MC SENTRY

Free carrier insurance check for brokers

What you can check for free, where the free version genuinely stops, and why we would rather say so than meter the thing that should be free.

By MC Sentry · · How these figures are computed

A free carrier insurance check is available here for any USDOT or MC number, with no account and no card. Paste the number, get the FMCSA record: authority status by type, insurance on file with limits and insurer, cancellations, and the date we read it.

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

We are being specific about "free" because the word is usually doing work it has not earned — a free tier that meters lookups after five, or asks for a card. Public lookups here are unlimited and unauthenticated, permanently. The reasoning is in monetization: the lookup is how brokers find this site, and metering it would break the only distribution the site has.

What the free check covers

  • Operating authority — common, contract and broker, each with its own status and date
  • Insurance on file — form type, coverage amount, insurer, effective date
  • Cancellations — including a policy that is still listed as active in one table while

a cancellation is in force against it, which is a distinction the raw FMCSA views do not make for you

  • Filing history — how long this carrier has held authority, and what has changed

That is the same data a paid lookup on other tools returns. There is no degraded version.

Where free genuinely stops

Free answers *"is this carrier OK right now?"* — one carrier, when you think to ask.

It does not answer *"did anything change on my list overnight?"* That is a different question and it is the one worth paying for, because it requires reading every carrier every day and diffing against yesterday. You cannot self-serve that from lookup pages, not because we block it, but because it is not the same operation.

The free tier watches five carriers with a weekly digest, no card. Beyond that, $39 a month covers 500 with daily alerts.

Why the free check matters more than it sounds

The gap this catches is not a carrier that was never insured. It is a carrier whose insurance was cancelled and whose authority still reads Active, because FMCSA takes a median of 17 days to suspend after a cancellation is filed — measured here.

A free lookup on the morning you tender catches that carrier. A free lookup you did three months ago does not. If checking by hand is realistic for your volume, do that — carrier vetting with a spreadsheet is an honest walk through building it yourself, including where it breaks.

We report what is on file with FMCSA. We do not rate carriers.

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