Gov. Stein Opens North Carolina's Largest DMV Office in East Charlotte; State Reports 23-Minute Average Wait in August

The Building Is Real. The Percentage Is a Choice.

The new DMV office at 5525 Albemarle Road in east Charlotte is, by the state's own description, the largest driver's license office in North Carolina^[1][4]. Gov. Josh Stein cut the ribbon there on Sept. 28, 2026^[1][3]. It replaces a smaller office on Executive Circle that closed the month before, and it only handles licenses and ID cards^[3][4]. That much nobody disputes.

What Stein said next is where the story gets interesting. His office reported that the average DMV wait across the state was 23 minutes in August 2026 — an 86% drop from a year earlier^[1][5]. Almost every outlet that covered the opening repeated some version of that number. But the size of the drop depends entirely on which month you start counting from, and different state announcements have picked different starting points^[1][6][7][9].

That's not a contradiction. It's how percentages work when you're measuring a recovery from a crisis. The real question isn't whether wait times fell — everyone agrees they did^[5][12]. It's who gets credit, what the number is actually measuring, and whether the fix is built to last.

What a "1-Hour-15-Minute Average" Actually Meant

To understand why 23 minutes sounds so dramatic, you need the starting point. In August 2025, State Auditor Dave Boliek released a 435-page audit of the DMV. It found the average wait across the state topped one hour and 15 minutes, with more than 13% of visits stretching past two and a half hours^[11][17].

That's not a typo — over one in eight people who walked into a DMV office in 2025 waited longer than two and a half hours. The audit traced the backup to a simple mismatch: demand kept growing while examiner staffing didn't. Pandemic-era backlogs, a rush for federally mandated REAL ID cards, low pay for examiners and a fast-growing state population all piled onto a system that hadn't scaled up to meet them^[11][13].

So when the governor's office says waits are down 86% from a year earlier, that comparison is measured against the worst stretch the DMV has had in years. It's a real improvement. But it's also, almost by definition, the largest possible percentage the state could report — because the baseline was the peak of the crisis^[1][6][7].

Two Paths to the Same Better Number

Fixing that backlog took two kinds of action, and both matter to the story. The first was hiring. House Bill 125, which Stein signed in August 2025, funded $1.2 million a year for 40 new examiners in 2025-26 and $3 million for 21 more the following year^[11]. The governor's office says 64 of those positions have been filled^[1]. A separate 2026 budget bill added 68 more positions running through mid-2027^[1][2].

The second was moving business online. Senate Bill 245, signed in September 2025, let more DMV transactions happen remotely instead of in person. The governor's office says more than 400,000 North Carolinians have used that option so far^[1][2]. Every one of those transactions is a person who never had to stand in a physical line, which lowers the average wait for everyone who does.

Both of those fixes came from bills the General Assembly wrote and passed, not from an executive action Stein took on his own^[1][5]. That fact sits underneath almost everything else in this story, including who wants credit for it.

Whose Win Is This?

Stein's office frames the new Charlotte office, and the wait-time numbers, as proof that steady funding and competent management can fix even an agency people love to hate^[1][2]. Under DMV Commissioner Paul Tine, the pitch goes, the state hired the right people, rebuilt the website to show live wait times, and gave North Carolinians more ways to skip the office entirely^[1][5]. The agency's own five-year plan now aims for a 15-minute average, an even more ambitious target than the 23 minutes it's currently reporting^[15].

Boliek, a Republican, sees it differently. In an op-ed, he credited his 2025 audit for identifying the problems and called the turnaround a "shared priority of government" rather than one official's achievement^[12]. That's a real institutional stake, not just a rhetorical one: it was legislative Republicans who wrote and funded HB 125 and SB 245, the two laws behind most of the staffing gains Stein's office lists^[1][5]. Boliek has also pushed a structural argument that goes beyond staffing. His audit found the DMV generates about 30% of the Department of Transportation's total revenue but receives back only 2.7% of that department's spending^[13]. His proposed fix — splitting the DMV into its own standalone agency — hasn't happened^[10].

For the people actually using the DMV, neither argument matters as much as the visit itself: how long the wait is, whether an appointment is even available, and whether they can avoid the trip altogether^[5][8]. CNN's national feature on the turnaround leaned on Reddit posts praising the new system, describing service "a Fortune 500 company would have been proud" of^[5]. That kind of anecdotal enthusiasm is real, but it sits alongside earlier reporting that appointment slots stayed hard to get even as walk-in wait times fell^[13].

The Money That Already Ran Out

Here's the structural tension underneath all of it: nearly every gain the governor's office lists was paid for by state lawmakers, not by the governor's office acting alone. That means the DMV's turnaround is only as durable as the next budget cycle^[1][13].

That's not hypothetical. Federal pandemic relief money had funded 7 a.m. openings at 90 DMV offices around the state. When that money ran out, those offices reverted to their normal 8 a.m. start on Feb. 9, 2026^[13][14]. It's a small detail, but it's a preview of what happens when one-time funding dries up: hours get cut, and the state has to decide all over again whether to replace it with recurring money.

So the DMV's short-term numbers look good. Whether they stay that way depends on choices the legislature hasn't fully locked in yet, including whether to fund the agency's staffing plan for years to come and whether to ever resolve the funding-and-oversight structure Boliek's audit flagged^[10][13].

How the Coverage Split

Outlets across the spectrum agreed on the facts and diverged on emphasis. Carolina Journal, published by the conservative John Locke Foundation, ran the headline "Stein: DMV wait times down by 90% since summer 2025" — attributing the figure squarely to the governor while highlighting bipartisan funding^[6]. CNN's national feature, "The DMV is good now, actually," leaned into an upbeat, Reddit-driven consumer-surprise tone and spent little time on what baseline the 86% figure was measured against^[5]. WFAE, an NPR member station, chose the verb "touts" in its headline — a word choice that marks the numbers as the governor's claim rather than settled fact^[2].

Local TV coverage from WCCB and Queen City News largely repeated the governor's figures as reported, with WCCB calling the drop "massive" without stating the baseline^[3][4]. WRAL's coverage was the most layered, running both a story that quoted Stein directly on the 90% figure and separate reporting on the funding that had already run dry^[7][13]. No international outlets picked up the story — it never crossed into a foreign-policy or global-business angle, and its only reach beyond North Carolina came through CNN's syndicated feature^[5].

What almost none of the coverage did was sit with the baseline question for more than a sentence. Every version of the percentage — 86%, 87%, or roughly 90% — is measured from the worst months the DMV has had in years^[1][6][7][9]. That doesn't make the number false. It just means the number is doing exactly what a number measured from a crisis floor will always do: look as dramatic as the math allows.