How to vet a carrier in 10 seconds — the seven fields that matter

Companion piece to Broker liability after the Supreme Court. That one's the "why"; this one's the "how."

A defensible pre-tender carrier check is seven fields. You can do them by hand against FMCSA's SAFER portal if you have ten minutes per carrier. Or you can use our carrier search, which pulls all seven into one card in about ten seconds. Either way, here's what you're looking for and what each result means.

1. Authority status

The carrier needs to be actively authorized for the type of operation you're tendering. For most general-freight loads that means Common authority (interstate, for-hire, general property). Some loads need Contract authority instead (carrier under a written contract with a specific shipper or shipper class). A carrier with only Broker authority isn't a motor carrier — they can't pull your trailer.

What to look for: CommonAuthorityStatus = A (Active) and no pending revocation. I (Inactive) or P (Pending application) means they're not currently authorized. A revocation pending today means they might be unauthorized tomorrow — don't tender.

2. Safety rating

FMCSA assigns one of three formal ratings after a compliance review: Satisfactory, Conditional, or Unsatisfactory. Many carriers — especially smaller fleets — are unrated because they haven't had a review.

What to look for:

• Satisfactory (S): cleared the bar. The default for carriers you'd want to tender to.
• Unrated / None: hasn't been reviewed. Not a red flag by itself — most carriers under 50 power units are unrated. Lean on the other fields.
• Conditional (C): FMCSA found enough issues to flag but not enough to suspend authority. Treat as a hard "review the rest of the profile before tendering."
• Unsatisfactory (U): FMCSA found systemic safety problems. The Supreme Court's negligent-selection decision singled out this category specifically. Don't tender.

3. BIPD insurance on file

Bodily injury and property damage. The FMCSA minimum for general freight (non-hazmat, non-passenger) is $750,000. The industry working baseline is $1,000,000. Hazmat carriers need more depending on the class — typically $5M for the higher-risk classes.

What to look for:

• BipdOnFileAmount ≥ $1,000,000 for general freight, more for hazmat. This is the minimum your cargo policy and your broker-liability insurer will expect.
• No BIPD on file at all: the carrier shouldn't be operating. Don't tender.
• BIPD at or near $750,000: legal floor, below the industry baseline. Some shipper contracts require the higher number; check the load's commodity value and your insurer's threshold.

The exposure isn't theoretical. If the carrier's policy can't cover the loss, the plaintiff's lawyer is looking for the next-deepest pocket — historically the shipper, increasingly the broker.

4. Cargo insurance on file

Separate from BIPD. Covers the freight itself in transit. Required by many shipper contracts. The FMCSA dataset shows whether the carrier has filed a cargo policy at all — not the policy amount; you'd verify the amount with the carrier's certificate of insurance.

What to look for: CargoOnFile = Yes. If it's "No," the carrier doesn't carry cargo coverage and you (or the shipper) are bare on cargo loss.

5. BASIC scorecard alerts

FMCSA's Safety Measurement System (SMS) ranks carriers by percentile across five behavior categories. A carrier in the top X percent for a category — meaning more red flags than X percent of peers with similar inspection volume — gets a published "alert."

The five categories:

• Unsafe Driving — speeding, reckless driving, improper lane change, failure to wear seatbelts. The most "did the driver do something dangerous?" category.
• Hours of Service Compliance — log book violations, driving past the regulated limits. The "driver was tired" category.
• Driver Fitness — medical certification, CDL endorsement, training requirements. The "driver shouldn't have been behind the wheel" category.
• Controlled Substances / Alcohol — drug or alcohol violations.
• Vehicle Maintenance — brakes, lights, tires, structural defects. The "the truck wasn't roadworthy" category.

What to look for: ideally no alerts in any of the five. One alert is a flag — go look at the underlying inspection history. Two or more alerts on the same carrier is the kind of pattern a plaintiff's lawyer screenshots and submits as Exhibit A.

The percentile bar on the carrier detail page shows where the carrier sits in each category — lower is safer. Carriers without enough recent inspections to score show "Not scored" rather than a percentile.

6. 24-month crash and fatality history

The crash log doesn't lie. A carrier with a fatal crash in the last 24 months is a carrier whose name shows up in a deposition.

What to look for:

• FatalitiesLast24Mo = 0: clean. Tender-ready on this axis.
• Any fatalities: hard stop. This is the field that drove the Supreme Court case in the first place. There are situations where you might still tender (small fleet, single freak crash years into a clean history) — but every one of them needs to be a documented exception, not your default workflow.
• CrashCountLast24Mo non-zero with no fatalities: case-by-case. A 500-truck fleet will have crashes; a 5-truck fleet with three crashes in 24 months is a different signal.
• OosViolationsLast24Mo: how often the carrier has had a driver or vehicle put out-of-service after a roadside inspection. This is the most-current-tell of operational discipline.

7. Years in business and fleet size

Context for the rest. A carrier with two power units and six months of operating history hasn't been inspected enough to score on BASIC, hasn't been around long enough to get a Satisfactory rating, and might still be a fine pick — but the rest of the checks lean more heavily on the unknown. A 500-truck carrier with 20 years in business and a clean record is a different risk profile from a 3-truck carrier with the same indicators.

This isn't a pass/fail field. It's the field that tells you how much weight to put on each of the other six.

Putting it together

Run the seven fields. Pattern-match the answers. Three outcomes:

• All seven green (Satisfactory rating, active authority, $1M+ BIPD, cargo on file, no BASIC alerts, no 24-month fatalities, healthy fleet/age). Tender-ready. Document the check, save the carrier profile to your CRM as a reference, move on.
• One or two soft flags (Conditional rating, or a single BASIC alert, or sub-$1M BIPD on a low-value load). Review. Decide whether the specific load — its value, the route, the commodity — justifies the risk. Document the decision either way.
• Any hard flag (Unsatisfactory rating, fatality in 24 months, revocation pending, no BIPD at all). Don't tender. Tell the shipper you couldn't qualify the carrier and move to the next option.

The whole point of the carrier search tool is to turn that seven-field check from a five-minute SAFER trawl into a ten-second filter. You can also ask Claude or ChatGPT to do it for you via MCP — search_tenderable_carriers with state=OH, hazmatOnly=true, maxFatalitiesLast24Mo=0, bipdMinAmount=1000000 returns the pre-vetted shortlist with a tenderReadinessLevel on each row, so the LLM can answer "is this carrier safe to tender?" without a follow-up call.

What this isn't

A safety check at the moment of tender doesn't immunize you against everything that can go wrong between Atlanta and Detroit. The driver who passes a roadside check Tuesday morning can be fatigued by Wednesday afternoon. The carrier whose insurance is current today can lapse next month. The point of the vetting workflow isn't to predict the future — it's to document that you did the check a reasonable broker would do given the data available.

That's what the law is now asking. That's what we built.

Try the carrier search → · Read the SCOTUS background · See pricing