How we check what is on this site

Where the data comes from

Federal carrier records

Federal records come from data.transportation.gov, the publishing platform of the US Department of Transportation. We read the datasets below and store the fields we publish, together with the date we read them.

• Carrier authority and insurance on file — 6eyk-hxee
• Fleet size, drivers and the MCS-150 filing date — kjg3-diqy
• Insurance policies on file — qh9u-swkp
• Crash records — aayw-vxb3
• Inspection records — fx4q-ay7w

Those links are the machine resources we import from, and they are here so that the source of the import is named rather than described. Beside each carrier on the site there is a link to the same record in a form made for reading.

About SAFER

SAFER is the agency's own carrier lookup, and for most people it is the first place they would check a carrier. We put no SAFER link on this site. From our network the fmcsa.dot.gov hosts answered 403 when we checked them on 7 August 2026, so we cannot check that such a link would open for you, and a link we cannot check does not belong on a page about checking. We point at the same records on data.transportation.gov, where we can check it.

The operator's own site

For what an operator does — when it leaves, what it charges, how it takes payment, in which language it serves, what it accepts as a parcel — the operator's own site is the source, because the operator is the one who decides those things.

It is not the source for federal status. Authority, insurance on file and fleet counts are kept by the agency, so we take them from the agency even where the operator states them itself.

What is not a source

Aggregators, business listings, directories and content sites are not sources here. From a listing we take at most the fact that a company exists and a link to follow. No value shown on this site comes from one.

How an operator is matched to a federal record

An operator appears here only when we can tie it to a federal record with strong evidence. There is no level between strong and none.

• A USDOT number published by the operator itself, on its own site or in its own documents. The status behind that number still comes from the agency, not from the operator.
• Or an exact match of the legal name or the trade name, plus the state, plus the city.

A name match has to be the only one in that city. Two carriers with the same name in one city is an unclear case, not a strong match, even when one of them looks like the obvious answer. We ran into exactly that, and the answer was to publish neither.

Weak evidence is never published: a similar name with no city, a match in another state, a phone number found in a listing, or choosing one of several same-named companies because it seemed more likely.

Why this list is not everyone

The operators on this site are not everyone who runs these routes. They are the operators we were able to match to a federal record under the rule above.

That is a statement about our method, not about the companies you do not see here. A company missing from this page may be entirely ordinary. We simply could not match it with the kind of evidence we accept, so we left it out rather than guess.

For the same reason you will not read the words "not found in the federal register" anywhere on this site. Finding nothing with our search says something about our search, not about a company.

Two dates, and why they differ

Every federal block carries two dates. One is the day the agency published the data we read. The other is the day we read it.

They differ because the agency publishes on its own schedule and we check on ours. Where a block was built from several datasets, the published date we show is the oldest of them: a record is no fresher than its least fresh input.

The observation window

Counts of crashes and inspections are counts of records dated between two days, and those two days are printed next to the numbers.

We print dates instead of a phrase such as "over the last 24 months" because a phrase goes out of date in silence while the page keeps repeating it. Two fixed days cannot do that.

The linked record holds every row for that carrier, including rows outside our window, so the number you see there will usually not be the number here. Nothing on this site says the two are the same.

What we refuse to work out

We do not calculate safety scores. We do not rank carriers, we do not sort them by crashes, and we do not compare one against another.

A carrier with a large fleet and a carrier with three vans cannot be compared by a raw count, and dividing by fleet size would be our own judgement rather than a fact from the source. That is why the counts always sit in one block with the fleet size, the driver count and the dates of the window.

What we do not publish

• Codes we have no dictionary for. Some fields arrive as codes, and where the source's own dictionary does not explain one, any label we put beside it would be our guess.
• Insurance policy numbers. That insurance is on file is public and useful; the policy number is neither.
• Records of an authority being revoked. We neither store nor show them, even where the source holds them: a status we cannot explain, published about a working company, does harm we could not undo.

How records age

• Up to six months old: shown normally, with its check date.
• Six to twelve months: shown with a visible warning that it has not been checked again.
• Over twelve months: the page stays online at the same address, asks not to be indexed and drops out of our sitemap.

Telling us about a mistake

If a value here is wrong, write to [email protected]. Say which page and which line, and give the source you are going by if you have one.

We check the source again and either correct the record with a new check date or take it down if it cannot be confirmed. A correction moves the date shown beside the value, so you can see that it was looked at.