For weeks, it seemed as if the N.C. Division of Motor Vehicles had given up on making appointments at driver’s license offices. For more than 80 days, people who went online to make an appointment found very few were available.
That’s because the DMV was quietly and systematically changing the way it makes appointments in an effort to become more efficient. Instead of letting people book a time slot up to 90 days ahead of time, the agency now makes appointments just seven days in advance.
During the transition, appointments were hard to come by. DMV commissioner Paul Tine described the process to the state Board of Transportation last summer.
“It’ll feel like to customers that appointments are not available, which is not the case. We’re just going to shorten the window,” Tine said. “We sort of have to break our system in order to fix it.”
The shorter window gives the DMV more flexibility to better manage demand and direct customers to offices that might have more capacity in a given week, said spokesman Marty Homan.
“It allows us to be more agile with our scheduling,” Homan said in an interview. “Should we decide to pivot and make a change, we’re only seven days out, rather than the 90 days out.”
Another change: Rather than schedule all its appointments in the morning, the DMV now spreads them out throughout the day, with time before, in between and after available for walk-in customers.
About 87% of people served at DMV driver’s license offices show up without an appointment. Scattering the appointments should help the agency serve walk-in customers faster.
Under the new system, the DMV is making the same number of appointments per day as it has in the past: 3,250 spread across 115 offices statewide, Homan said. New appointments are available at midnight each weekday, except when seven days ahead falls on a holiday.
Appointments ‘much more convenient for the customer’
The lack of appointments at DMV offices frustrates many customers. George Miller III of Durham tried to help his son Ben make an appointment in October to get an expired license reissued.
“I looked online and every appointment in the entire state was unavailable,” Miller said. “It was almost comical.”
Miller’s son tried simply showing up at DMV offices in Durham and Hillsborough but was told there were too many people already in the queue. He finally drove to Oxford, where after a 3 1/2-hour wait his license was reissued in a few minutes.
Having an appointment would have saved his son a lot of time, Miller said.
“Obviously the appointment is much more convenient for the customer,” he said. “You have a set time and boom, you go in at your appointed time, do your three minutes of business, and you leave.”
Tine agrees that in an ideal world everyone could make an appointment at the DMV. But even with additional staffing and increases in the number of transactions that can be done online, the demand for office visits exceeds the DMV’s ability to serve everyone by appointment, Tine says.
Studies elsewhere and the DMV’s own experience show that serving people on a walk-in basis is more efficient, Tine said.
“The fastest way to move people is have them show up and move them through,” he said in an interview. “It’s not the best for customer service and predictability, but it’s the best we can do to reduce the overall wait time for all our customers.”
Shortening the appointment window may also have another benefit: People will be less likely to miss an appointment or make multiple ones as a hedge against failing a test.
Tine says he thinks the DMV will always offer customers the option of making an appointment. But his ultimate goal is to improve service at DMV offices to the point where people won’t feel the need to make one.
“In the end, the best way for us to serve our people is to be like a bank,” he said. “People show up, wait 10, 15 minutes, they get served, they go out the door. That’s where we need to be.”
This story was originally published February 4, 2026 10:01 AM.
