What happens if you don't pay impound in Richmond

An unpaid tow in {c} sits at Seibert's Towing's contracted lot, where the state's lien-notice clock and the $500 lien-storage cap both apply the same as anywhere else in Virginia.

The fastest way to confirm a Richmond tow isn't a phone call, it's the city's own towed-vehicle listing at apps.richmondgov.com/applications/towviewing. It posts make, model, color, partial VIN, partial plate, and lot address for 14 days after a tow, and the city itself recommends checking it before filing a stolen-vehicle report. Every police-directed tow in Richmond runs through Seibert's Towing, the city's exclusive contractor since 1992 under a contract renewed by City Council Ordinance 2016-176, at a 19-acre secured lot on Southside Plaza Dr. Call Seibert's at (804) 233-5757, or Richmond's non-emergency line at (804) 646-5100, if the listing doesn't answer it. Tows happen during "Peak Towing" hours, 7 to 9 a.m. and 4 to 6 p.m., from tow-away zones, for three or more unpaid tickets, or after an accident. Most routine pulls are for street cleaning and special events, not violations. An Advisory Board has overseen Richmond's towing program since 1996. City Council reportedly raised the local hookup fee toward $195 in a November 2025 vote, but no Richmond tow can exceed Virginia's $210 statewide ceiling, and the first 24 hours of storage is always free by law. Confirm the current figure with Seibert's or the city.

Richmond is the hub city here, the busiest call area on the map, running from Downtown and Court End through The Fan, Carytown, Scott's Addition, Church Hill, Manchester, Shockoe Bottom, and Northside out to the Southside corridor along Midlothian Turnpike. Each of those neighborhoods carries its own dedicated page. The city's defining call type sits right at its center: the I-95/I-64 overlap, the three-mile stretch VDOT itself calls one of the highest-crash, most congested corridors in the region, carrying roughly 149,000 vehicles a day past the Bryan Park Interchange. A stall or fender-bender there backs up fast, with almost nowhere for surface streets already at capacity to absorb the overflow. Winter brings its own signature call. Richmond's freeze-thaw cycle, repeated swings above and below freezing rather than one long deep freeze, chews potholes into the pavement all winter into early spring, and any hard ice advisory (the region still measures itself against the 1998 Christmas ice storm that cut power to 400,000 Virginians) means dead batteries and slide-outs stacking up fast. VCU's roughly 29,000 students concentrate move-in, move-out, and semester-break parking chaos into the narrow one-way streets of The Fan and Court End, and General Assembly session traffic layers state-employee commuter volume onto the same downtown blocks. We cover Downtown, VCU Medical Center, and the Capitol district, and the operators we dispatch run flatbed through downtown's tight one-way grid and for anything caught in standing water near Shockoe Bottom, with wheel-lift covering the ordinary breakdown everywhere else.