How to check a tow operator before you call

What Ohio requires of a towing company

ORC 4921.03(A) states that no for-hire motor carrier may operate in intrastate commerce unless the carrier has a current and valid certificate of public convenience and necessity. ORC 4921.25(A) puts towing inside that regime: any person, firm, partnership, association, company or corporation engaged in the towing of motor vehicles is subject to regulation by the Public Utilities Commission as a for-hire motor carrier.

ORC 4513.67(B) then states the operating rule for tow trucks specifically. A towing service may not permit the operation of a towing vehicle on its behalf unless it holds a valid certificate of public convenience and necessity, and unless the certificate number and business telephone number are visibly displayed on both the left and right sides of the towing vehicle.

Ohio takes the certificate itself seriously, and it is worth being exact about what is punished. The penalties in ORC 4513.67(D) attach only to division (B)(1), operating a towing vehicle without a valid certificate of public convenience and necessity. A first offence is a minor misdemeanor, and the towing service may not plead guilty in writing and waive a trial — it must send an agent to court in person. A repeat is a misdemeanor carrying a mandatory five hundred dollar fine and a court order to seize and impound every vehicle used to tow on the service's behalf until a certificate is produced, and the offence is a strict liability offence. The separate marking requirement at division (B)(2) carries no penalty of its own in this section; a missing certificate number on the truck is a reason to ask a question, not proof of an offence.

Three things you can check in the time it takes the truck to arrive

Look at the truck. The certificate number and a business telephone number belong on both sides of it. A tow vehicle carrying neither is not displaying what ORC 4513.67(B) requires.

Look at the paperwork. ORC 4513.67(C)(1) makes it a violation for a towing service to fail to make its current certificate available for public inspection during normal business hours, and to fail to include its certificate number on all written estimates, contracts, invoices and advertising.

Look at the advertisement that brought you to them. OAC 4901:2-22-07 states that a towing service must include its certificate number on all written advertisements that could reasonably be used by a consumer to decide whether to hire it, though not on promotional items or where the name appears as an event sponsor.

Where PUCO publishes its carrier search

PUCO publishes what it describes as a motor-carrier search at https://community.puco.ohio.gov/p/s/search-motor-carriers. We could not open the tool from here, so we can give you the address and nothing more — not whether it will answer your question, not what it returns.

We are not describing the search boxes, the filters or the result columns here, because nobody working on this site was able to open the tool and record them. Rather than guess at an interface, we give you the address and leave the reading to you.

Ohio's Attorney General also publishes a public complaint search at https://complaintsummary.ohioattorneygeneral.gov/, which covers complaints submitted about Ohio businesses generally.

What the price is bound by

PUCO caps towing and storage fees by rule at OAC 4901:2-24-03 (effective January 1, 2026), under the mandate in ORC 4921.25(B)(4) — but only for vehicles removed under ORC 4513.60 and 4513.601, which are involuntary removals from public or private property and from private tow-away zones. If you telephone for a tow yourself, those caps do not apply and the price is whatever you agree. The statute also carries a carve-out worth knowing about: for a vehicle removed under ORC 4513.60, the commission's fees do not apply to a vehicle removed or stored within a municipal corporation that has established its own fees for vehicle removal and storage.

Separately, Ohio's motor vehicle repair rule requires disclosure at first contact. OAC 109:4-3-13(C)(7) makes it deceptive to fail to disclose, on first contact with the consumer, the basis on which a towing charge will be imposed where that service will be performed, and (C)(6) makes it deceptive to fail to disclose, upon first contact with the consumer, that a charge not directly related to the actual performance of the repair or service will be imposed whether or not repairs or services are performed — the paragraph that covers a call-out, dispatch or trip charge. Ask on the phone, before the truck rolls.

Private-property tows and police impounds in Columbus

Columbus has its own offense for unauthorized towing. CCC 2151.105, as amended in December 2025, provides that no person shall remove or cause to be removed any vehicle from private property unless in conformance with respect to removing motor vehicles from private property, and that a violation is a minor misdemeanor, rising to a misdemeanor of the third degree where the offender has a prior violation within one year. The codified text of subsection (a) reads as though a cross-reference has dropped out of it, so we quote it rather than paraphrase it into a rule it may not state.

Police impounds are a separate world from the one you reach by phone. Columbus Division of Police Directive 6.01 (revised December 30, 2023) defines a contracted wrecker as "any person operating a towing vehicle and employed and authorized by a private company contracted with the City of Columbus to perform towing services for the Division", and provides that "only contracted wreckers may be used to tow vehicles for impoundment or to move vehicles to an unrestricted parking space". That is a Division towing contract, not an open call to any operator, and no published roster of contracted wreckers was found while researching this site. The directive does leave room for a non-contracted operator at a crash scene: §III.G.1.a.(3) permits a private tow the owner or operator has authorized, where there is no need to impound and no delay or safety concern.

What we checked, and what we did not

Every towing listing on this site is marked unverified. We record where each fact came from and cite the source on the listing, and that is the whole of the claim we make. No listing here asserts that a PUCO certificate is held: where a certificate number appeared on an operator's own website footer, it was recorded as the operator's own claim, which is not independent verification of anything.

Payment never changes this. Paid placement does not change organic ranking, sponsored and featured placements are labeled as such, and payment never affects a listing's verification status.