Frequently Asked Questions

fleetfax is a carrier intelligence platform: it combines everything the federal government records about a carrier and makes it readable in one report. It exists for three reasons: to make the freight industry more transparent, to make fraud harder to run, and to make real carrier vetting free for everyone, so no brokerage is priced out of knowing who it works with.

Two ways to use it: here on the website, or as a Chrome extension that brings the same check wherever you find carriers. fleetfax Pro, for teams that vet at scale, opens soon.

Yes, and there is no asterisk. Every single-carrier report is free and complete, with nothing held back: no lookup cap, no trial, no card, no signup required. We charge for the work around vetting, like monitoring and bulk checks, not for the check itself.

From the public federal record: FMCSA's published datasets covering carrier registration, operating authority, insurance filings, roadside inspections, crashes, and safety ratings. We pull them into our own backend and refresh them daily, which is why a report loads in seconds instead of making you wait on a government site.

fleetfax re-ingests the federal datasets daily, and each report shows what it is reading. The ceiling is the federal source itself: FMCSA publishes different datasets on different cadences, and nothing built on the public record can be fresher than the record it reads.

USDOT number, MC number, company name, phone number, or email address. The name search suggests matches as you type. Whatever you have on the rate con or the load board usually works, and an MC number resolves automatically to the carrier's USDOT record, the identifier everything hangs on.

Named risk signals computed from the public record: things like an active out-of-service order, no insurance on file, an inspection-failure rate far above the national average, or identity overlaps with revoked carriers. Each flag states what the data shows and links to the underlying records.

No, deliberately. fleetfax is descriptive: it reports what the public record shows ("blocking issues found", "3 cautions found", "no blockers or cautions found") and puts the evidence in front of you. It never says "safe to book" or "do not book", and it computes no composite score. The booking call is yours. Different brokers run different risk policies, and no single number fits all of them.

It means the public federal record shows no blockers or cautions, which is meaningful but bounded. The record can't see yesterday's hiring decision, an unreported incident, or fraud that hasn't surfaced yet, and absence of evidence isn't proof. A clean report is a good data point inside your process, not a substitute for it.

Roughly 94% of FMCSA-registered carriers have no published safety rating (per FMCSA's own statistics; the agency lacks audit capacity to review more than a fraction of the industry). So "Not Rated" tells you almost nothing, and a vetting process that relies on the rating field alone is blind for most of the market. The underlying data (inspections, out-of-service rates, crashes, authority and insurance history) exists for every carrier, rated or not, and that's what fleetfax reads. Our analysis: what the data shows for unrated carriers.

No, and we are careful to say so. FMCSA stopped publishing the official CSA percentiles for freight carriers in 2015, so the real scores are not visible to anyone outside the carrier and enforcement. What fleetfax shows is its own estimate: it takes the same public inspection and crash records and ranks a carrier against others of similar size. It is a useful read on where a carrier stands, but it is a fleetfax estimate, labeled as one, never presented as CSA or an official FMCSA score.

Yes. Every report exports a timestamped PDF, generated on your device, suitable for the compliance file. The PDF carries a link and QR code back to the live report so anyone holding the document can re-check the carrier later.

No and no. fleetfax requires no account, sells no data, and carriers are not notified of lookups. The website uses ordinary analytics to understand aggregate usage; lookups aren't tied to your identity because we don't know who you are.

No. fleetfax reads public FMCSA data and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to FMCSA or the U.S. Department of Transportation. And to state the obvious plainly: a fleetfax report is information, not legal advice or a compliance certification.