Frequently asked questions

fleetfax is a carrier intelligence platform: it combines everything the federal government records about a carrier and makes it readable in one report. It exists to make the freight industry more transparent, to make fraud harder to run, and to make real carrier vetting free for everyone, so no brokerage is priced out of knowing who it works with.

Two ways to use it: here on the website, or as a Chrome extension that brings the same check wherever you find carriers. Carrier reports are free, with a daily limit. A free account checks any carrier you open against the fleetfax starter policy and keeps a book of up to 50 carriers (launch offer through Oct 14, normally 15), with every carrier you add monitored. fleetfax Pro, for vetting at scale, adds your own saved policy and no daily limit on reports.

There is no catch. Carrier reports are free, with a daily limit: no trial, no card, and no signup for your first 5 reports a day. A free fleetfax account gives you 15 a day and shows the phone and email on file. It also checks any carrier you open against the fleetfax starter policy, rule by rule, finds carriers by lane or area, and keeps a book of up to 50 carriers (launch offer through Oct 14, normally 15), with every carrier you add monitored. Past the limit you still see FMCSA's record and insurance filings for the carrier, without contact details.

The price and any launch offer are on the pricing page, and checkout shows the price again before you pay. Pro is monthly, cancel anytime. Carrier reports stay free, with a daily limit, either way.

From the public federal record: FMCSA's published datasets covering carrier registration, operating authority, insurance filings, roadside inspections, crashes, and safety ratings. fleetfax keeps its own copy, which is why a report loads in seconds instead of making you wait on a government site.

Each report shows the date its data runs through, and the site status page shows how fresh each carrier dataset is. The ceiling is the federal source itself: FMCSA publishes different datasets on different cadences, and nothing built on the public record can be fresher than the record it reads.

USDOT number, MC number or company name, and, with a free account, phone number or email address. The name search suggests matches as you type. An MC number resolves automatically to the carrier's USDOT record, the identifier the report is built on.

Named risk signals computed from the public record: things like an active out-of-service order, no insurance on file, an out-of-service rate above the national average, or an officer also listed on a revoked carrier. Each flag states what the data shows and links to the underlying records.

No, deliberately. fleetfax is descriptive: it reports what the public record shows ("blocking issues found", "3 cautions found", "no blockers or cautions found") and puts the evidence in front of you. It never says "safe to book" or "do not book", and it computes no composite score. The booking call is yours. Different brokers run different risk policies, and no single number fits all of them.

It means the public federal record shows no blockers or cautions, which is meaningful but bounded. The record can't see yesterday's hiring decision, an unreported incident, or fraud that hasn't surfaced yet, and absence of evidence isn't proof. A clean report is a good data point inside your process, not a substitute for it.

In FMCSA's 2021 data, about 94% of rating-eligible interstate freight carriers had never received a safety rating (the agency lacks audit capacity to review more than a fraction of the industry). So "Not Rated" tells you almost nothing, and a vetting process that relies on the rating field alone is blind for most of the market. The underlying data (inspections, out-of-service rates, crashes, authority and insurance history) exists for every carrier, rated or not, and that's what fleetfax reads. Our analysis: what the data shows for unrated carriers.

No. FMCSA stopped publishing the official CSA percentiles for freight carriers in 2015, so the real scores are not visible to anyone outside the carrier and enforcement. What fleetfax shows is its own estimate, built from the same public inspection and crash records. The peer group is different for each measure: carriers with similar inspection activity for the inspection BASICs, similar segment and activity for unsafe driving, and for crash rate every carrier with enough recorded crashes and miles to rate, measured per million miles. It is a useful read on where a carrier stands, but it is a fleetfax estimate, labeled as one, never presented as CSA or an official FMCSA score.

Every report has its own permanent address, so the simplest record is the link: it always reopens that carrier, and the report states the date the federal data was pulled.

Not yet. API access is coming soon. To hear when it opens, write to [email protected].

No and no. Your first 5 carrier reports a day need no account, a fleetfax account is free when you want one, we sell no data, and carriers are not notified of lookups. The website uses ordinary analytics to understand aggregate usage. A report you run without an account is not tied to your name or email, because we don't have them.

No. fleetfax reads public FMCSA data and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to FMCSA or the U.S. Department of Transportation. A fleetfax report is information, not legal advice or a compliance certification.