How long after an insurance cancellation does FMCSA suspend authority?
Everyone in freight knows a cancelled policy eventually costs a carrier its authority. Nobody publishes how long "eventually" takes. We measured it.
The answer
Across 273 carriers that had an insurance cancellation take effect and later received a suspension order, the median gap was 17 days.
| Days from cancellation to suspension order | |
|---|---|
| 25th percentile | 5 |
| Median | 17 |
| 75th percentile | 40 |
| 90th percentile | 62 |
| Longest observed | 309 |
| Gap | Carriers | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 0–7 days | 85 | 31.1% |
| 8–14 days | 41 | 15.0% |
| 15–30 days | 45 | 16.5% |
| 31–45 days | 46 | 16.8% |
| 46–90 days | 54 | 19.8% |
| 91+ days | 2 | 0.7% |
Only 85 of 273 (31%) were suspended within a week. The rest kept an authority status of Active while carrying no primary coverage on file.
Why this matters when you are vetting
A carrier-vetting process keyed on authority status cannot see this window. The FMCSA record says Active, because it *is* active — the suspension has not been served yet. The insurance filing is the field that already changed, and it is a different field in a different file.
That is the entire gap: for a median of 17 days, the answer to "is this carrier authorised?" and the answer to "is this carrier insured?" disagree, and only one of them is the one most people check.
How often does a cancellation actually end in suspension?
This is where the arithmetic gets easy to get wrong, so here is both versions.
Taken naively across every cancellation on file, 273 of 14,332 — 1.9% — led to a suspension order. That number is wrong, and we are publishing it only to explain why. Our revocation data begins 18 May 2026. A cancellation filed last week has not had time to produce a suspension order, so counting it as "never suspended" counts *not yet* as *no*.
Restricting to cancellations old enough to have resolved — those effective before 1 June 2026, giving each at least ten weeks — 82 of 387 (21.2%) were followed by a suspension order.
So a cancellation is a strong signal, not a certainty. Roughly 21 in 100 end in a suspension; the rest are resolved, replaced or refiled before it gets that far. Anyone telling you a lapsed filing means a carrier is finished is overselling it.
Method, and what would make this wrong
- Source. FMCSA Licensing & Insurance files:
motus_inshistfor insurance filing
history, motus_revoke for suspension and revocation orders. Public data, no scraping.
- Population. Carriers with a filing whose status reason is
CANCEL, joined to a
suspension order served *after* the cancellation took effect.
- Observation window. Revocation orders on file run 18 May 2026 to
8 August 2026.
- Known bias. That window is the limitation. A cancellation followed by a suspension
many months later falls outside it and is invisible here, which drops long gaps from the sample. The true median is therefore at least 17 days and more likely higher. It is not lower.
- Not counted.
TERM/CANCLis excluded. It reads like a cancellation and means
terminated-and-replaced — an insurer switch, not a lapse. Treating it as one produced a 24.3% false-critical rate when we tested it.
Every figure on this page is generated from the database by gap_report.py rather than typed in, so it moves when the data moves.