FMCSA authority activity in Q3 2026: what Motus shows
From 1 July 2026 to 30 September 2026, FMCSA granted operating authority to 12,748 motor carriers and involuntarily suspended the authority of 6,093: 5,596 because their liability insurance was cancelled with no replacement on file. It reinstated 4,150, and in September recorded 1,651 more reinstatements that corrected errors from its own move to Motus. On 9 October 2026, 5,316 of the 114,559 carriers Motus listed as active (4.64%) had a suspension notice served but not yet in effect.
Carriers, not authority records: a carrier whose common and contract authority were both suspended counts once. Brokers and freight forwarders are counted separately below.
Authority granted
12,748
carriers whose authority FMCSA granted
Involuntarily suspended
6,093
5,596 for cancelled insurance
Suspended for a missing process agent
457
152 also had no insurance
Voluntarily suspended
2,315
at the carrier’s own request
Reinstated
4,150
authority restored after a suspension
Reinstated by Motus correction
1,651
FMCSA fixing its own migration, not a carrier curing a suspension
Applications withdrawn
2,334
withdrawn before a decision
Suspension notices served
12,855
involuntary, plus 2,482 voluntary
By month
Month
Granted
Involuntarily suspended
Voluntarily suspended
Reinstated
Motus corrections
Applications withdrawn
July 2026
2,805
2,330
380
390
0
600
August 2026
5,237
2,772
886
1,349
0
811
September 2026
4,710
1,211
1,099
2,435
1,651
955
A carrier with two changes of the same kind in different months counts in each month, so the months can add up to slightly more than the quarter.
On 9 October 2026
Of the 114,559 carriers whose authority Motus listed as Active that day. Each is a fact FMCSA published, and each maps to a rule in CarrierScrub’s published verdicts.
Active carriers in Motus
114,559
plus 4,667 active brokers
Caution · Suspension notice pending
5,316
4.64% of active carriers
Stop · Out-of-service order in force
1,088
0.95%, while Motus still lists them Active
Cover below the requirement
1,471
1.28% of active carriers; STOP, or CAUTION where an earlier, lower requirement is met
Cover not stated in Motus
1,400
1.22%: a cover amount of 0, so the filings must be read
Caution · Mail returned undeliverable
747
0.65% of active carriers
Caution · Phone shared with a suspended carrier
167
on two to six USDOT numbers, within Motus
Stop · New authority at a suspended carrier’s phone
17
granted in the quarter, different name; 5 within 30 days
What stands out
Insurance drives suspensions. 5,596 of the 6,093 carriers involuntarily suspended (91.8%) were suspended for an insurance cancellation with no replacement on file. A further 305 were for a cancelled process agent (BOC-3) filing, and 152 for both.
FMCSA is still correcting the move to Motus. In September Motus recorded 1,651 reinstatements that FMCSA’s own wording ties to correcting how it consolidated legacy common and contract authority. Those carriers had read as suspended because of the migration, not because of anything they filed. A check made in August may have shown them inactive.
Out-of-service orders and Active authority disagree. 1,088 carriers that Motus listed as Active on 9 October 2026 were under a federal out-of-service order with no rescind date. An order in force bars the carrier from operating whatever its authority record says, so an authority check alone would pass them.
Brokers. 774 broker authorities were granted in the quarter, 227 were involuntarily suspended and 186 voluntarily suspended.
By state
By the business state on the carrier’s Motus record. The 50 states hold 110,306 of the 114,559 active carriers; the rest are in DC, the territories or abroad. Every state links to its carrier directory.
Four public FMCSA datasets on data.transportation.gov, read 9 October 2026: Motus Carrier (each authority’s status, cover and contacts, 159,917 rows), Motus authority history (every dated status change with FMCSA’s reason, 208,712 rows), Motus suspension and revocation notices (27,686 rows) and the out-of-service orders with no rescind date (227,356 rows). Nothing comes from CarrierScrub’s own database.
The quarter’s figures count distinct USDOT numbers with a status change of each kind dated in the quarter, for motor carrier authority (property, household goods and passenger); brokers and freight forwarders are counted on their own. Bookkeeping entries that do not change a carrier’s right to operate are left out: 31,151 “Initial Status”, 3,081 “Published to FMCSA Register”, 823 “Administrative Correction”, 3 “Eligible for Reinstatement”. Reinstatements whose reason says Motus corrected its own records are counted as corrections, not as carriers curing a suspension.
The snapshot uses the rules CarrierScrub’s verdicts use. Cover is the largest liability amount on file on an Active carrier authority against the largest requirement; Motus writes 0 when it does not state an amount, so those carriers are counted as “not stated”, never as under-insured. A phone links two carriers only when it is on two to six USDOT numbers, since a number on more is usually a filing or dispatch service. Returned mail is FMCSA’s own flag (“N = Undeliverable”).
Not comparable with the Q3 fraud-signals report. That report counted 379,060 active carriers in FMCSA’s legacy files, which FMCSA stopped updating on 14 May 2026. Motus listed 114,559 carriers as Active on 9 October 2026. The two systems hold and count authority differently, so a change between the reports is a change of source, not a trend. Phone-based signals here look only at phones on Motus records, so they are far lower than the earlier report’s census-based counts.
Totals and states only: no carrier is named. Rerun it with python3 scripts/research/motus_quarter.py 2026-Q3 in CarrierScrub’s repository; the script states every rule above in code.
Cite as: CarrierScrub, “FMCSA authority activity in Q3 2026: what Motus shows”, https://carrierscrub.com/research/motus-2026-q3. Data: FMCSA Motus, read 2026-10-09. Free to reuse with attribution; the underlying federal data is public domain.
See one carrier’s history.
A lookup shows every dated grant, suspension and reinstatement of a carrier’s authority, with FMCSA’s own wording. Three carriers a day, free, no account.
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