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Residents of northern Wake County will soon have a new DMV office of their own.
Tucked into the state budget approved this summer is money for a new Division of Motor Vehicles driver’s license office in either Wake Forest or Rolesville. The location hasn’t been chosen yet, but the DMV hopes to have the office up and running by early next year.
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This comes as the DMV works to open a new, larger office on the other side of Wake County, in Fuquay-Varina. The agency bought a former Walgreens store on North Main Street there and is turning it into a license office with more than three times the capacity as the existing one in downtown Fuquay.
The northern Wake office will become the seventh in a county of nearly 1.3 million residents. The budget provides more than a $1 million a year to operate the new office and staff it with 10 driver’s license examiners. That will make it larger than DMV offices in Cary, Garner and Wendell and smaller than the three Raleigh offices and the new Fuquay-Varina one.
Wake Forest has a license agency office for vehicle plates and registrations, in the Ligon Mill Business Park on South Main Street. The DMV is looking to lease a space large enough so both the driver’s license office and privately run agency office can exist side by side, said spokesman Marty Homan.
In the meantime, the DMV is hiring the new employees now, Homan said.
“We’re not going to wait until we have an office,” he said. “We’re going to hire and train them and put them to work in other offices until they can move into the new space.”
Both new offices in Wake were made possible by a General Assembly that has only recently begun to pay for new facilities and staff for the beleaguered state agency. From 2003 to 2024, North Carolina’s population grew by about 2.4 million people, but the DMV was authorized to open only three new driver’s license offices and hire no additional driver’s license examiners.
That changed starting last summer after State Auditor Dave Boliek determined the DMV didn’t have enough workers, as part of a larger review of the agency’s operations. Lawmakers provided money and authorization to hire 40 new license examiners for existing offices and 24 more for new offices in Fuquay-Varina and in Brunswick, Cabarrus and Sampson counties.
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This year’s budget provided money for two more new offices, in northern Wake and in the Columbus County town of Tabor City.
The northern Wake office will help keep up with demand in one of the fastest-growing parts of the state. Combined, the populations of Rolesville and Wake Forest have jumped from about 13,500 in 2000 to more than 71,000 now, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The closest offices to that area now are on Spring Forest Road in North Raleigh and in Louisburg in Franklin County.
In announcing the new DMV office in his district earlier this summer, Rep. Mike Schietzelt called it the kind of thing people expect their state government to get right.
“I’ve received countless emails and calls from new residents, parents of teenagers and seniors who have suffered from the lack of a DMV driver license office in our district,” Schietzelt, a Republican, wrote. “I heard you. I fought for you. And I delivered.”
DMV commissioner Paul Tine says the idea for an office in the Wake Forest/Rolesville area originated with the General Assembly.
“They reached out to us to see if it would be a good spot for us,” Tine said in an interview. “And we looked at the numbers and the fact that it’s sort of in a little desert up there and Wake County’s growing so quickly, it was a great spot to have there. We’re all for it.”
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This story was originally published August 17, 2026 at 12:26 PM.