wyoming-titled car to a Wyoming buyer reaches none of it, and the reason sellers who will never need one still see the form is that it is printed across the bottom half of the title application itself.
Wyoming Statutes title 31, W.S. 31-2-103(a)(vi) and W.S. 31-3-102(b).
Wyoming Department of Transportation, Motor Vehicle Services · figures and rules as of 2026-08-23. Plain-language help with paperwork, not legal advice.
See also: selling a car in Wyoming and the rest of the guides.