Depending on the severity of a DUI conviction in Arizona, you could have a misdemeanor or a felony on your record, have to spend time in a county jail or a state prison, be subject to probation, be made to pay the cost of installing an ignition interlock device in your car, and pay court-ordered fines and costs.

Often when people consider the legal penalties for a DUI in Arizona, it is easy to overlook one more way a DUI can complicate your life: points. As in, points that a DUI can add to your driver’s license record with the Arizona Motor Vehicles Department. If you receive enough of them within a certain period, points will add more sanctions on top of the ones built into Arizona’s DUI statutes.

What Are Points?

In the context of your Arizona driver’s license, points get added to your MVD driver’s license record when you are convicted of civil or criminal traffic violations. Arizona has a schedule of civil and criminal traffic violations and the points assessed for convictions.

How Does the MVD Assess Points to My License?

When it comes to how a DUI conviction can affect you, the MVD operates independently of the courts. What this means to you is that the court does not make points part of your sentence. Driver’s license points the MVD imposes on you having too many points on your license are separate from the sentence a court will impose on conviction.

Shortly after your conviction, the court will transmit a record of it to the MVD. The MVD will then assess points to your driver’s license based on the schedule above.

Note that the MVD will not “stack” points on your record if you are convicted for multiple offenses in one case. For example, if you were arrested for DUI (eight points) and speeding (three points) and tried for both offenses at the same time, then the MVD would not assess 11 points against you. What it would do is assess the single highest-point penalty on you, which in this example would be the DUI conviction of eight points.

What are the Penalties for Too Many Points on a License?

What the MVD might do to you if you rack up too many points on your license depends on two factors: how many points you have, and the time period in which you built them up. Here are some notes about how it works:

• If you acquire eight to 12 points in any 12-month period, then you may be required to attend Traffic Survival School (TSS). This is only available if you have not attended TSS in the past 24 months.
• If you successfully complete TSS, then this might–in the court’s discretion–avoid a license suspension. But if Traffic Survival School is not an option for you, then the MVD can suspend your license for three months.
• Note that for DUI convictions in Arizona, license suspensions of 90 days up to three years are part of the sentence. So, Traffic Survival School attendance will not avoid a license suspension for a DUI.
• If you acquire 13 to 17 points in a 12-month period, then you will receive a three-month driver’s license suspension with no option of Traffic Survival School.
• If you build up 18 to 23 points in 12 months, then the MVD will suspend your driving privileges for six months.
• Once you reach 24 points on your license, two things will happen: first, instead of looking back on the past 12 months, the MVD will extend that to the past 36 months. Also, the driver’s license suspension at this point is for 12 months.
• Remember, points-based driver’s license suspensions remain in effect until you pay a license reinstatement fee to the MVD.

Do Points on My License Ever Go Away?

In some non-DUI cases, if you successfully complete Traffic Survival School then the court may remove the points from your license.

Otherwise, however, points on your license do not go away. What happens instead is that once 36 months have passed since the underlying conviction, the effect of those old points will no longer effectively count toward the points you could accumulate on your license.

The Bottom Line: DUI and Driver’s License Points in Arizona

The main effect of a DUI conviction, or for a Super Extreme DUI conviction, is it makes attending Traffic Survival School practically a mandatory part of a DUI sentence (due to the eight points assessed for a DUI conviction), even though DUI penalties themselves do not include a TSS requirement.

Another effect that a DUI can have is to quickly add a lot of points to an otherwise spotless or mostly clean driving record.

For example, in the past 12 months, you can have a two-point conviction for following too closely and a three-point conviction for speeding, and still be comfortably below the eight-point threshold where TSS attendance or a license suspension becomes a risk. But add a DUI on top of those, and your points are now up to 13, resulting in a mandatory three-month suspension with no chance of avoiding it through TSS.

Do You Need Help With an Arizona DUI Charge?

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Members of the editorial and news staff of Law&Crime were not involved in the creation of this content.