Safety Rating Lookup
Look up a carrier's official FMCSA safety rating (if it has one) and its Safety Measurement System BASIC results.
Safety rating vs. BASIC scores — two different things
These get confused constantly, so it's worth separating them. A safety rating (Satisfactory, Conditional, or Unsatisfactory) is a formal determination FMCSA issues only after conducting a full compliance review — an in-depth audit, not a roadside stop. Most active carriers have never been reviewed and simply have no rating on file, which is normal and does not itself indicate a problem. BASIC scores, by contrast, come from FMCSA's Safety Measurement System (SMS) and are calculated continuously from roadside inspection results across five behavior categories — they exist for any carrier with enough recent inspections, rated or not.
The five BASICs
- Unsafe Driving — speeding, reckless or improper driving violations
- Hours-of-Service Compliance — driver fatigue and logbook violations
- Driver Fitness — valid license, medical certification, qualification
- Controlled Substances/Alcohol — drug and alcohol violations
- Vehicle Maintenance — brakes, lights, tires, and other mechanical defects
A note on how we show BASIC percentiles
For the vast majority of active carriers — those hauling property rather than passengers — FMCSA's own public dataset does not publish a percentile ranking, only the underlying measure and an alert flag. Where FMCSA doesn't publish an official percentile, CarrierPedia computes its own — ranking the carrier's published measure against every other active carrier in our database — and always labels it clearly as a CarrierPedia-computed figure, not an official FMCSA percentile. The alert flag itself is always FMCSA's own. See How to read an SMS percentile for the full explanation.
Why most carriers don't have a safety rating
FMCSA has limited capacity for full compliance reviews and generally prioritizes them for carriers showing elevated risk in the SMS data, or following a serious incident. A carrier with no rating on file isn't hiding anything — it simply hasn't come up for review, and relying on BASIC scores and inspection history is the more complete picture for the vast majority of the industry.