Iowa's trucks work for the corn and the hogs first. Corn is the top farm product in 75 of the 99 counties in USDA's 2022 census and hogs in 21 more, and the carriers say the same thing: in the census FMCSA published in October 2026, close to 26,800 carriers give an Iowa address, and nearly twelve thousand of them carry grain, feed and hay, more than five and a half thousand carry farm supplies, five thousand carry livestock, and three and a half thousand carry dry bulk. A little under six in ten are registered for in-state work only, and about a third are private fleets. Read that as the grain truck waiting at the elevator in October, the hog hauler on a Washington County road, the feed truck, the anhydrous tanker in April, a semi truck with a sleeper on I-80 between Council Bluffs and Davenport, the day cab draying containers off the Council Bluffs ramp, a dump truck loading at the Ames mine or the Linwood quarry at Buffalo, and the box truck one of those private fleets keeps for its own deliveries. Every one of those is a truck we'd make an offer on, and the way to sell my semi truck in Iowa starts with a message: year, make, model and VIN, photos from every side, a photo of the title, and the town it sits in.
Eighty thousand, and 4,085 bridges that say less
Iowa Code section 321.463 sets 80,000 pounds gross for a truck or combination, subject to the axle limits, and the federal bridge formula governs the interstates the same way. The number that matters more in a county with gravel roads is on the bridge signs: in the FHWA National Bridge Inventory's 2025 file for Iowa, 4,085 of 23,716 structures are posted below legal loads, about one in six, and counties maintain more than three quarters of the state's bridges. A grain truck that worked the county system all its life was routed around those postings, and a tandem that never left the paved roads was not.
None of that arithmetic changes the sale. A five-axle semi truck that grossed 80,000 pounds on I-35, a tandem dump truck that stayed under a county posting, a hog hauler on a quad-axle trailer and a dually that never saw a scale are four trucks and one conversation with us. The penalties in section 321.463 are graduated by how far over the truck weighed, which is the state's business with the carrier and not a thing a buyer asks about.
The county treasurer holds the title
Iowa titles at the county treasurer's office, not at a state DMV: the Iowa DOT's own words are that registrations, plates and titling are processed at a county treasurer's office, and it lists 81 of them. A lost title is replaced at the treasurer's counter in the county where the truck is registered. Two Iowa rules are worth having right if the truck has a history. The salvage threshold is repair cost above 70 percent of fair market value before the damage, raised from 50 percent on July 1, 2021, so an older explanation of it is twenty points out, and the ordinary route back to a road title needs a salvage theft examination by a specially certified peace officer under Iowa Administrative Code 761-405. If your title carries a brand, say so in the first message and we take it from there.
The rest of the Iowa work: containers go onto rail at Council Bluffs and at the Butler terminal at Shell Rock, 39 racks from Dubuque and Le Mars to Sergeant Bluff and Fort Madison fill the tankers, cement comes out of Mason City and the Davenport plant at Buffalo, and stone comes from 46 quarries, Ames, Cedar Rapids, Fort Dodge, Sully, Le Claire and Coralville among them, with 31 sand pits behind them. The 75 rail yards run from Council Bluffs and Sioux City to Clinton, Fort Madison and Waterloo. Camp Dodge, the Des Moines and Sioux Gateway Guard units and the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant at Middletown keep fleets too. Tell us whether you'd like us to come for the truck, buy it from where it sits, or have you bring it in. Sleeper or day cab, heavy-haul tractor, dump truck, roll-off, mixer, garbage truck, wrecker or rotator, log truck, tanker, boom or crane truck, box truck, straight truck, utility truck, pickup or dually: an offer comes back for any of them.