Data & Scoring Methodology

Sources

Where the data comes from

Every page on USDOT Lookup is built from public datasets published by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), an agency of the U.S. Department of Transportation. The sources are:

• The FMCSA Motor Carrier Census (MCS-150 registrations), which provides each carrier's identity, fleet size, and operating status.
• Licensing and insurance filings, which provide insurer names, coverage amounts, policy dates, and operating-authority events such as grants, revocations, and reinstatements.
• FMCSA crash and inspection files, which provide reportable crash counts and inspection results, including out-of-service orders.
• Safety Measurement System (SMS) measure data, which provides the per-carrier safety measures used for our scoring.

Freshness

How often the data updates

The database is refreshed quarterly from the latest federal files. The current snapshot is from 2026-07-20. Each page is therefore a snapshot in time, not a real-time view — a carrier's status, insurance, or authority may have changed since the snapshot was taken. Always confirm time-sensitive details against the FMCSA's SAFER system.

Scoring

How our safety scores work

Where the SMS files publish a safety measure for a carrier, we rank that carrier's measure against the distribution of measures for all carriers nationwide and convert the rank to a 0–100 score for each category (Unsafe Driving, Hours-of-Service Compliance, Driver Fitness, Controlled Substances & Alcohol, and Vehicle Maintenance). A score of 0 means the best observed measure; 100 means the worst. Higher scores indicate more safety events relative to peer carriers, so lower is better. Carriers with no published measure in a category simply show no score there — an absent score is not a clean record or a bad one, just an absence of data.

Independence

These are not official government scores

Under the Fixing America's Surface Transportation (FAST) Act, the FMCSA is restricted from publicly displaying its own relative percentile rankings for property carriers while those rankings are reviewed. The scores shown on this site are our own independent computations from the underlying public measure data. They are not the FMCSA's official CSA scores or BASIC percentiles, and they are not produced, reviewed, or endorsed by the FMCSA. We publish them because the underlying data is public and because a transparent, reproducible ranking is more useful to shippers, brokers, and insurers than no context at all.

Legal

Disclaimers

The figures on this site are raw federal data, reproduced as filed; they may be incomplete, outdated, or contain errors introduced at the source. Crash involvement does not imply fault — FMCSA crash records list all reportable crashes involving a carrier regardless of who caused them. Nothing here is legal, insurance, or business advice, and it should not be the sole basis for hiring, contracting, or credit decisions.

USDOT Lookup is independently operated and is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, the FMCSA or the U.S. Department of Transportation.