Mississippi Bans Studs Year-Round: No Protuberance May Project Beyond the Tread

The provision sits at § 63-7-67, headed simply "Tires," inside the General Provisions of Title 63, Chapter 7 (Equipment and Identification, §§ 63-7-1 through 63-7-107). It carries three separate commands. The first sets a construction standard for solid rubber tires: rubber at least one inch thick above the edge of the flange around the entire periphery. The second bans any metal tire in contact with the roadway on a motor vehicle, trailer or semitrailer. The third is the one that reaches studs, and it is drafted as a list of shapes rather than a list of products, so a manufacturer cannot escape it by calling the hardware something other than a stud.

Read the third sentence closely, because two limits are built into it. The prohibited item must be on the periphery of the tire, and it must project beyond the tread of the traction surface. A siped or heavily lugged all-rubber winter tire is untouched, since the material is rubber. A stud, spike or metal cleat is caught the moment it stands proud of the tread. Mississippi did not write a hardness limit, a projection tolerance in thirty-seconds of an inch, or a permit route for passenger studs, and it did not attach a seasonal window of the kind that lets studs run from mid-October to the end of April in northern states. The word stud appears in the Mississippi traffic code in this one section and nowhere else.

The two exceptions are narrow and are aimed at agriculture and at emergency traction, not at winter tires. Farm machinery may run tires with protuberances, but only protuberances "which will not injure the highway." Tire chains are permitted only when they are of reasonable proportions and only when required for safety because of snow, ice or other conditions tending to cause a vehicle to skid, which is a use-based licence rather than a general permission to keep chains fitted through the winter.

The fourth paragraph adds a permit route, and it belongs to the Mississippi Department of Transportation and to local authorities within their own jurisdictions. They may issue special permits for traction engines or tractors with movable tracks carrying transverse corrugations, and for farm tractors and other farm machinery whose highway operation would otherwise be barred by Title 63. That permit power is written around tracked and agricultural equipment; nothing in it authorises a passenger-car stud permit.

Section 63-7-9 sets a further boundary that matters on rural roads. Except where Chapter 7 says otherwise, the chapter's equipment rules do not apply at all to implements of husbandry, road machinery, road rollers or farm tractors, a limit the Legislature brought forward without change in Laws 2023, ch. 443, § 23. The tire section was itself last touched by Laws 2001, ch. 596, § 63, effective July 1, 2001, which is when the highway agency reference became the Mississippi Department of Transportation; its roots run back to Laws 1938, ch. 200 and Code 1942, § 8254.

Section 63-7-7 makes it a misdemeanour to drive or move on any highway a vehicle equipped in any manner in violation of Chapter 7, and it reaches the owner who causes or knowingly permits the vehicle to be moved as well as the driver. Section 63-7-67 sets no penalty of its own, so the general scale in § 63-9-11(2) applies: not more than $100 or ten days for a first conviction, not more than $200 or twenty days for a second conviction within one year, and not more than $500 or six months for a third or subsequent conviction within one year of the first.

Because Mississippi repealed its whole motor-vehicle inspection chapter, §§ 63-13-1 through 63-13-29, by Laws of 2015, ch. 417, § 1, effective July 1, 2015, no annual lane exists where a trooper would find studs before you drove on them. Enforcement is roadside only. A first-time driver charged under Chapter 7 may be eligible under § 63-9-11(3) to complete at least four hours of a court-approved traffic safety violator course within ninety days, pay a $10 election fee, and have the prosecution dismissed and the record expunged, but § 63-9-11(4) shuts that door to any holder of a Mississippi commercial driver's licence regardless of which vehicle was being driven.