Keelway
Carrier vetting checklist

How to vet a carrier

Last updated

Nine checks, in order, every one of them free. This is the carrier vetting process written out the way a broker actually runs it — what to look at, exactly where it lives in the public FMCSA record, and what bad looks like when you find it. Run it by hand and it works. Run it on every carrier that emails you and it stops being realistic, which is the whole problem.

~5%
Driver out-of-service national average
FMCSA roadside inspections
~20%
Vehicle out-of-service national average
FMCSA roadside inspections
36 mo
Insurance cancellation lookback
FMCSA Licensing & Insurance

The nine-step carrier vetting checklist

Run them in this order. The first five are the ones that stop a booking outright. The last four are the ones that catch the carrier who passes the first five on paper and is still not who they say they are.

  1. Step 01

    Confirm the MC or DOT is real and active

    Pull the entity by its MC or DOT number. Confirm it exists, that the legal name matches the name on the email and the rate confirmation, and that operating authority — common, contract, or both — is active and FMCSA lists the entity as allowed to operate.

    Where to look
    SAFER company snapshot (safer.fmcsa.dot.gov) for the census record and the allowed-to-operate flag. FMCSA Licensing & Insurance (li-public.fmcsa.dot.gov) for the authority record itself: active, pending, or revoked.
    What bad looks like
    Authority status is anything other than active. FMCSA flags the entity as not authorized. There is an out-of-service order in effect. Or the MC resolves to a legal name that is not the company writing to you — the oldest trick in the book is pasting a real carrier's MC into your own signature block.
  2. Step 02

    Check the authority age

    Find the date the operating authority was granted, and how long the entity has actually been running under it. New authority is not disqualifying — every legitimate carrier was new once — but it is the single most common trait of a fraudulent MC, so it is the trigger to tighten every other step on this list.

    Where to look
    Licensing & Insurance, authority history: the grant date, plus any revocation and reinstatement in between.
    What bad looks like
    Granted less than six months ago. Worse: under six months old with twenty or more power units — legitimate fleets do not materialize at that size, and that combination is the classic reincarnated-carrier signature. Also worth a hard look: authority revoked at any point in the last 36 months.
  3. Step 03

    Check insurance on file against insurance required

    Compare the BIPD coverage actually filed with FMCSA against what this carrier's authority requires — $750,000 for general freight, more for certain hazardous materials. Then read the filing history: who the insurer is, when the policy took effect, and every cancellation in the last 36 months.

    Where to look
    Licensing & Insurance, insurance tab: insurer name, policy number, coverage amount, effective date, and the full history of filings and cancellations. Do not treat the certificate the carrier emails you as proof — a COI is a PDF, and anyone can edit a PDF. Pull it from L&I, or call the insurer's office directly.
    What bad looks like
    Coverage on file below the amount required, or no active BIPD filing at all. Two or more cancellations in 36 months — insurers cancel for non-payment and for loss history, and neither is a good sign. A policy that took effect two days ago on a carrier that has been around for years.
  4. Step 04

    Check the safety rating and the out-of-service rates

    FMCSA issues one of three ratings after a compliance review: Satisfactory, Conditional, Unsatisfactory. Most carriers have no rating at all, because most have never been reviewed — an unrated carrier is not a red flag. Then look at the out-of-service rates: what share of this carrier's roadside inspections ended with a driver or a truck pulled off the road.

    Where to look
    SAFER company snapshot: the rating and its date, plus the 24-month inspection table with driver and vehicle out-of-service counts and rates.
    What bad looks like
    Unsatisfactory — the worst rating FMCSA issues, and most shipper contracts and cargo policies exclude it outright. Conditional means FMCSA found the carrier's safety management controls inadequate. A driver out-of-service rate above roughly 5%, or a vehicle rate above roughly 20%, is worse than the national norm; the vehicle number in particular tends to mean deferred maintenance.
  5. Step 05

    Read the BASIC scores — and know what they are not

    The BASIC categories are FMCSA's behavioral buckets: unsafe driving, hours-of-service compliance, driver fitness, controlled substances and alcohol, vehicle maintenance, and hazardous materials compliance. They are built from roadside inspection violations, weighted by severity and recency. Crashes are tracked separately.

    Where to look
    FMCSA's Safety Measurement System (ai.fmcsa.dot.gov/SMS) carries the underlying inspection and violation data. The percentile rankings themselves have not been public for property carriers since 2017 — read the note below before you quote a percentile to anyone.
    What bad looks like
    Any BASIC at or above the 85th percentile against peers with a comparable inspection count. A violation rate around twice the national average when no percentile is available. Scores over FMCSA's own intervention threshold — that is FMCSA saying this carrier is worth intervening on. The honest caveat: a carrier with three inspections has no meaningful BASIC score. Do not over-read thin data.
  6. Step 06

    Cross-check the phone, email, and address

    Take the contact details off the FMCSA record — not off the email — and ask one question: does this phone number, this email address, or this physical address appear on any other carrier's filings? This is the step nearly everyone skips, and it is the one that catches shells.

    Where to look
    The FMCSA Company Census file, published publicly, is the only way to do this at scale: load it, group by phone, email, and address. By hand you can approximate it — search the number, search the suite address, and see how many MC numbers come back.
    What bad looks like
    One phone number behind three or more MCs. One email address behind three or more MCs. An address shared with ten or more carriers — sometimes that is a legitimate filing agent or a truck park, and sometimes it is a mail drop with a dozen shells behind it. A single bad actor running a stable of MCs has to reuse something, and it is almost always the contact block.
  7. Step 07

    Sanity-check the fleet against the story

    Power units, driver count, reported mileage, inspection count. Four numbers that have to agree with each other — and with whatever the rep on the phone is telling you about their capacity.

    Where to look
    SAFER company snapshot: power units, drivers, the mileage figure and the year it was reported, and the roadside inspection count.
    What bad looks like
    Six-figure reported mileage with no inspection history at all. A carrier running those miles gets inspected; if it has not been, it either is not running the miles it claims or is not running them under this MC. A rep offering you forty trucks on an MC that reports two. Driver counts wildly out of step with power units in either direction.
  8. Step 08

    Confirm the truck is actually theirs

    Check whether the entity also holds broker authority. Plenty of legitimate companies hold both, so this is not a red flag on its own. But if the carrier you are covering with is also a broker, ask the question directly: is this moving on your truck, with your driver, under your authority?

    Where to look
    Licensing & Insurance lists every authority type the entity holds — motor carrier, broker, freight forwarder — on the same record.
    What bad looks like
    They hold broker authority and dodge the question. The driver's name and cell never materialize. The truck number changes twice before pickup. Get the answer in writing on the rate confirmation, put a no-re-brokering clause in your carrier packet with a chargeback attached, and read the double-brokering playbook before you cover with anyone new.
  9. Step 09

    Verify the person, not just the MC

    Every step above vets an entity. None of them vet the human in your inbox. Call the phone number on the FMCSA record — not the one in the email signature, not the one on the certificate they sent you — and ask for the person who emailed you, by name.

    Where to look
    SAFER company snapshot and the L&I record both carry the contact block the carrier filed with FMCSA. That is the number you dial.
    What bad looks like
    Nobody there has heard of them. The line is disconnected. Someone answers with a different company name. They ask you to email a different address because the main one is down. An entire class of stolen-identity fraud dies at this step, and it costs you one phone call. Then capture the driver's name and cell before pickup, and call the driver 24 hours out.
On BASIC percentiles

FMCSA stopped publishing property-carrier SMS percentiles in 2017. The percentiles CarrierVet shows are computed from FMCSA's public inspection and violation files against peer carriers with a similar inspection count. They approximate FMCSA's methodology — they are not the official score, and the panel labels them as such.

Anyone selling you an “official FMCSA score” for a property carrier is selling you something FMCSA does not publish. Use percentiles as a relative signal against peers, and never as the reason, on its own, that you turned a carrier down.

Or do eight of the nine in one highlight

The checklist, collapsed into a side panel

Those nine steps pull from four different FMCSA systems — SAFER, Licensing & Insurance, the SMS inspection files, and the Company Census. Doing it properly means a lot of tab-switching, and the honest truth is that nobody does it properly on the fortieth email of the day.

CarrierVet is a free Chrome extension that reads the same public records and renders the answer where you already are. Highlight an MC or DOT number in Gmail or Outlook on the web, click the badge, and a side panel opens with the identity and cargo classes, the authority age and status, insurance on file against insurance required with the insurer name and any cancellations in the last 36 months, the safety rating, crashes, driver and vehicle out-of-service rates, the BASIC scores, the contact cross-checks, and a Low / Medium / High risk level with the specific factors named — not a black-box number. On any other site, right-click the number and choose “Vet carrier”. Or type an MC, a DOT, or a company name into the panel’s search bar.

It reads the same public record you would. It just reads all of it, every time. Step nine it cannot do for you — but it hands you the phone number FMCSA has on file, which is the one you should be dialing.

Add to Chrome — free

Works in Gmail and Outlook on the web. Right-click lookup anywhere else.

  • Free· no account, no card
  • Public FMCSA data
  • Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc

Red flags that should stop a booking

Five findings end the conversation on their own. Any one of them is enough — you do not need a second reason, and there is no version of these that a good rate makes acceptable.

  • Not allowed to operate per FMCSA

    FMCSA has this entity flagged as not authorized to operate. There is no version of this that ends well.

  • No active operating authority

    Neither common nor contract authority is active. If they move your freight, you are the one holding the liability.

  • Active out-of-service order

    FMCSA has ordered the carrier off the road. The panel shows the date the order took effect.

  • Unsatisfactory safety rating

    The worst rating FMCSA issues. Most shipper contracts and most cargo policies exclude it outright.

  • Insurance on file below the amount required

    The filed BIPD coverage is less than what this carrier's authority requires. A claim could land on you.

The ones that only matter when they stack

Below the hard stops sits a longer tier of signals that are not disqualifying alone but are damning together. Authority under six months old. Twenty-plus power units on that same six-month-old authority. A phone number or an email address shared with three or more other carriers. An address shared with ten or more. Two or more insurance cancellations in 36 months. A Conditional safety rating. Six-figure reported mileage with no inspection history. Fatal crashes in the last 24 months. One of those is a question. Two or three of them, on the same MC, is an answer.

The full taxonomy — twenty-one rules, five that force a High rating and sixteen that carry weight — is broken out rule by rule in the carrier risk signals reference. If the pattern you are worried about is specifically a re-brokered load, start with how double brokering actually works.

What the public record cannot tell you

Every step on this page reads a government dataset. That is a real advantage and a real limit, and a vetting process that does not understand the limit will get you hit anyway.

It cannot tell you the person emailing you is who they say

FMCSA records describe an entity. Anyone who knows that entity’s MC number can type it into an email signature. A clean record on a stolen MC is still a clean record — the data is accurate, it is just describing someone who is not in your inbox. This is why step nine exists, and why it is the one step you cannot automate away.

It cannot catch a freshly compromised legitimate carrier

A carrier with eight years of authority, an insurer in good standing, and a Satisfactory rating whose email account was taken over yesterday will pass all nine checks. Nothing in the public record changes when an inbox is breached. The only defenses are out-of-band: call the number on file, confirm the driver, and be suspicious when banking details change mid-load.

It lags real-world events

Insurance filings, census updates, and inspection results land on FMCSA’s schedule, not on the day the thing happened. A cancellation that took effect this week may not surface for weeks. Contact and fleet details in the Company Census are refreshed monthly, not continuously. Anyone claiming “real-time” carrier data is describing the query, not the underlying record.

It does not rate honesty

There is no FMCSA field for “will re-broker your load.” Authority, insurance, and safety are the floor, not the ceiling. Somebody has to make the judgment call, and that somebody is you.

It does not know your history

A carrier you have run forty loads with is a materially better bet than a stranger with identical FMCSA data — and FMCSA has no idea that is true. Your own book is the dataset the government does not have, and it is the one most brokers never actually use.

Spot-checking one carrier at a time has a ceiling

The checklist works when you are looking. The problem is that you are not always looking. Post a load, get forty replies, and the vetting realistically happens on the two or three you were already inclined to call. The rest go uncovered by any process at all — and fraud, when it lands, lands in the ones nobody checked.

That is the part a browser extension cannot fix, because it needs you to highlight something. It is what the paid side of Keelway is for. The $799/mo flat broker TMS reads every inbound carrier email as it arrives, runs the FMCSA checks against every MC that replies, ranks the replies by trust, rate, and your own history with that carrier, and drafts the response in your voice — so the fortieth email gets the same vetting as the first. The carrier email automation piece is the engine underneath it. The base plan already runs the carrier check on every reply; Fraud Shield, at $199/mo, adds the deeper layer — carriers that rebranded after a bad MC, fake-MC quotes, and look-alike domains — so a risky MC is flagged before you have read the message.

CarrierVet stays free either way. It is not a trial, it does not expire, and nothing in it is gated. If all you ever want is a fast way to vet a carrier from your inbox, take it and go — that is a legitimate use of it. If you want to see the rest, book a demo or read what the whole thing costs.

Where all of this lives

Four public FMCSA systems carry everything on this page. None of them cost anything, and none of them require an account.

  • SAFER Company Snapshot — safer.fmcsa.dot.gov. The census record: legal name, DBA, address, power units, drivers, reported mileage, safety rating, crash counts, and the inspection and out-of-service table. Start here.
  • Licensing & Insurance (L&I) — li-public.fmcsa.dot.gov. The authority record and the insurance record: grant dates, revocations, authority types held, insurer name, coverage on file versus required, and every cancellation. This is the system most brokers under-use, and it holds the two facts that matter most.
  • Safety Measurement System (SMS) — ai.fmcsa.dot.gov/SMS. The inspection and violation data behind the BASICs, plus the public input files. Read the percentile caveat above before you act on a number you find here.
  • Company Census file — FMCSA publishes the full carrier census as a downloadable dataset. It is the only practical way to answer “is this phone number on anyone else’s filing?” at scale.

If you just need one number checked right now and do not want to install anything, our free FMCSA MC and DOT lookup runs the authority and safety pull in the browser. And if you are building the vetting step into a formal onboarding flow, the carrier onboarding guide covers the packet, the agreement, and where the checks belong in the sequence.

Frequently asked questions

What is the minimum you should check before covering a load?+
Five things. Operating authority is active and FMCSA lists the carrier as allowed to operate. Insurance on file meets the amount the authority requires. The safety rating is not Unsatisfactory. There is no out-of-service order in effect. And you have called the phone number on the FMCSA record and spoken to a human who knows the person emailing you. Everything else on this page lowers your risk further, but those five are the floor.
How do I check a carrier's operating authority?+
Look the MC or DOT number up in FMCSA's Licensing & Insurance system (li-public.fmcsa.dot.gov). It shows whether common and contract authority are active, pending, or revoked, and the date the authority was granted. SAFER (safer.fmcsa.dot.gov) shows the census record and whether FMCSA lists the entity as allowed to operate. Active authority in L&I plus allowed-to-operate in SAFER is the baseline. Anything else is a stop, not a conversation.
Is a brand-new MC number automatically a red flag?+
No. Every legitimate carrier was new once, and new carriers need loads. But authority granted less than six months ago is the single most common trait of a fraudulent MC, so treat it as the trigger to tighten every other check: verify the insurance filing directly rather than from their certificate, call the number on the FMCSA record, and capture the driver's name and cell before pickup. It is a reason to look harder, not an automatic decline.
Are the BASIC percentiles you see anywhere official FMCSA scores?+
FMCSA stopped publishing property-carrier SMS percentiles in 2017. The percentiles CarrierVet shows are computed from FMCSA's public inspection and violation files against peer carriers with a similar inspection count. They approximate FMCSA's methodology — they are not the official score, and the panel labels them as such.
How can I tell if a carrier is going to double-broker my load?+
Usually you cannot tell from the record alone, so the tells are indirect: the entity also holds broker authority, the fleet is far too small for the volume they are offering, the contact details turn up on other carriers' filings, and the driver's information never quite arrives. Ask directly whether the load moves on their own truck under their own authority, get that answer on the rate confirmation, and call the driver before pickup.
Can vetting catch a carrier whose email has been hacked?+
No. A real carrier with eight years of authority, current insurance, and a clean safety record whose email account was taken over yesterday looks flawless in every FMCSA dataset. The public record describes the entity, not the person typing. The defense is not a better database — it is calling the number on the FMCSA record and verifying the driver before the load moves.
Do I have to pay for a carrier vetting service?+
No. Everything in this checklist comes from public FMCSA data — SAFER, Licensing & Insurance, and the SMS inspection files — and it is free to look up by hand. Paid tools buy you speed, coverage, and monitoring, not access. CarrierVet is a free Chrome extension that runs these checks from your inbox: no account, no credit card, no seat limit.
The paid side of this

Vet every carrier that replies. Not just the ones you called.

See the demo

Related

CarrierVet →

The free Chrome extension. Highlight an MC or DOT number in Gmail or Outlook and the carrier profile opens in a side panel.

Carrier risk signals →

All twenty-one rules behind the Low / Medium / High rating, in plain English — the five that force a High and the sixteen that stack.

Double brokering →

How a re-brokered load actually happens, the tells that show up in the public record, and the contract language that gives you recourse.

Free FMCSA lookup →

Check authority, insurance, and safety on any MC or DOT number in the browser. No install, no account.

Carrier email automation →

What happens when the vetting runs on every inbound reply instead of the two you had time for.

The $799/mo flat TMS →

Triage, vetting, ranking, and drafting on every carrier email that hits your inbox. One price, every feature.