Glossary
Out-of-service (OOS) rate
When a roadside inspection finds violations severe enough that the vehicle or driver cannot legally continue, that inspection ends in an out-of-service result. A carrier's vehicle OOS rate and driver OOS rate are the percentage of its inspections that ended that way.
The benchmark
FMCSA publishes national averages for comparison, and they move. The live tracker has the current national averages for vehicles and drivers. A carrier running far above them is failing roadside inspections at a rate most carriers are not, and fleetfax flags both its vehicle and driver OOS rates. See the live national OOS tracker →
The small-sample caveat
One caveat baked into fleetfax's methodology: rates computed from a handful of inspections are noise. A carrier with three inspections and one OOS result isn't "33% OOS" in any meaningful sense, so fleetfax weighs sample size before flagging.
Not the same thing as an OOS order
The OOS rate is a report card on individual inspections. An out-of-service order is a federal shutdown of the whole carrier. Conflating them is one of the most common vetting mistakes; the rate describes performance, the order describes legal status.
Related terms
Out-of-service (OOS) order
A federal order prohibiting a carrier from operating at all, issued for causes like an imminent-hazard finding, a final Unsatisfactory rating, or failure to maintain insurance. An absolute disqualifier while active.
Roadside inspection (levels 1 to 6)
An enforcement officer's examination of a truck, its driver, or both, at weigh stations and roadside stops. The most abundant safety evidence in the public record; results feed OOS rates and CSA scoring.
CSA & the BASICs
FMCSA's safety scoring system: seven behavior categories. Official percentiles are hidden from the public for all seven; the raw data behind five of them is public.
fleetfax reads public FMCSA data and is not affiliated with FMCSA or the U.S. Department of Transportation. This page explains terminology; it is not legal advice.