fleetfax research

Most carriers have no safety rating. Here's what the data shows instead.

Published 2026-06-11 · fleetfax research

Ask the federal record for a carrier's safety rating and the most likely answer, by far, is silence. Per FMCSA's own statistics, 93.7% of interstate freight carriers eligible for a safety rating have never received one: 646,777 of 690,091 carriers as of the agency's 2021 data snapshot. Call it 94%.

Why almost nobody is rated

A safety rating (Satisfactory, Conditional, or Unsatisfactory) is issued only after an on-site compliance review, and FMCSA has the audit capacity for a few thousand reviews a year against a carrier population in the hundreds of thousands, with new authorities arriving constantly. Reviews go where the agency's prioritization sends them: crashes, complaints, intervention thresholds. The arithmetic never closes. This isn't a scandal so much as a structural fact, but it has a consequence the industry routinely ignores: the rating field is empty for the overwhelming majority of carriers a broker will ever quote.

What "Not Rated" does and doesn't mean

Two opposite mistakes get made with unrated carriers, and both are expensive.

• Reading absence as clearance. "No negative rating on file" sounds like a pass. It isn't; it means FMCSA never looked. An unrated carrier can be carrying an inspection-failure rate triple the national average, and the rating field will never say so.
• Reading absence as disqualification. A broker who declines every unrated carrier has just declined roughly 94% of the eligible market, including most small fleets, most new entrants, and a large share of perfectly safe operators who simply never drew an audit.

The rating field, for most of the market, is not evidence in either direction. The evidence lives elsewhere.

The record that exists for every carrier

The same agency that can't audit everyone publishes operational data on everyone. For any carrier, rated or not, the public federal record carries:

• Roadside inspections: every inspection, with its violations and whether the vehicle or driver was placed out of service. fleetfax's store currently holds 8.2 million inspection records.
• Out-of-service rates: the share of inspections that sidelined the truck or driver, comparable against FMCSA's published national averages (about 22.3% vehicle and 6.7% driver as of April 2026).
• Crash records: 4.9 million involvement records with severity (tow-away, injury, fatal).
• Authority and insurance history: grants, revocations, reinstatements, gaps, cancellation filings, churn.
• Registration data: fleet size, age of authority, addresses, officers, and the cross-carrier overlaps among them.

This is the data FMCSA's own prioritization runs on, and it is sufficient to build a meaningful safety read on the unrated majority: performance benchmarked against similar-size peers, trends over time, and the identity patterns that ratings never captured anyway. That is, in fact, exactly what fleetfax does with it, free, for any carrier: run a check and the report shows every layer above with the records behind it.

The post-Montgomery stakes

Since the Supreme Court's Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II decision (2026) removed federal preemption of state negligent-selection claims, the question "what did you check before tendering this load?" has legal weight for every U.S. freight broker. "The rating field was empty" describes 94% of the market; it isn't much of an answer. The defensible answer is the underlying record: checked, at booking time, with a copy retained. The data for that answer is public and free. It always was; it just wasn't usable in the time you have to book a load.

Method & sources

• Headline figure: FMCSA, Pocket Guide to Large Truck and Bus Statistics, 2022 edition (2021 data; snapshot 2022-01-28): 646,777 unrated of 690,091 rating-eligible interstate freight carriers = 93.7%. The figure is FMCSA's own; fleetfax did not adjust it.
• National out-of-service averages: FMCSA-published national averages as displayed in SAFER, as of April 2026.
• Record counts (8.2M inspections, 4.9M crashes): fleetfax's ingestion of FMCSA's published datasets, as of June 2026.
• FMCSA publishes a new Pocket Guide edition annually; this page will track the current edition.