Who reads the state rules behind US Boater Card

US Boater Card is published by Radif Partners, a company that builds free tools on public data. This one is for anyone about to take a boat, a jet ski or a rental out on a lake or the coast: first-time owners, parents of teens who want to drive the family boat, visitors from another state and people who learned to boat decades ago and wonder whether the law caught up with them.

Why this site exists

The answer to "do I need a boating license?" depends on four things at once: the state, the year you were born, the engine and, more and more, the date. California extended its card to every age in 2025, Minnesota moves its birth-date cut-off every July until 2028, and several states give the card a different name. Pages that explain this are often years old, and many of them sell a course while leaving out that a free approved one exists in your state.

So this site does one thing: it applies your state's own rule to your date of birth, your boat and the day of your outing, and gives the cheapest legal way to comply, with the official page and the date we read it beside every answer.

Where the rules come from

For each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia we read the boating agency's education page, its boating handbook or the statute, and kept the exact sentence each figure comes from. The rule of 49 states and DC is confirmed so far, 6 of them on dated archived copies of the official pages because the agency site refuses automated reading, and some fields remain "not confirmed"; a state we could not confirm on an official page is shown as "not verified yet", never filled in from another site. Whether the free BoatUS Foundation course is accepted comes from the Foundation's own state list. The method page gives the details.

The practice questions

We wrote the 47 general questions ourselves from federal texts that belong to the public: the Inland Navigation Rules (33 CFR part 83), the aids to navigation system (33 CFR part 62), the equipment, numbering and accident rules (33 CFR parts 173, 175 and 183), the fire extinguisher rule (46 CFR part 25) and the engine cut-off switch law. The 143 state questions are generated from the verified records. None comes from a course exam, a vendor or a book.

What we are not

We are not a state agency, the Coast Guard, NASBLA or a course provider. We cannot issue a card, replace a lost one or look up a record, and we use no state seal or logo.

How the site is paid for

It is free and needs no account or email. We sell no course, insurance or boat, take no commission and link to no provider that pays us. If advertising is added one day, it will never sit above the check, and it cannot use what you enter because it never leaves your browser.

Tell us when something is wrong

Write to contact@usboatercard.com with the state and the rule. The editorial policy explains how a correction is made. The site has 20 pages in English.

State rules last checked on October 24, 2026.