CarrierChk sources all carrier authority, insurance, and safety data directly from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) MCMIS database — the same system that powers the official FMCSA SAFER website. This page explains exactly what we verify, where each data point comes from, how current it is, and what our limitations are.
Every piece of carrier data displayed on CarrierChk originates from the FMCSA Motor Carrier Management Information System (MCMIS) — the federal government's authoritative database for all registered US motor carriers. This is the same underlying data that powers:
We do not supplement, estimate, or editorialize any of the core compliance fields. Authority status, insurance records, safety ratings, and inspection data are shown exactly as they appear in FMCSA's system.
We do calculate a small number of figures ourselves — out-of-service rates, peer rankings, and the vetting notes and flags on each profile. These are clearly labelled as CarrierChk calculations wherever they appear, and section 5 below explains exactly how each one is derived. None of them is an FMCSA rating, and we never present them as one.
The Motor Carrier Management Information System is maintained by the US Department of Transportation's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. It contains registration, authority, insurance, inspection, and crash records for all commercial motor carriers operating in interstate commerce.
Why not scrape SAFER directly? We ingest the FMCSA bulk data files that FMCSA publishes for third-party use, combined with daily delta feeds. This gives us faster response times and 100% coverage, whereas scraping SAFER would be slower and less complete.
The following table shows each data category on CarrierChk carrier profiles, its source within FMCSA MCMIS, and what exactly we display:
| Data Field | FMCSA Source | What It Shows |
|---|---|---|
| Operating Authority | MCMIS Authority table | Active, Inactive, or revocation pending. Separate flags for Common, Contract, and Broker authority. |
| Insurance Coverage | MCMIS Insurance table | BI&PD and cargo policy amounts, insurer name, and any active cancellation filings from FMCSA Form BMC-91/91X. |
| Pending Cancellations | MCMIS Pending Insurance table | Active cancellation filings — shown with effective date when present. This is the earliest warning signal for coverage lapses. |
| Safety Rating | MCMIS Carrier table (safety_rtg field) | Satisfactory, Conditional, or Unsatisfactory. Issued by FMCSA after a compliance review. Not all carriers have one on file. |
| Out-of-Service Rate | CarrierChk calculation from MCMIS inspection data | The share of the carrier's roadside inspections in the last 24 months that resulted in an out-of-service order, shown with separate vehicle and driver rates. Requires at least 5 inspections in the window — below that, a single stop distorts the figure, so we show nothing rather than a misleading number. |
| Peer Percentile | CarrierChk calculation | Where the carrier's out-of-service rate ranks against carriers with a comparable number of inspections (5–9, 10–24, 25–99, or 100+). Lower is better. This is our ranking, not an FMCSA score, and it is not the FMCSA SMS percentile. |
| Inspection Records | MCMIS Inspections table | Up to 50 most recent inspections including date, state, inspection level, vehicle, violations, and OOS orders. |
| OOS Rates | Calculated from MCMIS inspection data | Driver and vehicle out-of-service rates, calculated from inspection records and compared to current national averages (5.5% driver / 20.7% vehicle). |
| Authority History | MCMIS Authority History table | Timeline of authority grants, revocations, and reinstatements. Used to calculate how long a carrier has held active authority. |
| Fleet Size | MCMIS Carrier / MCS-150 filing | Power units, tractors, trucks, and trailers reported on the carrier's most recent MCS-150 form filed with FMCSA. |
| Driver Count | MCMIS Carrier / MCS-150 filing | Total drivers and CDL drivers reported on MCS-150. This is self-reported by the carrier — not independently verified. |
| Cargo Types | MCMIS Carrier table | Commodity types the carrier is registered to haul, drawn from their FMCSA registration. |
| Contact Information | MCMIS Carrier table | Physical and mailing address, phone, fax, and email on file with FMCSA. This is what the carrier self-reported — not independently verified. |
CarrierChk synchronizes with the FMCSA data system daily. This matches the update cadence of the official FMCSA SAFER system. Here is what changes at each update cycle:
Important: For time-critical decisions, always treat our data as a same-day snapshot, not a real-time feed. If a carrier's authority was revoked in the last few hours, it may not yet be reflected. For extremely high-value loads, verify directly against the FMCSA SAFER system at safer.fmcsa.dot.gov.
Most of what you see on a carrier profile is federal data reproduced as-is. A few figures are ours. We list them here so you always know which is which, and so you can judge whether our reasoning is sound rather than taking a number on trust.
We count the carrier's roadside inspections from the last 24 months and calculate what share of them resulted in an out-of-service order. We show the overall rate plus separate vehicle and driver rates, because a carrier can be strong on one and weak on the other.
Vehicle rates are calculated from Level I and Level II inspections, driver rates from Level I and Level III — the inspection types where each is actually assessed. We require at least 5 inspections in the 24-month window before showing anything. Below that, a single out-of-service order produces a 20–100% rate that says more about sample size than about the carrier. Carriers under that threshold show no rate at all rather than a zero, because a zero would read as a clean record when it really means "not enough data".
We rank each carrier's out-of-service rate against other carriers with a similar number of inspections — 5–9, 10–24, 25–99, or 100 or more. A carrier with six inspections is not meaningfully comparable to one with six hundred, so we do not rank them together.
Peer groups are national rather than by state. Safety performance is not a geographic property, and ranking a carrier only against its neighbours would make the same record look different depending on where the business is registered.
This is not the FMCSA SMS percentile. FMCSA publishes its own percentile system with different inputs, different weighting and its own alert thresholds. Ours is a simpler measure built only from out-of-service outcomes. Where FMCSA has published a safety rating for a carrier, that rating is shown separately and is FMCSA's, not ours.
The vehicles listed on a profile are the tractors and trailers recorded in that carrier's roadside inspections. FMCSA's inspection records include the VIN of each unit inspected, so this is federal data — but the year, make and model beside each VIN are not. Those we decode ourselves from the VIN using the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's public vPIC database, the same reference used to identify vehicles for recalls.
Model year comes from the VIN standard, which encodes year on a 30-year repeating cycle. For older equipment this can occasionally be ambiguous, and a long-serving trailer may show a year three decades off. We publish the decoded value as-is rather than guessing at a correction.
A vehicle appearing here means it was inspected while operating for this carrier at some point in the available records. It is not proof the carrier still owns or operates that unit today, and the list is not a complete fleet inventory — only equipment that has actually been stopped for an inspection appears. Where a VIN cannot be decoded, we show it as recorded without inventing details.
The notes and coloured flags on each profile are generated from the underlying records — an expired filing, a pending insurance cancellation, recently granted authority, an elevated out-of-service rate. Each one points at a specific fact you can check for yourself further down the same page. They are prompts to look closer, not verdicts about a business, and we deliberately do not combine them into a single overall score.
A metric we removed: until August 2026 these profiles displayed a "Safety Percentile" attributed to FMCSA SMS. It was in fact derived from how complete a carrier's registration record was — whether a phone number, address and email were on file — and not from safety performance at all. A carrier with sparse paperwork could appear to have elevated violations. We have removed it and replaced it with the out-of-service rate described above, which measures actual inspection outcomes. We are noting it here rather than quietly deleting it, because anyone who read a profile before that date may have seen it.
CarrierChk does not have data on everything. Here is what we explicitly do not provide:
We display what the carrier reported to FMCSA — including their name, address, and contact information. We do not independently verify that the person contacting you is actually affiliated with the carrier whose MC or DOT number they provided. Identity fraud and carrier impersonation exist. Always cross-check the contact details in our system against what the carrier gave you directly.
Insurance data reflects FMCSA's records, which are updated by insurers when they file changes with FMCSA. If an insurer has not yet filed a cancellation or if a policy lapsed without FMCSA notification, our records will not reflect it. For critical loads, call the insurer directly to confirm active coverage.
Carriers that operate as private carriers (hauling their own goods) may have a USDOT number but no MC number. Their authority structure differs from for-hire carriers and the absence of an MC number is not automatically a red flag for private fleets.
Carriers that operate exclusively within a single state (intrastate only) may not be registered with FMCSA and therefore will not appear in our database. These carriers are regulated at the state level.
We include Canadian and Mexican carriers that hold US FMCSA registration (US DOT numbers). Carriers that operate domestically within Canada or Mexico and do not cross into the US are not in FMCSA's database and therefore not in ours.
CarrierChk is a decision-support tool, not a substitute for a complete carrier onboarding process. For high-value or hazmat loads, supplement our data with a direct call to the carrier, certificate of insurance from the insurer, and review of the carrier's operating history.
There are two different things people usually mean by "this is wrong", and they have different answers.
We reproduce FMCSA's records. If a detail is wrong here, it is almost always wrong in the federal record, and correcting it with us would not fix it anywhere else — SAFER, brokers' systems and every other tool drawing on MCMIS would still show the old value. Corrections have to go to the source:
That is a separate request and we handle it ourselves. Use the listing removal form. You verify control of the carrier using the email address already on file with FMCSA, then choose to have the profile hidden from search engines or removed from the site entirely. Our listing policy sets out what each option does.
We do this because although this is public federal data, a large share of small carriers are owner-operators whose registered contact details are simply their home address and personal phone number. Publishing that at scale is not the same as FMCSA making it available on request, and we would rather give people a straightforward way out than argue the point.
Removal from CarrierChk does not remove the carrier from FMCSA's records, from SAFER, or from any other site that publishes the same source data.
CarrierChk is built and maintained by King Dispatch LLC, a US-based freight dispatch and logistics services company. We built CarrierChk because we use carrier verification daily in our own dispatch operations and found existing tools too slow, too expensive, or too incomplete for practical daily use.
Our team has direct operational experience in freight brokerage and carrier onboarding. The data fields we prioritize — authority status, pending insurance cancellations, authority age, and out-of-service rates — reflect what actually matters in production carrier vetting, not what looks impressive in a feature list.
We are not affiliated with the FMCSA or the US Department of Transportation. We are a private company providing a free tool that surfaces publicly available government data in a more accessible format.
Questions about our data or methodology? Contact us here.