How the grade works

🛡️ Safety Score (50%)

From FMCSA public records (the SMS bulk files and the QCMobile API):

• Out-of-service rates— vehicle and driver OOS rates, shrunk toward the national averages (20.7% / 5.5%) until a carrier has enough inspections, so 0% on 2 inspections isn't read as a perfect record. We also show how the rate compares to similar-size carriers. The vehicle rate is severity-weighted: an OOS for under-inflated tires or a dead lamp (wear items, often a pre-trip miss) counts less than an OOS for failed brakes or steering — up to a 40% discount when every OOS finding is a wear item. The card says so when the discount applies.
• Driving behavior— aggressive-driving violations (speeding, dangerous driving, phone use) plus fatigue-masking violations (ELD tampering, hours-of-service, falsified logs), per inspection. This is the violation class that precedes catastrophic crashes, so it's scored — not just displayed. A clean sheet scores well; a pattern craters the signal.
• Crash rate — severity-weighted crashes (fatal and injury weighted heavier than tow-away) per power unit, over a rolling 24-month window. A carrier with an inspection record and no crashes on file counts that as a real (mildly positive) signal rather than a blank — scaled by fleet size and capped, since an absent crash record can also be a data gap: 0 crashes on 2 trucks is weak evidence, and even a large fleet with no crash record never earns a perfect crash score it didn't demonstrably prove.
• Operating authority.A for-hire carrier with no active FMCSA operating authority can't legally take a load — we cap its grade at Cand show a warning. Private and intrastate carriers, which don't need that authority, are not flagged.
• Safety rating — hard cap. An Unsatisfactory rating or an active out-of-service order caps the grade at F (the carrier is unfit to operate). A Conditional rating caps it at D. The strictest cap wins. A stale rating cuts no slack: a Satisfactory issued a decade ago is shown with its year ("Satisfactory (2014)") and described as history, not a present-tense endorsement — FMCSA doesn't re-audit on a schedule.
• Fatal crashes — hard cap, rate-aware. A carrier whose fatal-crash rate runs well above the national baseline (~3×, per truck over 24 months) is capped at C— public crash data assigns no fault, so we say "involved in", never "caused". That rate combined with an aggressive-driving violation pattern — or a multiple-fatal rate — caps at D, with a red banner either way. The cap is a rate, not a count: a 9,000-truck fleet with a couple of fatals over two years is running below the national average and is judged on its full record, while one fatal on a 20-truck fleet is far above it.
• What an F means. F is reserved for carriers that are unfit or dangerous — an Unsatisfactory rating, an out-of-service order, or a real crash/fatality pattern. An active, authorized, crash-free carrier with poor inspection numbers tops out at D("verify carefully"), not F — high out-of-service rates are a maintenance problem, not proof of danger.

We never punish missing data — weights renormalize over whatever signals exist. Thin inspection samples are held near the national average (0% out-of-service on 2 inspections isn't a clean record), and every grade carries a graded confidence label — low (<10 inspections), medium (10–29), or high (30+) — with the observed numbers always shown alongside their sample size.

📈 Stability Score (30%)

How likely is this carrier to still exist — and still pay you — in six months? Built from the carrier's own FMCSA Licensing & Insurancerecord, not from market indices: every carrier in a soft market isn't equally likely to fail, so we score the carrier, not the weather. Four signals:

• Insurance discipline (40%)— coverage gaps and insurer churn over the last 36 months (a rolling 3-year window; older filings don't predict much). Carriers drop insurance right before they shut down; a 30+ day gap in required liability coverage is one of the strongest distress signals in trucking. FMCSA files an annual renewal with the same code it uses for a real insurer switch, so we compare insurer names: keeping one insurer with no gaps is the strongest record there is, while three or more insurers inside three years is churn worth asking about. A carrier with no required insurance on file right now scores 0 and gets a red warning banner. Carriers whose authority has since lapsed are still scored on their filing history — an insurance collapse is usually why a carrier died, so it stays visible. We also show who insures the carrier today and for how much— straight from FMCSA's active filings. $750,000 is the federal minimum for general freight (49 CFR 387.9), so a carrier sitting at the floor reads differently than one carrying $1M+. We never publish an insurer credit rating: that data isn't public, and we don't guess.
• Authority age (30%) — years since first operating authority. First-year carriers fail at very high rates; a carrier that has operated 20+ years has survived multiple freight recessions. Carriers without for-hire authority use their FMCSA census first-seen date instead.
• Fleet trajectory (20%) — is the fleet growing or shrinking between census snapshots? Carriers usually downsize before they fail. Until a second snapshot exists this signal is simply not counted— the other signals share its weight, so a carrier is never dragged toward the middle by a measurement we haven't taken yet.
• Authority history (10%) — involuntary revocations, weighted by recencyfirst. A revocation inside the last 3 years is a live red flag. The same event ten or more years ago, since reinstated, on a carrier that has operated cleanly since, is startup history and scores close to clean — a carrier shouldn't be judged forever on how its first year went.

Reincarnated-carrier check:a carrier sharing an exact street address and phone number with a carrier whose authority was revoked in the last 5 years — and first registered around or after that revocation — is flagged as a possible "chameleon" and capped at D, with a warning naming the revoked DOT. Matching is deliberately conservative to avoid false positives.

⭐ Driver Reviews (up to 30%)

Verified, anonymous reviews from drivers who worked there (phone-OTP verified; we store a one-way hash, never the number). The weight earns its way up with volume:

• Fewer than 3 verified reviews → reviews don't count at all (no swinging a grade on one voice). The grade is carried by safety and stability — we don't inject a neutral placeholder that would drag every carrier toward the middle.
• At 3 reviews they count 10%, growing linearly to 30% — and the count needed for full weight scales with fleet size (2× the truck count, between 8 and 25). Six verified reviews from an 11-truck fleet is proportionally better coverage than 25 from a 9,000-truck one. Safety and stability share the rest in their 50:30 ratio, and the exact weights used are shown on every grade card.
• One review per driver per carrier; structured questions, not blank rants.

Other states

• Equipment type (van / reefer / flatbed) is a best guess, not a fact. FMCSA publishes no trailer-type field — only which commodities a carrier is authorized to haul — so we label a carrier flatbed or reefer only when a majority of its own cargo authorizations point there. Everything else shows as van, which is what ~94% of authority holders actually run.
• Inactive / revoked carriers show a warning to verify before signing.
• Zero trucks on file flags a possible broker or shell company.
• Carriers with too little FMCSA history to grade (new, very small, intrastate, or dormant) get a "not enough record to grade" state — their operating-authority and operation status, not a guessed letter.
• Shown as context, not scored: what recruiters tend to promise for a carrier (from drivers' Promise Checks) and reviews split by company-driver vs owner-operator. These are descriptive and never move the letter.

Disclaimer

Readers should not draw conclusions about a carrier's overall safety condition based solely on this data. Unless a carrier has received an UNSATISFACTORY safety rating under 49 CFR Part 385 or has been ordered to discontinue operations by FMCSA, it is authorized to operate on the nation's roadways.

Grades are CarrierGrade's independent analysis of public data; not an FMCSA safety rating.

CarrierGrade is informational and is our independent analysis of disclosed public data — not legal, safety, or hiring advice, and not an FMCSA safety rating. Money never influences a grade.