Free tool · vetting

Free carrier vetting

  • Auto
  • DOT
  • MC
  • Name
  • Phone
  • Email

Everything the federal government records about a motor carrier is scattered across separate systems: registration, operating authority, insurance filings, roadside inspections, crashes, safety measurement, equipment. The SAFER snapshot most brokers check reads just one of them. Nobody vetting a carrier has time to open all the rest, and the raw feeds are noisy. fleetfax pulls the public record together into one report, cleans it, and surfaces what matters.

fleetfax cross-references the sources: the trucks a carrier runs against the trucks it reports, its identity against carriers whose authority was already pulled, its safety against peer carriers. You see how the pieces line up, or don't, instead of one slice at a time.

fleetfax reads 40+ million federal records: 2.2M+ active USDOT numbers, 9.2M inspections, 5.0M crashes, 7.4M insurance records, plus authority changes, out-of-service orders, and safety-measurement records. Sizes as of Oct 4, 2026.

How to vet a carrier in three steps

Step 1

Search the carrier

Enter a USDOT or MC number, company name, phone, or email. fleetfax pulls the matching federal record.

Step 2

Read the report

Risk flags up top, then authority, insurance, safety vs peers, inspections, crashes, fleet detail, and an operating map.

Step 3

Come back to it

Each carrier has a permanent link. It always opens today's report, not a copy of what you saw before. The report states the date its data was pulled.

What the report looks like

One carrier, pulled together from the federal record.

The read
Findings first, each one you can open
A fleetfax summary card reading Blocking issues found, 3 blocking and 2 cautions. The blocking group names an inactive USDOT record, inactive operating authority and no active insurance on file, with the first one opened to its evidence. Below it a Serious issues found group names an officer also listed on a revoked carrier and a crash rate above the federal benchmark, and a Cautions group names more units observed than reported and a previous revocation.
fleetfax reads the public federal record for a carrier, reconciles it, and leads with what matters. Blocking issues are the hard ones, like an inactive authority or no insurance on file. Serious issues are findings that are grave and still legal, so they get their own tier rather than reading as blockers. Cautions sit beneath both. Several findings here only exist because we cross-reference sources, like an officer who also appears on a carrier whose authority was pulled. Reading it. Blocking and caution describe the record, not a decision. Every finding opens to the data behind it, so you can judge it yourself.
Where they operate
A map built from inspections, not an address
fleetfax operating map drawn from 176 roadside inspections across 37 counties, with activity traced along the I-44, I-49, I-70 and I-55 corridors on the real road geometry, a domicile marker on Springfield, Missouri, a toggle for showing inspections, crashes or both, and a 24-month bar chart of monthly activity
Every roadside inspection carries a location and a date. fleetfax plots them: bigger dots mean more inspections in a place, and the shading shows the carrier's real operating footprint over the window you choose. This one is built from 176 inspections across 37 counties, with the interstates the activity lines up along drawn in and recorded crashes on their own layer. Reading it. This is where the trucks were actually pulled in, which is hard to fake. Compare it to the address and lanes the carrier claims. One domiciled in a state but only ever seen far from it is worth a question.
Safety vs peers
Measured against the carriers it compares to
The fleetfax FMCSA BASIC categories table: crash rate, unsafe driving, hours of service, vehicle maintenance, controlled substances and driver fitness, each with a percentile bar against the peer median and the alert zone, the 24-month violation count and the inspections behind it, and an outlined status chip. A line above states the date the safety data runs through.
fleetfax groups a carrier with others that have a similar amount of inspection activity. It weighs each violation by severity and age, per relevant inspection, following FMCSA's Safety Measurement System method. The result is shown as a percentile. These are fleetfax estimates, not official FMCSA scores. Reading it. A high percentile means more violations than most similar carriers, not a pass or fail. The alert zone marks roughly where FMCSA steps in. The counts and the inspections behind each bar are all there.
The fleet
The trucks observed on the road, decoded
The fleetfax fleet check, marked Consistent: 42 power units reported on the MCS-150 against 38 seen in inspections over 24 months, 47 drivers at about 1.1 per truck, 4.1 million annual miles on the 2025 MCS-150, cargo declared as general freight, building materials, machinery and large objects against dry van, flatbed and reefer observed, and 3 units first seen in the last 6 months
A decoded equipment table: one row per truck or trailer seen in a roadside inspection, with its type, plate and plate state, make and model, model year, trailer length, weight class, the VIN each was decoded from, and when it was last seen
fleetfax decodes the VIN of every truck and trailer seen in a carrier's inspections, then dates and classifies the equipment and compares its age to other carriers of the same size. It also lines the observed fleet up against what the carrier reports on its MCS-150. Reading it. This is the fleet on the road, not a number on a filing. A mismatch, like equipment plated far from the carrier's base, is the kind of thing worth asking about.

Product views: every carrier name, number, date and amount is fictional; the layouts and wording are the product’s own.

What's in every report

Free, for any carrier, with the records behind each line.

Status and operating authority

Whether it's active and which authority types it holds, with the full history of grants, revocations, and reinstatements. An authority revoked once and reinstated looks active today, but reads differently with the history attached.

Insurance on file

The filings on record, with a routine renewal told apart from a cancellation the federal filing ledger confirms, so a normal renewal never reads as a lapse. No active insurance on file surfaces as a blocking issue.

Safety vs peer carriers

Safety percentiles against peer carriers and crash rate per million miles, with the inspections and crashes behind every number.

Where they're observed to operate

A map drawn from where the carrier's trucks were actually inspected, so you can see where it really runs. A lot harder to fake than the address on a filing.

Fleet, reconciled

The trucks reported on the MCS-150 against the trucks actually seen in inspections, plus equipment age vs peers. When the reported fleet and the observed fleet don't line up, that surfaces as a flag.

Cross-referenced risk signals

The identity-overlap patterns behind double-brokering and reincarnated carriers, surfaced by reconciling a carrier's record against the rest of the federal data. Each one is a named flag with the evidence behind it.

Vetting that surfaces facts, not a pass or fail

Fraud and double-brokering are the industry's biggest worry right now, and a carrier built to scam is built to pass a quick glance. Reports to the Transportation Intermediaries Association rose 65% in the six months ending February 2025, and 22% of respondents reported more than $200,000 in losses in a single six-month period. Reading deeper is the whole point: authority granted last week with no inspection history, an open out-of-service order, no insurance on file, or a phone, address or officer that also appears on a carrier whose authority was revoked. fleetfax surfaces each of those as a named flag with the record attached.

Source: TIA, “State of Fraud in the Industry,” April 2025 (survey of the six months ending February 2025). news.tianet.org

The exposure isn't only financial. In May 2026, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II that brokers can face state negligence claims over the carriers they select. That makes a carrier's federal record matter more than it used to.

Source: Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, No. 24-1238, decided May 14, 2026.

fleetfax is descriptive by design. It tells you what the record shows (blocking issues found, a count of cautions, or nothing flagged as of the day you check) and links every claim to its evidence. It will never call a carrier safe or clear to book. A clean report is one input to your decision, not a replacement for your process.

Free carrier vetting FAQ

Is carrier vetting on fleetfax really free?

Yes. Carrier reports are free at full depth, with a daily limit: no trial and no credit card. Read 5 a day without an account, 15 with a free one. Past the limit you still see FMCSA's record and insurance filings for the carrier, without contact details. A carrier's phone and email need a free account. A carrier's federal record is always free.

What does fleetfax check when vetting a carrier?

Operating authority and status, insurance filings on file, roadside inspections and out-of-service rates, crashes, fleet and equipment detail, a map of where they are observed to operate, and named risk flags including the identity-overlap patterns behind double-brokering, all read from the public FMCSA datasets.

Does fleetfax decide whether to book the carrier?

No. fleetfax gives you the facts and the patterns: the public record, the cross-referenced signals, and the evidence behind each one, so you can make an informed call. The decision to book is always yours. fleetfax never says safe-to-book or do-not-book, and it computes no single score.

Do I need an account or a credit card?

Not for your first 5 reports a day. A free account gives you 15 a day, the carrier's phone and email, and monitoring for the carriers in your book.

How is free fleetfax different from other vetting tools?

fleetfax goes deeper on the single-carrier read. The data is public, so we ingest the federal record ourselves and reconcile it: safety against peer carriers, a map of where the carrier is observed to operate, the fleet checked against what it reports, and the identity-overlap signals behind double-brokering. Carrier reports are free, with a daily limit, and the first 5 a day need no account.

Start from a number with the free MC number lookup or free DOT number lookup, run a free FMCSA safety check, check is this carrier legit, or browse the carrier directory.

fleetfax reads public FMCSA data and is not affiliated with FMCSA or the U.S. Department of Transportation. A clean report is not legal cover or a substitute for your own process or policy.

Vet any carrier, free.

Search by USDOT, MC, company name, phone or email. The full report is free, with a daily limit.

Run a free carrier check

Prefer it in your browser? Get the Chrome extension →