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Free FMCSA safety check

Pull any carrier's safety record from the public FMCSA data: out-of-service rates, inspections, crashes, and how it compares to carriers its own size. Below, what the CSA scores mean.

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Free for every carrier. No account, no card.

What an FMCSA safety check shows

FMCSA runs a safety program called CSA (Compliance, Safety, Accountability). Inside it, the Safety Measurement System (SMS) takes the last two years of roadside inspections and crashes and sorts each carrier's record into seven categories, called BASICs:1

  • Unsafe Driving
  • Crash Indicator
  • Hours-of-Service (HOS) Compliance
  • Vehicle Maintenance
  • Controlled Substances/Alcohol
  • Hazardous Materials (HM) Compliance
  • Driver Fitness

For each category, SMS ranks a carrier against a peer group of carriers with a similar number of inspections, on a 0 to 100 percentile where a higher number is worse.1 Cross a category's intervention threshold and FMCSA flags the carrier for closer attention, like a warning letter or an investigation.1

Why the official scores are hard to find

Here is the part that trips up a lot of brokers. Since the FAST Act of 2015, FMCSA removed property (freight) carriers' BASIC percentiles and alerts from public view; only the carrier, when logged in, and enforcement can see them.23 Passenger carriers' information stays public. So when you look a typical freight carrier up on the government's SAFER site, you can see its inspection and crash counts, but not where it actually ranks against its peers.

The underlying inspection and crash data is still public. fleetfax computes its own peer estimates from that public data and labels them as estimates, not official CSA scores, so you get the peer context the public site hides, with the individual inspections and crashes behind every number. See what that looks like in a full report.

A safety rating is not a CSA score

Two different things get mixed up constantly. A safety rating (Satisfactory, Conditional, or Unsatisfactory) comes from a full FMCSA compliance review of the carrier.4 A CSA score is a BASIC percentile from rolling inspection data. They are not the same, and most carriers have neither a good rating nor a bad one: about 94% of freight carriers have no safety rating at all, because FMCSA never audited them.5

So "unrated" does not mean unsafe, it usually just means no audit. And a "Satisfactory" rating can be years old. That is exactly why the rolling inspection record, and how a carrier compares to its peers, carries the weight.

How to read a safety check

  • Compare, don't just count. Ten violations means nothing without knowing how a similar-size carrier usually performs. A percentile or out-of-service rate well above peers is the signal, not the raw total.
  • Watch the trend. A carrier whose crashes doubled in the last year looks the same as a stable one in a flat 24-month count. The direction matters.
  • No rating is normal. An unrated carrier is the rule, not a warning. Read the inspections instead.
  • It describes, it doesn't decide. A safety check tells you where a carrier stands. What you do with that is your call.

Common questions

Are a carrier's CSA scores public?

Mostly no. Since the FAST Act of 2015, FMCSA removed property (freight) carriers' BASIC percentiles and alerts from public view; only the carrier and enforcement can see them. Passenger carriers' information stays public. The underlying inspection and crash data is still public, which is what fleetfax uses to compute its own peer estimates.

What are the seven CSA BASICs?

Unsafe Driving, Crash Indicator, Hours-of-Service (HOS) Compliance, Vehicle Maintenance, Controlled Substances/Alcohol, Hazardous Materials (HM) Compliance, and Driver Fitness. FMCSA's Safety Measurement System scores each from the last two years of inspections and crashes.

Is a safety rating the same as a CSA score?

No. A safety rating (Satisfactory, Conditional, or Unsatisfactory) comes from a full FMCSA compliance review. A CSA score is a BASIC percentile from rolling inspection data. About 94% of freight carriers have no safety rating at all because FMCSA never audited them, so "unrated" does not mean unsafe.

What does "out of service" mean?

It is an inspector's order that a truck or driver may not operate until a specific problem is fixed. A carrier's out-of-service rate, how often its trucks or drivers were pulled out of service per inspection, is one of the clearest safety signals in the public record.

Sources

  1. FMCSA, Safety Measurement System (SMS) Methodology and CSA program. csa.fmcsa.dot.gov · SMS Methodology (PDF)
  2. Fixing America's Surface Transportation (FAST) Act of 2015, Pub. L. 114-94. congress.gov
  3. FMCSA Analysis & Information, SMS public-display notice (property percentiles removed; Crash Indicator and HM Compliance hidden; passenger carriers public). ai.fmcsa.dot.gov/SMS
  4. FMCSA safety ratings and compliance reviews, 49 CFR 385. ecfr.gov
  5. FMCSA Pocket Guide to Large Truck and Bus Statistics, 2021 data (about 94% of rating-eligible interstate freight carriers unrated). fmcsa.dot.gov

fleetfax peer percentiles are our own estimates computed from public FMCSA inspection and crash data, not official CSA scores. This page is general information, not legal advice. fleetfax is not affiliated with FMCSA or the U.S. Department of Transportation.