USDOT records · free, no account
One date on one federal form decides
whether a carrier looks real.
Every motor carrier has to refile an MCS‑150 every two years, on a schedule set by its own USDOT number. The status still reads ACTIVE when that date goes stale, so nothing warns the carrier and nothing warns the people about to hand them a load. In our 22,255-record sample, carriers that did not file were 551 times more likely to leave ACTIVE status.
Which one are you? ↓ Both sides free to start
551×
more likely to lose ACTIVE status
| Left ACTIVE | |
|---|---|
| Filed an MCS‑150 | 1 of 12,018 0.008% |
| Did not file | 469 of 10,237 4.58% |
Two people care about this date, for opposite reasons
You run the trucks
Find out when yours is due, and never think about it again
Your deadline is not two years from your last filing. It is a month and a year assigned by the last two digits of your USDOT number, which is why people miss it. We work it out from your number and email you before it comes round.
- Your assigned filing month and year, free
- A reminder before the deadline, free
- Get a draft and watch the public date change, $64 a year
You book, factor or insure them
Find out which carriers on your list are running on a stale record
SAFER answers one USDOT number per search and leaves the arithmetic to you. A working list is hundreds of names. A small but real share carry a stale or missing date that deserves a direct check with the carrier and FMCSA.
- Paste a list, get back only the ones worth reading
- 10 numbers free, three times a day, no account
- Check up to 2,500 at once, with two CSVs and a dated report, $19
The public date still matters while deactivation is paused
FMCSA moved carrier registration to Motus in May 2026. It has temporarily suspended USDOT inactivation for missed biennial updates since June 1 while the new system stabilizes. The update itself is still required.
The old date stays on the public record
A carrier can still show ACTIVE while its MCS‑150 date is stale. Brokers, factors and underwriters can see that same row when they run the number.
Get the filing ready, submit it yourself in Motus, and keep the dated before-and-after record.
Where the numbers come from
Everything on this site is read from the FMCSA Company Census File, dataset
az4n-8mr2 on data.transportation.gov. It is free, public, keyless federal data, and it
is read live in your browser when you press a button, never from a cache of ours. Nothing you
type is stored and nothing is sent anywhere else.
The 551× figure above comes from our own daily snapshots of that file, which is the one thing here you cannot get from FMCSA directly: they publish what a record says today, not what changed. The method page shows every query.