FMCSA takes a median of 17 days to suspend a carrier after its insurance is cancelled
When a motor carrier's insurer files a cancellation with FMCSA, the carrier's operating authority is not suspended that day. It is suspended later — and in the meantime the public record continues to read Active while no primary liability coverage is on file.
We measured how long that gap lasts.
The finding
Across 273 carriers that had an insurance cancellation take effect and were later served a suspension order, the median gap was 17 days.
| Days | |
|---|---|
| Minimum | 1 |
| 25th percentile | 5 |
| Median | 17 |
| 75th percentile | 40 |
| 90th percentile | 62 |
| Maximum | 309 |
The distribution is wide and front-loaded, but with a long tail: 31% are suspended inside a week, while a fifth take between six weeks and three months.
| 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 18 of 273 — 6.6% — fell in a 28–32 day window. If you have seen "authority is revoked 30 days after a cancellation" stated as a rule, it does not describe this data.
How often does a cancellation end in suspension at all?
This is the number most easily got 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 figure is wrong, and it is published here only to explain why. Our revocation data begins 18 May 2026, so a cancellation filed last week has not had time to produce a suspension order. Counting it as "never suspended" counts *not yet* as *no*.
Restricting to cancellations old enough to have resolved — 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 and not a certainty. Roughly 21 in 100 end in suspension; the rest are resolved, replaced or refiled before it gets that far. Anyone saying a lapsed filing means a carrier is finished is overselling it.
Why it matters
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 lives in a different file.
For a median of 17 days, "is this carrier authorised?" and "is this carrier insured?" have different answers, and only one of them is the field most people check.
Method
- Source. FMCSA Licensing & Insurance files:
motus_inshistfor insurance filing
history, motus_revoke for suspension and revocation orders. Public data, retrieved directly from FMCSA. No scraping and no third-party dataset.
- Population. Carriers with an insurance filing whose status reason is
CANCEL, joined
to a suspension or revocation order served *after* the cancellation took effect.
- Measure. Calendar days from the cancellation's effective date to the date the order
was served.
- Observation window. Revocation orders on file run 18 May 2026 to 8 August 2026.
- Reproducibility. Both figures are recomputed from the source files by
verify_copy_claims.py in our repository, against the same public data anyone can pull.
What would make this wrong
The observation window is the limitation, and it biases in a known direction. A cancellation followed by a suspension many months later falls outside the window and is invisible here, which removes long gaps from the sample.
The true median is therefore at least 17 days, and more likely higher. It is not lower.
A second limitation: this measures carriers that *were* suspended. It says nothing about how long an uninsured carrier keeps operating when no order ever arrives, which is the larger population and which we cannot observe from these files.
Citing this
MC Sentry (2026). *FMCSA takes a median of 17 days to suspend a carrier after its insurance is cancelled.* Measured across 273 carriers, FMCSA Licensing & Insurance data retrieved 8 August 2026. https://mcsentry.com/research/insurance-cancellation-to-suspension
Journalists and researchers are welcome to reproduce the tables and the chart with attribution. If you want the underlying query or a cut of the data we have not published, ask — the point of measuring it was for it to be used.
We report what is on file with FMCSA. We do not rate carriers, and nothing here is legal advice.