The admin side — registration, insurance, CDL, zoning, titling
Timing the re-registration of your bus is one of those decisions that seems simple until you start asking around and realize everybody’s got a different answer. The best time to re-register your school bus as an RV is as soon as you meet your state’s minimum conversion requirements, which usually means a permanent bed, a … Read more
You’ve got the bus, you’ve started your build, and now you’re wondering if some state inspector is going to take one look at your DIY conversion and shut the whole thing down. It’s a legit fear, and it comes up constantly in the skoolie community. The hardest states to pass vehicle inspection with a skoolie … Read more
You’ve got a bus, you’re planning a roof raise, and now you’re wondering if there’s some magic number that makes your build illegal. Or maybe you’ve already done the raise and you’re second-guessing whether you can actually drive this thing across the country without getting pulled over. In the United States, there is no single … Read more
You’ve done the math on bus life, and somewhere between insurance quotes and registration fees, you started wondering what happens when tax season rolls around. Does the government see your skoolie as a house or a vehicle? No, you don’t pay property tax on a converted school bus. Your bus is classified as a vehicle, … Read more
How Much Does It Cost to Register a Converted School Bus? (See our guide on Can You Get Insurance for a Converted School Bus? for more on this.) When I first started looking into getting my skoolie, this was one of the first questions I had to figure out. Registration costs can vary wildly from … Read more
If there’s one part of the skoolie journey that makes people’s eyes glaze over, it’s this one. Nobody gets excited about paperwork. Nobody’s filming a YouTube tour of their trip to the DMV. But I’ll tell you what, this is the part that trips people up more than the actual build, and I’ve seen it … Read more
I’m going to be upfront about something. Insurance was the topic that almost made me quit researching bus conversions entirely. Not because it’s impossible, but because every answer I found contradicted the last one. One person says State Farm covered them no problem. The next person says State Farm laughed them off the phone. One … Read more
This is one of those things that nobody thinks about until they’re like two weeks from hitting the road. I was deep into planning my build when it hit me — wait, if I don’t have a house anymore, where does my mail go? Where does my driver’s license say I live? It sounds like … Read more
This was one of those things that kept tripping me up when I was researching bus conversions. Every state seems to have slightly different rules, and the DMV websites are about as helpful as you’d expect. I spent a solid weekend just trying to figure out what paperwork I actually needed, and what I found … Read more
A couple months back I was talking to a guy at a truck stop who had a converted transit bus. I asked him about his insurance situation and he just laughed. Turns out he’d been through four companies before one would even talk to him. That conversation is basically why I dug into this topic … Read more