Methodology
Sources and limitsWhere these numbers come from
The data
Three public FMCSA datasets, published on data.transportation.gov and free to use:
| File | What it holds | Records |
|---|---|---|
| Company Census | Identity, address, fleet size, operating status | 4,480,554 |
| Vehicle Inspection File | Every roadside inspection, with violation and out-of-service totals | 8,329,380 |
| Inspections and Violations | The specific violation cited at each inspection | 13,468,815 |
The inspection file covers a rolling window, currently about three years. A carrier page shows a recent record, not a lifetime one.
How a name search works, and why it misses some carriers
Searching by name looks through the inspection file, not the registration census. That choice matters more than anything else here.
The census holds 4.5 million registrations and most describe no operating business. Searching one large carrier's name there returns nine records, four of them identical inactive shells with zero vehicles and zero inspections. Ranking them by reported fleet size makes it worse: the field is self-reported, and 1,073 active carriers claim more than 10,000 power units while 116 claim more than 100,000, against a largest real US fleet in the low tens of thousands.
The inspection file records the carrier name as an inspector wrote it at the roadside, across millions of stops. A carrier appears only if it has genuinely been inspected, so the shells are excluded by construction. Spelling variants come free, because inspectors wrote them: "JB HUNT" and "J B HUNT" both resolve to the same carrier.
The trade-off is deliberate. A carrier with no inspections can't be found by name. It has no record to show, and that absence is itself worth knowing. Anyone holding its DOT number can still look it up directly.
What the verdict means, and what it isn't
The line at the top of a carrier page describes its roadside inspection record: how many inspections, how many ended with a vehicle or driver ordered out of service.
It isn't a safety rating. FMCSA issues Satisfactory, Conditional and Unsatisfactory ratings through a separate compliance review, and most carriers have never been rated at all. Computing a figure and presenting it as if it were that rating would be inventing a number and attributing it to the government, so this site doesn't.
What gets a page
200 violation codes, 51 states and 250 carriers are published as pages. Every one of the roughly 667,000 carriers with an inspection history is reachable, generated when someone looks it up, but only the list above is submitted for indexing.
That's a deliberate limit rather than a technical one. A new site can't get hundreds of thousands of pages crawled, and pages that go uncrawled drop out of search anyway, taking crawl budget from the ones that would have earned something. Carriers get added to the published list when they show they deserve it.
What this site isn't
It isn't affiliated with FMCSA or the Department of Transportation. It doesn't show insurance status or operating authority, both of which you should confirm with FMCSA directly. Nothing here is legal or business advice, and none of it should be the only check you make before tendering a load.
Curated page set built 2026-08-08. Carrier records refresh daily. Source: FMCSA via data.transportation.gov. Look up a carrier