Anyone titling a car in Franklin County is about to pay more at the counter. Starting Sept. 1, the fee to get a vehicle title in the county rises from $18 to $23, a change tied to a state law that gave county governments new authority to add their own local charge on top of a statewide increase.
The Franklin County Board of Commissioners passed a resolution in July authorizing the county clerk of courts to raise the fee, according to The Columbus Dispatch. That local action follows from Ohio House Bill 96, which the paper reports was signed into law on June 30, 2025, and which allowed the vehicle title fee increase to take effect statewide on Jan. 1, 2026. The law included a mandatory $3 statewide increase that flows to the Security, Investigations, and Policing Fund, which the Ohio State Highway Patrol administers, and it separately authorized counties to tack on an additional $5 fee of their own.
Franklin County's Auto Title Division, run out of its office at 1583 Alum Creek Drive in Columbus, has not seen an increase to the portion of the fee reserved for its own certificate of title administration fund since July 2009, per the Dispatch's reporting. Officials described the new $23 fee, in a memorandum cited by the paper, as a balanced and measured adjustment meant to maintain affordability while helping preserve service levels and operational stability for the division.
Rising Costs Behind the Increase
The case for the increase rests heavily on how much more expensive it has gotten to run the title office. The division's expenses climbed from $5.5 million in 2015 to $6.7 million in 2020, and reached around $8.5 million in 2025, the Dispatch reported. Over that same broader 2010-to-2025 stretch, auto title division wages rose about 63%, materials and services costs jumped around 135%, and employer health care costs increased roughly 93% — while total auto title division expenses overall climbed about 82%, according to the paper's figures.
Meanwhile, the paper reports that auto title revenue itself only increased approximately 38% over that same 15-year period, a gap officials point to in justifying the fee bump. Title transfers generated $7.8 million in revenue in 2024 and $8.6 million in 2025, per the Dispatch. Richard Simms told the paper via email that 380,446 titles had already been issued so far in 2026.
A Growing Workload for County Clerks
Part of what's driving those costs is sheer volume. The Auto Title Division issued around 489,000 titles in 2020 and roughly 597,000 in 2025, an increase of more than 22% over five years, according to Franklin County figures reported by Citizen Portal. The division operates under elected Clerk of Courts Maryellen O'Shaughnessy and runs four public branch locations across Columbus, including a North Branch that relocated to East Campus View Boulevard in February 2026.
Franklin County's move fits into a wider pattern playing out across the state. House Bill 96 set a uniform $18 base title fee statewide beginning Jan. 1, 2026, while giving all 88 Ohio county boards of commissioners the option to add their own $5 local fee, bringing the total to $23 if adopted — a framework detailed by the Belmont County Clerk of Court. Ohio counties may adopt the new fee individually, meaning some residents elsewhere in the state could still be paying less than Franklin County drivers depending on local decisions.
More Fees, But Same-Day Service
The title fee increase isn't happening in isolation. House Bill 96 also raised deputy registrar service fees from $5 to $8 and increased the Bureau of Motor Vehicles administration and enforcement fee from $11 to $16, according to figures reported by Car Paperwork. Ohio law separately imposes a mandatory $5 late fee, kept entirely by the county clerk, on title applications submitted more than 30 days after a vehicle changes hands.
Despite the added cost, Ohio still offers same-day title issuance, a convenience not every state can match — Indiana's title processing and mailing, by comparison, can take up to 21 days, even though its standard title fee sits at $15. Franklin County vehicle owners have also caught a break in recent years on another front: Ohio permanently eliminated the county's mandatory vehicle emissions testing requirement, known as E-Check, on July 1, 2022, according to Bo Beuckman Ford.
Title fees remain a small slice of what buyers actually pay at the counter. Anyone titling a vehicle in Franklin County also owes an 8.0% combined sales tax — 5.75% state and 2.25% local — collected by the clerk of courts at the same time, per figures from Vehicle Sales Tax Calculator. Separately, private dealers are capped by state law at charging $387 or 10% of the purchase price, whichever is lower, in documentation fees, and must disclose those charges apart from official government title and registration costs.
Franklin County vehicle title paperwork has drawn scrutiny before: dealerships sued over withheld titles after the Ohio Attorney General accused several Central Ohio dealers of failing to hand over valid titles to buyers. With the new $5 fee taking effect in just a couple of weeks, on Sept. 1, county officials say the increase is meant to keep the title office running smoothly rather than to change how quickly Ohioans can expect their paperwork.
