Traffic fines in Mendoza: what the API returns and what the data shows

Provincial Law 9024 created Mendoza’s municipal administrative traffic courts, one per department, while the Road Safety Directorate of the Ministry of Security controls provincial routes and roads. Lookups and collection are centralised at the Mendoza Tax Administration (ATM), which simplifies payment but not detection: the fine still originates in a court or a route checkpoint the company does not see.

Context and authority

Voluntary payment offers a ten-percent discount if paid within three business days of the fine being issued, the shortest window among the provinces we analysed; defences are filed within five business days, three in the city of Mendoza depending on the case. Plate lookups and payment plans are available on the ATM portal and on the Ministry of Security systems.

Limitation periods follow the National Traffic Law 24.449: two years for minor offences and five for serious ones. With a three-day discount window, any process that depends on a person opening the portal is late by design.

What the API returns for this jurisdiction

The API queries the Mendoza provincial source by plate and returns each fine with the detail a rental or transport operation needs to act within the window:

• Authority, fine number and issue date, the field that starts the voluntary-payment clock.
• Offence description and reported amount.
• Status, due dates and payment plans published by the source.
• Downloadable payment slip when one exists.
• Lookup coverage and partial-result flag.

What the data shows

Mendoza is the province with the fewest fines in our sample among those that reach the publication floor: 1% of plate lookups in the period found at least one Mendoza fine. That is why we do not publish the category mix or the seasonality, which do not reach the minimum number of observations required by the data methodology.

What does hold: the median amount band is ARS 50,000 – ARS 100,000, among the lowest in the sample, and the median age of fines without a recorded resolution is 210 days. Against a three-business-day discount window, that age describes the problem precisely: fines are discovered months after the discount expired.

Case study: fleets that look up plates in Mendoza

The fleet cohort, 50 accounts with twenty or more plates and 2,040 plates in total, had fewer than fifty lookups with a Mendoza fine, below the floor to publish a share.

The case that describes the province is a rent-a-car with a harvest and a snow season: the customer returns the car, the company checks the portal at month-end and the fine lost its discount weeks ago. Looking up the plate at return time and again a few days later, automatically, is the only way to arrive within three business days; the webhook result, with the issue date in the response, allows paying with the discount or passing the fine on to the customer while the contract is still open.

How to integrate

The lookup is a POST with the plate; the API accepts the job immediately and the result arrives by status or webhook with each fine and its issue date, the field that defines the discount window.

{
  "plate": "ABC123",
  "jurisdictions": [
    "AR-M"
  ]
}

Scheduling repeated lookups per plate requires one idempotency key per operation and tolerance for partial results; the asynchronous APIs guide explains it step by step. The API page details access.

Limits and considerations

• Mendoza coverage is provincial and centralised; departmental courts are added as they are integrated.
• The Mendoza sample is small: several metrics remain suppressed until more observations are gathered.
• The issue date published by the source may differ from the notification date; the discount window is determined by the authority.
• Our data comes from user lookups and does not describe the Mendoza vehicle fleet.
• The API neither pays fines nor handles defences.