Carrier vetting for freight brokers

Carrier vetting for freight brokers comes down to one question asked at the wrong moment: *is this carrier still legitimate right now?* Most vetting answers it once, at onboarding, and then never asks again.

That is where the loss comes from. A carrier you qualified in March can lose its insurance in July, keep hauling for weeks on an authority record that still reads Active, and you will not know unless something makes you look.

What a broker has to establish

Four things, in this order:

1. Operating authority is active — and for the right property type. Common and contract authority are separate grants, and a carrier can hold one without the other. 2. Insurance is on file with FMCSA — not a certificate emailed to you, which is a different artefact entirely. The difference between a COI and an FMCSA filing is the one most brokers have backwards. 3. No cancellation is pending against the policy on file. 4. The carrier is who it says it is — the identity half of vetting, which is where double brokering starts.

Points 1 and 2 are the ones a public lookup can answer, and the ones that go stale.

Why a snapshot check is not vetting

FMCSA does not suspend a carrier's authority the day its insurance is cancelled. Across 273 carriers we measured with both events on record, the suspension order followed a median of 17 days later.

For that entire window the public record says Active while no primary coverage is on file. A vetting process keyed on authority status returns a green light. That is not an edge case — it is the normal sequence, and it is how long the gap usually lasts.

If your check runs once at onboarding, your exposure is not 17 days. It is however long it has been since you looked.

What closes the gap

Re-reading the filings every day and only telling you when something changes. That is a different job from a lookup tool, and it is the one a broker cannot do by hand across a carrier list of any size.

Concretely: we read the FMCSA Licensing & Insurance and SAFER files at 13:00 UTC daily, diff them against yesterday, and email what moved. Insurance cancelled. Authority suspended. A new policy filed. Nothing else.

Where to start

Look up a carrier you already haul with — no account, no card:

<p><a class="b6" href="/">Look up a USDOT or MC number</a></p>

If the record is clean, that is the answer you wanted. If you want the same check running every morning across your whole list, the free tier watches five carriers with no card, and paid plans start at $39/month for 500. The full comparison, including where competitors are genuinely stronger, is in the Carrier411 alternatives guide.

We report what is on file with FMCSA. We do not rate carriers, and nothing here is a recommendation to haul or not haul.