What an FMCSA safety check shows
FMCSA runs a safety program called CSA (Compliance, Safety, Accountability). Inside it, the Safety Measurement System (SMS) takes the last two years of roadside inspections and crashes and sorts each carrier's record into seven categories, called BASICs:1
- Unsafe Driving
- Crash Indicator
- Hours-of-Service (HOS) Compliance
- Vehicle Maintenance
- Controlled Substances/Alcohol
- Hazardous Materials (HM) Compliance
- Driver Fitness
For each category, SMS ranks a carrier against peers on a 0 to 100 percentile, where higher is worse. Most categories group peers by number of inspections. Unsafe Driving groups them by inspections with an unsafe driving violation, and Crash Indicator by number of crashes; for those two, fleet size and miles driven go into the score itself.1 Cross a category's intervention threshold and FMCSA flags the carrier for closer attention, like a warning letter or an investigation.1
Why a carrier's CSA scores are not public
Since the FAST Act of 2015, FMCSA removed property (freight) carriers' BASIC percentiles and alerts from public view; only the carrier, when logged in, and enforcement can see them.23 Passenger carriers' information stays public. So when you look a typical freight carrier up on the government's SAFER site, you can see its inspection and crash counts, but not where it actually ranks against its peers.
What fleetfax adds
The underlying inspection and crash data is still public. fleetfax computes its own peer estimates from that public data and labels them as estimates, not official CSA scores, so you get the peer context the public site hides, with the individual inspections and crashes behind every number. See what that looks like in a full report.
A safety rating is not a CSA score
Two different things get mixed up constantly. A safety rating (Satisfactory, Conditional, or Unsatisfactory) comes from a full FMCSA compliance review of the carrier.4 A CSA score is a BASIC percentile from rolling inspection data. They are not the same, and most carriers have neither a good rating nor a bad one: FMCSA's Pocket Guide, using 2021 data, listed about 94% of interstate freight carriers eligible for a safety rating as unrated.5
So "unrated" does not mean unsafe. It usually means no audit. And a "Satisfactory" rating can be years old. That is exactly why the rolling inspection record, and how a carrier compares to its peers, carries the weight.
How to read a safety check
- Compare it to its peers. Ten violations tell you little until you know how a comparable carrier usually performs. A percentile or out-of-service rate well above peers stands out in a way the raw total can't.
- Watch the trend. A carrier whose crashes doubled in the last year looks the same as a stable one in a flat 24-month count.
- No rating is normal. More than 9 in 10 interstate freight carriers have none, so the inspections tell you more.
- You make the call. A safety check tells you where a carrier stands.
Frequently asked questions
Are a carrier's CSA scores public?
Mostly no. Since the FAST Act of 2015, FMCSA removed property (freight) carriers' BASIC percentiles and alerts from public view; only the carrier and enforcement can see them. Passenger carriers' information stays public. The underlying inspection and crash data is still public, which is what fleetfax uses to compute its own peer estimates.
What are the seven CSA BASICs?
Unsafe Driving, Crash Indicator, Hours-of-Service (HOS) Compliance, Vehicle Maintenance, Controlled Substances/Alcohol, Hazardous Materials (HM) Compliance, and Driver Fitness. FMCSA's Safety Measurement System scores each from the last two years of inspections and crashes.
Is a safety rating the same as a CSA score?
No. A safety rating (Satisfactory, Conditional, or Unsatisfactory) comes from a full FMCSA compliance review. A CSA score is a BASIC percentile from rolling inspection data. FMCSA's Pocket Guide, using 2021 data, listed about 94% of interstate freight carriers eligible for a safety rating as unrated. "Unrated" does not mean unsafe.
What does "out of service" mean?
It is an inspector's order that a truck or driver may not operate until a specific problem is fixed. A carrier's out-of-service rate, how often its trucks or drivers were pulled out of service per inspection, is one of the clearest safety signals in the public record.
Sources
- FMCSA, Safety Measurement System (SMS) Methodology and CSA program. csa.fmcsa.dot.gov · SMS Methodology (PDF)
- Fixing America's Surface Transportation (FAST) Act of 2015, Pub. L. 114-94. congress.gov
- FMCSA Analysis & Information, SMS public-display notice (property percentiles removed; Crash Indicator and HM Compliance hidden; passenger carriers public). ai.fmcsa.dot.gov/SMS
- FMCSA safety ratings and compliance reviews, 49 CFR 385. ecfr.gov
- FMCSA Pocket Guide to Large Truck and Bus Statistics, 2021 data (about 94% of rating-eligible interstate freight carriers unrated). fmcsa.dot.gov
fleetfax peer percentiles are estimates from public FMCSA inspection and crash data, not official CSA scores. This page is general information, not legal advice. fleetfax is not affiliated with FMCSA or the U.S. Department of Transportation.
