Every manufactured-home title the State of Minnesota issues carries one sentence in capital letters. The Legislature wrote it into the statute word for word: “THIS TITLE DESCRIBES A MANUFACTURED HOME - NOT A MOTOR VEHICLE.” Minn. Stat. § 168A.02, subd. 3.
Hold onto that sentence. It matters more than it looks.
Since 2017, Minnesota has let you put a beneficiary on your car title the way you’d put one on a bank account. You die, the car goes to the person you named, and nobody opens a probate file to move a Honda. Boats got the same deal a year earlier. In my experience, almost nobody uses either one. And the person who’d get the most out of a transfer-on-death title, the one whose biggest asset is a manufactured home on a rented lot in a park, is the person the statute leaves out. The statute covers a “motor vehicle”. Their title says, in capitals, that they don’t own one.
What does Minnesota’s transfer-on-death vehicle law actually do?
It lets you skip probate for a car, with strings. Here’s the grant:
A natural person who is the owner of a motor vehicle may have the motor vehicle titled in transfer-on-death or TOD form by including in the application for the certificate of title a designation of a beneficiary or beneficiaries to whom the motor vehicle must be transferred on death of the owner or the last survivor of joint owners with rights of survivorship, subject to the rights of secured parties.
— Minn. Stat. § 168A.125, subd. 1
“[N]atural person” does real work there. A car titled to your LLC or your trust can’t carry a TOD designation under this section. It has to be you.
The rest is what you’d hope for. The designation “is not required to be supported by consideration,” and the title doesn’t have to be handed to the beneficiary for the designation to work. § 168A.125, subd. 2. The beneficiary has “no interest in the motor vehicle until the death of the owner” or the last surviving joint owner. Id., subd. 3. You can still sell the car, trade it in, or crash it into a ditch. And the designation “may be changed at any time by the owner or by all joint owners with rights of survivorship, without the consent of the beneficiary or beneficiaries, by filing an application for a new certificate of title.” Id. Your nephew doesn’t get a vote.
The Legislature passed it in the 2017 special session as section 41 of article 3 of a transportation bill, signed May 30, 2017. 2017 Minn. Laws 1st Spec. Sess. ch. 3, art. 3, § 41. It’s been on the books for more than nine years.
The sentence nobody reads: your spouse may have to sign
This is the part that surprised me, because the boat statute doesn’t have it. The last sentence of subdivision 2:
If the owner of the motor vehicle is married at the time of the designation, the designation of a beneficiary other than the owner’s spouse requires the spouse’s written consent.
— Minn. Stat. § 168A.125, subd. 2
Want the truck to go to your son from your first marriage? The statute requires your current spouse’s written consent. Driver and Vehicle Services builds this into its form. The Application for Transfer-on-Death Beneficiary, form PS2004, has a Section E for spousal consent, and the spouse’s signature gets notarized: “(Required with spousal signature)”. The owner’s signature gets notarized too.
Compare the watercraft version, Minn. Stat. § 86B.841, enacted in 2016. Its subdivisions track the car statute nearly word for word, and it has no spousal-consent sentence at all. Same Capitol, one year apart, two different answers on whether your spouse gets a say. As far as § 86B.841 goes, a married boat owner can name the kids without asking. The car needs a signature.
Is a transfer-on-death car title free?
No. The PS2004 is upfront about it: “The Transfer on Death Beneficiary designation is not a title application.” You file it with an Application for Motor Vehicle Title, the PS2000, because the statute makes the designation part of the title application, and changing it later means “filing an application for a new certificate of title.” § 168A.125, subds. 1, 3.
A new title costs money. DVS’s fee schedule lists an $8.25 title fee due “Each time a title is issued”, a $12 filing fee “Due with each title transaction”, and a $2.25 technology surcharge, plus a $1 surcharge if a deputy registrar processes it. Then find a notary. It’s cheap, not free.
And the beneficiary doesn’t get anything to hold. “A motor vehicle title will not be provided to the beneficiary.” The title stays with you, with the beneficiary’s name on it.
What does the beneficiary do when the owner dies?
Under the statute, ownership vests in the surviving beneficiary at death, still “subject to the rights of secured parties”, and the beneficiary “may apply for a new certificate of title to the motor vehicle upon submitting a certified death record of the owner of the motor vehicle.” § 168A.125, subd. 4. If no named beneficiary survives, “the motor vehicle must be included in the probate estate of the deceased owner.” Id. And the transfer “is not a testamentary transfer.” Id. It doesn’t pass under a will.
DVS’s own instructions for a TOD transfer are looser than the statute’s words on proof of death. Its deceased-relative page asks for the title, payment of fees, a lien release if there is one, and proof of death, which it says can be a copy of a death certificate, “Copy of obituary notice”, or “Copy of memorial card”. The statute says “certified death record”. I’d bring the certified death certificate and skip the argument with the counter clerk.
One more thing the beneficiary should know. Minnesota’s motor vehicle sales tax definition excludes “the acquisition of a motor vehicle by inheritance from or by bequest of, or transfer-on-death of title by, a decedent who owned it”. Minn. Stat. § 297B.01, subd. 16(c)(1). No sales tax on the transfer. DVS’s form tells you the same thing, though it cites “MS§ . 279B.01 subd. 16 (c)(1)” for the point. There is no section 279B.01. The Revisor returns a not-found page for it. Someone at DVS transposed two digits, and the rule is right anyway.
Does the car loan follow the car? Yes. So can the estate’s bills.
A TOD title doesn’t wash off a lien. “[S]ubject to the rights of secured parties” appears in both subdivision 1 and subdivision 4, and subdivision 5(a) adds: “This section does not limit the rights of any secured party or creditor of the owner of a motor vehicle against a transfer-on-death beneficiary or beneficiaries.” DVS says the same thing on the ground: lien release, if applicable. If Mom owed $14,000 on the car, you inherited a car with a $14,000 loan on it.
The unsecured creditors are a different question. The obvious place to look is Minn. Stat. § 524.6-207, the statute that lets an estate pull money back from a survivor when the estate comes up short. It covers bank accounts and nothing else: “No multiple-party account will be effective against an estate of a deceased party to transfer to a survivor sums needed to pay debts, taxes, and expenses of administration” when the estate runs short. A “multiple-party account” is a joint account or a P.O.D. account, and an “account” is “a contract of deposit of funds between a depositor and a financial institution”. § 524.6-201, subds. 2, 5. A car is neither. So § 524.6-207 doesn’t reach it.
What reaches it is § 168A.125’s own subdivision 5(a), which preserves a creditor’s rights against the beneficiary without saying how a creditor enforces them. That’s a gap. The statute keeps the door open and doesn’t install a handle.
Not so for the state. Subdivision 5(b) names a state or county agency with a claim or lien under four statutes, including the medical assistance estate-recovery statute, § 256B.15, as a creditor, and then goes further for that one:
A claim authorized by section 256B.15 against the estate of an owner of a motor vehicle titled in transfer-on-death form voids any transfer-on-death conveyance of a motor vehicle as described in this section.
— Minn. Stat. § 168A.125, subd. 5(b)
Voids. Not survives, not attaches. A claim or lien under the other three statutes “continues to apply against the designated beneficiary or beneficiaries after the transfer” if the rest of the estate can’t pay, and it stays with the car until the beneficiary sells it to someone without notice. Id. But a medical assistance claim knocks out the conveyance itself. Section 256B.15 already counts “assets conveyed to a survivor, heir, or assign of the person through survivorship, living trust, transfer-on-death of title or deed, or other arrangements” as part of the estate it recovers from. § 256B.15, subd. 1a(b)(5). If a parent spent the last two years of life in a nursing home on medical assistance, don’t count on the TOD designation on the car surviving the state’s claim. I wrote about how that recovery claim works at /news/minnesota-medical-assistance-estate-recovery/.
The boat statute names the same four state claims and says they continue to apply. It doesn’t have the “voids” sentence. Nobody explained the difference in the text, and I won’t guess.
Can I put a transfer-on-death beneficiary on my manufactured home?
Not under § 168A.125, as I read it. The statute grants TOD titling to “the owner of a motor vehicle”, and every manufactured-home title carries that capitalized line telling you it describes “A MANUFACTURED HOME - NOT A MOTOR VEHICLE.” § 168A.02, subd. 3.
Chapter 168A doesn’t define “motor vehicle” itself. Its definitions section covers “vehicle” and, separately, “manufactured home”, which it borrows by way of § 327.31 from a federal regulation. § 168A.01, subds. 9a, 24; § 327.31, subd. 6. The registration chapter right next to it does define the term, and it carves manufactured homes out by name: “Motor vehicle” there “does not include a snowmobile; a manufactured home; a park trailer”, and a few other devices. Minn. Stat. § 168.002, subd. 18(d). That definition is written “for the purposes of this chapter,” meaning chapter 168. But when the Legislature prints “NOT A MOTOR VEHICLE” on the title itself, I don’t see much room to argue a manufactured home is one for § 168A.125. And the same 2017 bill that created vehicle TOD titles amended the manufactured-home affixation statute in the very next section, so it had manufactured homes in front of it. It wrote “motor vehicle” anyway.
DVS’s page on manufactured-home titles describes transfers, cancellations, and re-titling. It doesn’t mention transfer-on-death. I couldn’t find a Minnesota appellate decision applying § 168A.125 at all. I searched CourtListener for the section number and for the statute’s phrasing, and CourtListener indexes no Minnesota district court files, so all that tells you is that nothing on it turned up there.
Here’s why this hurts. A manufactured home can be converted to real estate, and real estate can use a transfer-on-death deed. But the conversion requires, among other things, that “the title to the land on which it is situated is held by” the home’s owner, or by a Minnesota nonprofit or cooperative the owner belongs to. Minn. Stat. § 273.125, subd. 8(b)(1); see § 168A.1412, subd. 1. Rent your lot from a for-profit park and, under the better reading of § 168A.1412, that door is closed. DVS says it “processes title transfers for manufactured homes not affixed to real property.” That’s your home, then: personal property on a DVS title, with no TOD option. I covered the lot-lease side of park living at /news/minnesota-manufactured-home-park-lot-leases-327c/.
So what’s left? If the owner is married, a manufactured home that’s the family residence is part of the homestead, which “descends free from any testamentary or other disposition of it to which the spouse has not consented in writing or as provided by law”. Minn. Stat. § 524.2-402(a). If the estate is small enough, the small-estate affidavit may work, and I walked through its limits at /news/minnesota-small-estate-affidavit/. Otherwise it’s a will and probate, or a plan built before death. The one-form fix that works for a Chevy doesn’t work for the house.
What about boats, snowmobiles, and ATVs?
Boats, yes, if they’re titled. Section 86B.841 lets “[a] natural person who is the owner of a watercraft” title it in TOD form, using language that tracks the car statute. Minnesota titles a watercraft “greater than 16 feet in length,” with exclusions for canoes, kayaks, small single-hull row-type fishing boats under 40 horsepower, and a few others. Minn. Stat. § 86B.820, subd. 14.
Snowmobiles and ATVs, no, as I read the statutes. Chapter 168A’s definition of “vehicle” leaves out “vehicles not originally constructed primarily for use on public roads and highways.” § 168A.01, subd. 24(b)(2). A snowmobile is registered under § 84.82, and the transfer document the statute calls for is a bill of sale: “A person may not sell a snowmobile without furnishing the buyer a bill of sale on a form prescribed by the commissioner.” § 84.82, subd. 1a. ATVs work the same way: a transfer is executed “using a bill of sale that includes the vehicle serial number”, § 84.922, subd. 4(b), and the ATV registration statute never mentions a certificate of title. No title, no TOD title.
No beneficiary named? What DVS does instead
DVS has a page of paths for a deceased owner’s car, and its first answer to the will question is blunt: “A will cannot be used to transfer ownership of a motor vehicle.” The will can show the heir inherited, which exempts the transfer from sales tax. It won’t move the title.
What DVS uses instead:
- Joint owners. If the title reads “or” between the names, the survivor brings proof of death and the title. If it doesn’t, DVS also wants the surviving spouse form or a small-estate affidavit.
- A surviving spouse. The spouse signs a notarized Assignment of a Vehicle to a Surviving Spouse, form PS2071, certifying the car was selected from the estate’s personal property under § 524.2-403. That statute gives a surviving spouse “one automobile, if any, without regard to value.” § 524.2-403(a)(2). I wrote about that car clause at /news/minnesota-homestead-exempt-property-family-allowance/.
- No spouse, no probate. The same PS2071 lets an heir certify “the estate of the above-named person has not been and will not be probated and there are no monetary claims or security interests relating thereto.”
- Probate. The personal representative signs the title as seller, with paperwork from the court.
So for a married couple with one car, a TOD naming the spouse buys little; the spouse can already take one car under § 524.2-403 with a one-page form. DVS even has the owner initial an acknowledgment on the PS2004 that TOD ownership is subject to secured parties “and any surviving spouse (MS§ . 524.2-403).” The TOD title earns its keep somewhere else. The single owner. The second car. The unmarried partner. The kid from a first marriage, with the spouse’s signature on the consent line.
Does a divorce cancel the TOD on my car title?
The statutes don’t answer it cleanly. Minnesota’s revocation-on-divorce statute revokes a revocable “disposition, beneficiary designation, or appointment of property made in a governing instrument” to a former spouse. Minn. Stat. § 524.2-804, subd. 1(1). The definition of “governing instrument” lists a deed, will, trust, insurance policy, POD account, a “security registered in beneficiary form (TOD)”, a “transfer on death (TOD) deed”, retirement plans, and powers of appointment and attorney, and then ends “or a dispositive, appointive, or nominative instrument of any similar type.” Minn. Stat. § 524.1-201(27). A TOD vehicle title isn’t on the list by name. It may fit the catch-all. I’d rather not find out in court. After a divorce, file the new title application and take the ex off. It’s under $25 in fees, and a notary if you name someone new. I covered the divorce statute itself at /news/minnesota-revocation-by-divorce/.
The slayer statute is easier. Minnesota’s version doesn’t run on the “governing instrument” definition. After listing wills, joint tenancies, contractual arrangements, and life insurance, it adds: “Any other acquisition of property or interest by the killer shall be treated in accordance with the principles of this section.” Minn. Stat. § 524.2-803(e). A beneficiary who feloniously and intentionally kills the owner doesn’t drive off in the car.
The gap nobody plans for: insurance
Between the death and the new title, the car sits in a legal in-between, and the beneficiary may be tempted to drive it home. Call the insurer first. Whose policy covers a dead owner’s car, and for how long, depends on the policy, and I’m not going to guess at yours. That conversation takes ten minutes and costs nothing.
How does this compare to a transfer-on-death deed?
Same idea, different machinery. Real estate uses a recorded transfer-on-death deed under § 507.071, with its own rules on spouses, creditors, and recording, and I wrote that one up at /news/minnesota-transfer-on-death-deed/. A vehicle TOD lives on the DVS title and nowhere else. Neither one replaces a plan. Each one moves a single asset around probate, and neither one updates itself when your life changes.
Two pages and under $25 in fees can keep a car out of probate. It can’t do anything for a house the State has stamped NOT A MOTOR VEHICLE.
Madgett Law, LLC
Madgett Law, LLC handles Minnesota estate planning and probate avoidance, including transfer-on-death deeds, beneficiary designations, and revocable trusts coordinated with each other, so the car, the house, and the accounts aren’t each going somewhere different. Read about our trusts and estate planning practice. If you’ve got a title, a manufactured home, or a family situation that doesn’t fit a one-page form, send us a message.
Sources: Minn. Stat. § 168A.125 (2026), subd. 1 (natural person; TOD titling; subject to rights of secured parties), subd. 2 (no consideration; no delivery; spouse’s written consent for a non-spouse beneficiary), subd. 3 (no interest before death; change without beneficiary consent by application for a new certificate of title), subd. 4 (vesting; certified death record; probate if no beneficiary survives; not a testamentary transfer), subd. 5(a) (rights of secured parties and creditors preserved), subd. 5(b) (state and county claims under §§ 246.53, 256B.15, 261.04, 270C.63; § 256B.15 claim voids the TOD conveyance; other claims continue). 2017 Minn. Laws 1st Spec. Sess. ch. 3, art. 3, § 41 (enacting § 168A.125; signed May 30, 2017), § 42 (amending the manufactured-home affixation statute). Minn. Stat. § 86B.841, subds. 1–5 (watercraft TOD title; enacted 2016 Minn. Laws ch. 189, art. 3, § 27). Minn. Stat. § 86B.820, subd. 14 (watercraft defined; exclusions). Minn. Stat. § 168A.01, subd. 9a (manufactured home, by reference to § 327.31, subd. 6), subd. 24(b)(2) (vehicle excludes vehicles not originally constructed primarily for use on public roads). Minn. Stat. § 168A.02, subd. 3 (manufactured-home title notice). Minn. Stat. § 168.002, subd. 1 (scope), subd. 18(d) (motor vehicle excludes snowmobile, manufactured home, park trailer). Minn. Stat. § 168A.1412, subd. 1 (manufactured home as improvement to real property). Minn. Stat. § 273.125, subd. 8(b)(1) (land title held by owner, nonprofit, or cooperative). Minn. Stat. § 84.82, subd. 1a (snowmobile registration; bill of sale). Minn. Stat. § 84.922, subd. 4(b) (ATV transfer by bill of sale). Minn. Stat. § 297B.01, subd. 16(c)(1) (TOD acquisition not a sale for motor vehicle sales tax). Minn. Stat. § 256B.15, subd. 1a(b)(5) (estate includes assets conveyed by transfer-on-death of title). Minn. Stat. § 524.6-201, subds. 2, 5 (account; multiple-party account); § 524.6-207 (rights of creditors against multiple-party accounts). Minn. Stat. § 524.2-402(a) (homestead including manufactured home that is the family residence). Minn. Stat. § 524.2-403(a)(2) (one automobile without regard to value). Minn. Stat. § 524.1-201(27) (governing instrument). Minn. Stat. § 524.2-804, subd. 1(1) (revocation on dissolution). Minn. Stat. § 524.2-803(e) (other acquisitions by a killer). Minnesota Department of Public Safety, Driver and Vehicle Services, Application for Transfer-on-Death Beneficiary, form PS2004 (instructions; Sections E and F); Assignment of a Vehicle to a Surviving Spouse/Not Subject to Probate, form PS2071; “Deceased relative vehicle title transfer”; “Vehicle fees” (title fees); “Vehicle title transfer and cancelation for manufactured homes”. This article is general information about Minnesota law, not legal advice. Reading it does not create an attorney–client relationship, and no outcome is promised or implied.