Nc Dmv MCP Server

@pipeworx/nc-dmv

North Carolina DMV MCP — live wait times at every NCDMV driver license office and license plate agency, plus the office directory the same feed carries. Keyless.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1865+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

North Carolina and Oregon are the only two US states whose DMV publishes a machine-readable live wait feed. Every other state's is captcha-gated, blocked to cloud egress, broken, or only inside a phone app.

Tools

• nc_dmv_wait_times(office?, service?, open_only?, sort?, limit?) — current average wait, longest wait, and open/closed status per office. 148 driver license offices; service: "vehicle" switches to the vehicle services / license plate agency units.
• nc_dmv_offices(office?, city?, zip?, service?, district?, limit?) — address, city, ZIP, phone, posted hours and NCDMV district. This feed is the only machine-readable NCDMV office directory that exists, so it doubles as the state's office locator.

Auth

None. Keyless and unauthenticated.

Data source

https://wait.services.ncdot.gov/IWT/IWTWeb/XmlStats.aspx?controller=IWT_UnitsListXML&UnitID=<n>

Gotchas this pack handles for you

Closed-hours zeros are data, not gaps

Outside posted business hours every office reports OfficeStatus Closed with AvgWT/MaxWT of 0:00:00. That is NCDMV reporting an idle queue — it is neither an error nor a missing value, and it must not be read as "walk right in".

Responses therefore always carry offices_open, and when nothing is open the note says the wait figures are idle-queue zeros. sort: "wait" puts open offices ahead of closed ones for the same reason: a shortest-wait ranking would otherwise be won by 148 closed offices tied at zero.

The feed is a tree, and the sentinel row lies about its parent

UnitID=2 returns 161 <Unit> blocks: one root (Driver Services, UnitLevel 1), eleven districts (level 2), the 148 real offices (level 3), and a sentinel named Invalid. For UnitID=182 the real unit sits at level 2 instead.

So the pack keeps leaves — any UnitId never named as another unit's ParentUnitId — rather than filtering on UnitLevel, which survives NCDOT re-organising the tree.

The ordering matters: the Invalid sentinel hangs off a real office (Greensboro West, ParentUnitId=143). Computing the parent set before dropping Invalid demotes that office out of the results and yields 147 offices where NCDMV publishes 148. Invalid is dropped first.

Addresses

-- is the feed's null. The separate <ZipCode> tag is empty on every single unit, so the ZIP has to be parsed out of the one-line Address string ("521 S. Sandhills Blvd., Aberdeen, NC 28315"). That line is not consistently punctuated: some offices embed newlines, omit the comma before the city, or drop NC altogether ("2479 E. Fifth St., Lumberton 28358"). The parser peels from the right — ZIP, then the state token, then the city at the last comma — and returns the whole string in address with city: null when the city cannot be separated from the street safely.

Current coverage: 118 of 148 offices carry an address at all (NCDMV leaves 30 blank); of those, 118 ZIPs and 116 cities parse. offices_missing_address reports the gap.

Some entries are stale on NCDMV's side — Greensboro Express OLD still appears in the feed. They are returned as published rather than second-guessed.

Wait units

AvgWT / MaxWT are H:MM:SS; the pack converts them to whole minutes.

Related

• or_dmv_wait_times / or_dmv_offices — Oregon, the other live state wait feed.
• ca_dmv_offices — California field offices (no wait feed published).

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "nc-dmv": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/nc-dmv/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/nc-dmv/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1865+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/nc_dmv_wait_times \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"office":"Raleigh"}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/nc_dmv_wait_times. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Run it from npm

@pipeworx/mcp-nc-dmv is a local stdio bridge to the Pipeworx gateway: your MCP client starts it with npx, and it forwards every call to the same https://gateway.pipeworx.io/nc-dmv/mcp endpoint shown above. It needs network access; there is no offline mode.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "nc-dmv": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-nc-dmv"]
    }
  }
}

Without a key it calls anonymously, capped at 50 calls a day. A free account raises that to 200 a day: get a key at https://pipeworx.io/signup and add "env": { "PIPEWORX_API_KEY": "<your key>" } to the server entry. The key is sent as a Bearer token, the same way a hosted connection sends it, so calls are metered and billed exactly as they are there.

It lists only this pack's tools by default. Set PIPEWORX_META_TOOLS=1 to also list ask_pipeworx and the other gateway-wide tools.

Behind an HTTPS proxy: Node's built-in fetch does not read HTTPS_PROXY by default. Newer Node releases honour it when NODE_USE_ENV_PROXY=1 is set; check your Node version's documentation.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Nc Dmv data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT