CarrierScrub
What is an FMCSA safety rating?
A safety rating is FMCSA's formal finding about whether a motor carrier has adequate safety management controls. It comes from a compliance review: in the regulation's words, "an examination of motor carrier operations, such as drivers' hours of service, maintenance and inspection, driver qualification, commercial driver's license requirements, financial responsibility, accidents, hazardous materials, and other safety and transportation records to determine whether a motor carrier meets the safety fitness standard." A roadside inspection is not a compliance review, and neither is the safety audit a new entrant gets: the rule says plainly that "safety audits do not result in safety ratings."
So a rating is a statement about a carrier's management systems at the time an investigator examined them, not a score of its trucks on the road. That distinction explains most of what follows.
Satisfactory, Conditional, Unsatisfactory: what each means
| Rating | FMCSA's definition (49 CFR 385.3) | Carriers holding it, Sep 2026 | On a CarrierScrub result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Satisfactory | The carrier "has in place and functioning adequate safety management controls to meet the safety fitness standard." Controls are adequate "if they are appropriate for the size and type of operation." | 150,175 | Shown with its date. No reason code. |
| Conditional | The carrier "does not have adequate safety management controls in place" and the gaps "could result in" the kinds of occurrences the safety fitness standard lists. | 70,279 | CAUTION, with the date. |
| Unsatisfactory | The carrier "does not have adequate safety management controls in place" and the gaps have "resulted in" those occurrences. | 15,898 | CAUTION, with the date. See below for why not STOP. |
| Unrated | "A safety rating has not been assigned to the motor carrier by the FMCSA." | 4,266,115 (94.8%) | "Not rated." Never treated as a pass or as a flag. |
The difference between Conditional and Unsatisfactory is the difference between could result in and has resulted in: the same inadequate controls, before and after they have produced the violations, crashes or other occurrences the safety fitness standard describes.
Why most carriers have no rating
Ratings only come from compliance reviews, and FMCSA reviews a small fraction of the carriers it regulates. Everything else it knows about a carrier -- roadside inspections, out-of-service orders, crashes -- lives in the Safety Measurement System and produces no rating. New entrants get a safety audit, which by rule does not produce one either. The result is that 94.8% of registered carriers are unrated, including a large share of the carriers a broker tenders to every day.
So an absent rating is not a finding. It means FMCSA has never examined that carrier's management systems, which is the normal state of affairs. A vetting tool that renders "no rating" as a blank, or worse as a clean mark, is misreading the record; CarrierScrub prints "Not rated" and moves on to the sections that do carry data.
What happens to a carrier rated Unsatisfactory
The rating arrives as a letter. FMCSA gives the carrier written notice of any rating from a compliance review within 30 days. A Satisfactory rating, or one that improves a previous Unsatisfactory, is final on the date of the notice. Any other rating is first proposed, and becomes final 45 days later for carriers hauling placarded hazardous materials or passengers, and 60 days later for everyone else.
A proposed Unsatisfactory rating is, in the regulation's words, notice "that the FMCSA has made a preliminary determination that the motor carrier is 'unfit' to continue operating in interstate commerce." If the carrier does not fix the deficiencies in that window, the prohibition follows: hazmat and passenger carriers "are prohibited from operating a CMV in motor carrier operations in commerce beginning on the 46th day after the date of the FMCSA notice," all others from the 61st day, with up to 60 additional days available to a carrier FMCSA finds is making a good-faith effort. When the rating becomes final, FMCSA issues an order placing the carrier's operations out of service.
Here is the part a vetting tool has to be honest about. The rating field in FMCSA's record does not carry what happened next. A carrier that fixed its deficiencies and was upgraded shows the new rating; but the census also holds Unsatisfactory ratings dated decades ago on carriers that are still being inspected at the roadside today. One Florida carrier has carried an Unsatisfactory rating since May 1989 and was inspected 73 times in the last 24 months. Whether such a carrier may lawfully operate turns on orders, upgrades and reinstatements the rating alone does not show. That is why CarrierScrub reports an Unsatisfactory rating as CAUTION with its date, stated as the fact it is, rather than as a STOP that would claim to know the carrier's current legal standing. STOP is reserved for filings that speak for themselves: no active authority, or insurance below the amount required.
How to check a carrier's safety rating
FMCSA publishes the rating and its date on the carrier's SAFER Company Snapshot, free, along with a 24-month roadside inspection and crash summary. Enter the USDOT number above and CarrierScrub shows the same rating and date in section 02 of the result, next to the operating-authority and insurance checks that decide the verdict, so a Conditional rating and a pending revocation land on one page with their dates. The rating is read from FMCSA's monthly Safety Measurement System snapshot and dated to it; until the first snapshot is loaded the section reads PENDING rather than guessing.
If a rating on file is wrong, the correction runs through FMCSA's DataQs process, or through a request for a rating change under Part 385. CarrierScrub republishes what FMCSA has on file; it cannot change it.
Safety rating vs. BASIC scores vs. out-of-service rate
These three get run together in sales copy and they measure different things.
| What it is | Who produces it | Public for property carriers? | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Safety rating | A compliance-review finding about management controls: Satisfactory, Conditional, Unsatisfactory, or none | FMCSA investigators, under 49 CFR Part 385 | Yes, with its date |
| BASIC measures and percentiles | Seven Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories computed from roadside inspection and crash data, each a raw measure and a percentile rank against peers | FMCSA's Safety Measurement System, monthly | Measures yes; percentiles and alerts no. Crash Indicator and Hazardous Materials BASICs hidden entirely. |
| Out-of-service rate | The share of roadside driver or vehicle inspections that found at least one out-of-service violation, over 24 months | Roadside inspections, summarised by FMCSA | Yes. SAFER also prints national averages (22.26% vehicle, 6.67% driver, as displayed 15 September 2026). |
On percentiles, FMCSA's own notice on the SMS site is the authority: "Pursuant to the FAST Act of 2015, certain information previously available on the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's (FMCSA) Safety Measurement System (SMS) Website related to property carrier's compliance and safety performance is no longer available for public display." It goes on: what remains public is "inspection and crash data, investigation results, and measures for all public" BASICs, "however, the Crash Indicator and Hazardous Materials Compliance BASICs remain hidden from public view." Complete results are visible only to enforcement users and to a carrier logged in to view its own. That is why no CarrierScrub result shows a BASIC percentile for a property carrier, and why a vendor showing one for the carriers a freight broker vets is worth asking about.
Where the data comes from
The rating and its date are in FMCSA's Company Census File. Roadside inspection and out-of-service counts, the acute or critical violation indicator from FMCSA investigations, and crash counts are in FMCSA's monthly SMS data files, all published free under FMCSA's open data program. CarrierScrub reads them for the carrier you look up and dates every section to the snapshot it came from. The authoritative record is always the carrier's SAFER Company Snapshot, which every result links to.