Assistance program
Alcohol Open Container Requirements
$416.8 Million committed in FY2018–FY2026
- Agency
- National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Transportation, Department of
- Assistance
- Project Grants
- CFDA number
- 20.607
- What it does
- To encourage States to enact and enforce a compliant alcohol open container law. Under Section 154, to avoid the transfer of funds, a State must enact and enforce an open container law that prohibits the possession of any open alcoholic beverage container, or the consumption of any alcoholic beverage, in the passenger area of any motor vehicle (including possession or consumption by the driver of the vehicle) located on a public highway, or the right-of-way of a public highway, in the State. 23 U.S.C. 154(b)(1)
- Who benefits
- State Departments of Transportation and State Highway Safety agencies.
- Who applies
- States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.
- Authorized by
- Highway Safety Act of 1998, as amended
- Program site
- http://www.nhtsa.gov ↗
Committed by fiscal year
* FY2026 is year-to-date — the fiscal year is still in progress, so its total is still filling in. The striped band and dashed line mark that provisional stretch.
Top recipients
By dollars committed.
How to read these numbers
- Committed through this program
Money committed under this assistance listing (its CFDA program), counted in the year each action happened.
- How it's paid
Most programs pay out one way — a grant, or a direct payment to individuals; the flow bar only appears when a program genuinely mixes types.
- Some recipients aren't itemized
For entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, the government reports one aggregate instead of naming tens of millions of people, so the recipient roster isn't part of the public record.
- Awards, counted once
An award count is the number of distinct awards with at least one action that year — each counted once, however many times it was amended.
- The colored bars
Every bar on this page splits by how the money moves:
Direct payments