Search by company name, USDOT number, or MC number and see safety, authority, insurance, and inspection data sourced directly from FMCSA.
Three ways to find a carrier or broker, depending on what you already know.
Search a carrier or broker's legal name or its "doing business as" (DBA) name — these are sometimes different, since a company's official FMCSA registration name and the name painted on its trucks don't always match. If a search doesn't turn up what you expect, try a shorter or partial version of the name.
A USDOT number is the most reliable way to look up a carrier, since it's a permanent identifier that doesn't change even if the company changes its name. If you don't know it, it's required to be displayed on the power unit itself for most for-hire carriers, and it also appears on the company's MCS-150 filing and any cab card issued to the business.
An MC number identifies a company's operating authority specifically, and it's usually the best way to look up a broker, since that's their primary public identifier. If you're not sure of a broker's or carrier's MC number, check a rate confirmation, carrier packet, or any contract paperwork exchanged before a load — it's standard practice to include it there.
Every category shown on a carrier or broker profile, and what it actually means.
FMCSA's Safety Rating — Satisfactory, Conditional, or Unsatisfactory — comes from a full on-site compliance review, though most carriers have never had one and simply show no rating on file. The BASICs breakdown is available far more often and updates monthly from real roadside inspection data across seven safety categories, giving a much more current picture than the comparatively rare formal rating.
Every lookup shows whether a carrier's or broker's operating authority is active, along with the USDOT and MC numbers tied to it. This is the fastest way to confirm a company is actually and currently allowed to haul freight for compensation or arrange it as a broker, rather than simply being registered with FMCSA in some capacity.
Carrier profiles show BIPD liability insurance on file against the federally required minimum for that carrier's cargo type. Broker profiles show BMC-84 bond status, since brokers must maintain $75,000 in financial security to legally operate — a lapse in either is one of the clearest red flags available in public FMCSA data.
Power units, driver counts, and fleet classification give a sense of a carrier's actual scale. This context matters because a one-truck operation and a 500-truck fleet carry very different operational and risk profiles, even when their compliance records look similar on paper.
Every carrier profile includes recent crash counts and roadside inspection results, including the out-of-service rate compared against the national average. Unlike percentile scores, this reflects specific, physically verified events rather than a modeled statistic.
Skipping a verification check takes no time at all — which is exactly the problem, since it's also the step most people skip right before something goes wrong. A broker whose BMC-84 bond lapsed last month can still send a rate confirmation that looks completely normal, and a carrier with a recently spiked out-of-service rate can still show up to a pickup on time. Neither problem is visible unless you actually check.
Broker fraud in particular has gotten more common as more freight gets booked digitally — double-brokering, carrier identity theft, and brokers that keep booking loads while insolvent all rely on nobody checking authority status or bond standing before money or freight changes hands. Our guide on common trucking scams walks through the patterns that come up most often, and how to check if a broker is legitimate covers the specific verification steps in more depth than fits here.
The same logic runs the other direction: a shipper or broker vetting an unfamiliar carrier wants to know its safety standing and authority status are both genuinely current, not just technically on file somewhere. None of this takes long to check — that's the whole point of a lookup tool — but it only helps if checking is actually part of your process before a load moves, not something you do after a problem shows up.
Yes, completely — there's no account, subscription, or payment required to look up any carrier or broker. The site is supported by a separate, optional factoring and insurance matching tool, not by charging for lookups.
Carrier and broker records are synced from FMCSA's public systems daily, and BASICs safety percentiles update monthly on FMCSA's own schedule. Some fields — like fleet size and driver counts — come from a carrier's MCS-150 filing, which companies only update every two years, so those specific numbers can lag even though the overall record is current.
A USDOT number is a permanent identifier nearly every carrier has, used mainly for safety tracking. An MC number is issued only when a company is granted operating authority to haul or broker freight for compensation, so it reflects legal authority to do business, not just registration. A company can have a USDOT number without an MC number, but not the other way around.
The most common reasons are a name spelled or abbreviated differently than expected, a company operating under a DBA name different from its legal name, or a carrier that hasn't been synced into our directory yet. Searching by USDOT or MC number instead of company name is usually the most reliable option if a name search comes up empty.
No — public FMCSA data is a strong starting point, not a guarantee. A carrier can have clean records and still have a problem that hasn't yet been caught by an inspection, and a broker's authority and bond being active doesn't guarantee it will pay on time. Use this data as one part of your own due diligence, not a substitute for it.