If You Gave Blood, Your ALR Deadline Works Differently

Why There Is No DIC-25 in a Voluntary Blood Case

The DIC-25 notice of suspension exists for two situations: a refusal, or a breath test failure known at the scene. When you voluntarily give blood, neither has happened. The result will not exist until a lab tests the sample, which can take weeks or months, so there is nothing to suspend your license over on the night of the arrest and the officer should not serve a DIC-25.

That is why blood cases feel quiet at first. You go home with no license paperwork, no deadline, and often no idea a license case is coming. Whether one comes at all depends entirely on the lab number. If the result is under 0.08, no ALR suspension follows. If it is 0.08 or higher, the process below begins, and the waiting period in between is its own subject, covered on Blood Results Timeline.

The 20 Days Run from the Postmark

When a result comes back 0.08 or higher, Texas law requires DPS to mail a notice of suspension by first class mail to the address in its records, or to the address in the officer’s report if that one is different. From that mailing, you have 20 days to request the ALR hearing.

Here is the part that catches people: the window runs from the mailing, not from the day you open the envelope. Keep the envelope and check the postmark, because that date, not the day the letter surfaced from the mail pile, is what your deadline is counted against. A letter that sat unopened for a week has been quietly spending your window the entire time.

The Five-Day Presumption

The law presumes you received the notice on the fifth day after it was mailed. That presumption is what gives the mailed notice teeth: DPS does not have to prove the letter reached you, only that it was sent.

Run the math on an ordinary week. The notice is mailed on the first. You are presumed to have received it on the fifth. If the envelope actually gets opened on the twelfth, seven presumed days are already gone, and the request deadline is closing whether or not anyone in the house has read a word of it. This is the single fact that decides most missed blood-case deadlines, and almost nobody writes it down. If you gave blood, treat every piece of DPS mail as urgent the day it arrives, and if a letter has already been sitting, count from the postmark immediately.

The Address Trap: Update DPS Within 30 Days of Moving

DPS mails the notice to the address in its records, which is normally the address on your driver’s license. If that address is stale, the notice goes to your old apartment, the presumption of receipt runs anyway, and the hearing opportunity can be lost by someone who never saw a single page.

Texas law separately requires updating your address with DPS within 30 days of moving, and failing to do so is a Class C misdemeanor. So, the move that already happened is worth fixing today, for two reasons at once: it is what the law requires, and it is the only way the one letter that decides your license case actually finds you. If you gave blood and you have moved recently, updating your DPS address is the most important five-minute task on your list.

If You Were Handed a DIC-25 After a Voluntary Blood Draw

It happens. Not every officer understands the blood-case rule, and some serve a DIC-25 anyway on a voluntary draw. That is an error, because the form cannot properly issue unless there was a refusal or a specimen already known to be 0.08 or greater, and on a voluntary draw the result is unknown at arrest by definition.

If you are holding one, do two things. First, protect yourself as if the paper were valid: request the hearing inside 15 days of receiving it, because the safest reading of a defective notice is still the cautious one. Second, keep the form, because a notice that should never have issued is a defect in the State’s paperwork, and defects in the paperwork are exactly what gets examined at The ALR Hearing.

What the DPS Letter Must Say

The notice of suspension letter is not free-form. The law requires it to state the reason and statutory grounds for the suspension, the effective date, your right to a hearing, how to request one, and the deadline by which DPS must receive the request. A letter missing any of these is worth showing to a lawyer, because required contents that are absent or wrong bear on whether the notice did its legal job.

When the letter arrives, the response is the same as in every ALR case: request the hearing before the window closes, using the same routes and information checklist covered on The 15-Day Rule. And because a blood case means the State’s evidence is a lab result, the substance of the fight runs through The Blood Test.