Whether you're standing up a new authority, vetting a carrier you're about to lease onto, or confirming your own record looks right, two free tools show you the truth: SAFER and Motus. Between them you can see a company's authority, insurance on file, safety record, and operating status. Here's how to pull a company up and read what you're looking at.

SAFER: the company snapshot

SAFER (Safety and Fitness Electronic Records) is FMCSA's public lookup at safer.fmcsa.dot.gov. Open the site and choose the Company Snapshot. You can search by USDOT number (best), MC/MX number, or company name. Search by the DOT number when you have it, since names return multiple matches.

Once the snapshot loads, here is what actually matters, top to bottom:

  • Operating status. You want to see AUTHORIZED FOR ... Property (or the relevant type). "NOT AUTHORIZED," "OUT OF SERVICE," or an out-of-service date is a stop sign. This is the first thing to read.
  • Legal name and DBA. Confirm it matches who you think you're dealing with.
  • USDOT number and MC/MX number. The two identifiers you'll use everywhere else.
  • Entity type and operation. Carrier, broker, or both; interstate vs. intrastate; for-hire vs. private.
  • Power units and drivers. Fleet size, and a quick sanity check against the MCS-150.
  • MCS-150 form date and mileage. How recently they updated their registration. A very old date can mean the record is stale (and the biennial update is overdue).
  • Cargo carried and operation classification. What they're set up to haul.
  • Safety rating and inspection/crash summary. Satisfactory, Conditional, Unsatisfactory, or None (many carriers are unrated), plus a snapshot of U.S. inspections, out-of-service rates, and crashes.

SAFER is your fast "is this real and active" check. What it does not show in detail is the insurance filing history, which is where Motus comes in.

Not sure your record is set up right? Let us check it

Motus: the authority and insurance detail

Motus is the deeper view. Where SAFER gives you the summary, Motus is where you read the authority and insurance detail: which authorities are active, pending, or revoked, the insurance on file (the BMC-91X liability filing and the BOC-3 process agent), and the history, including prior insurers and any cancellations. Pull a carrier up by DOT number and work down the record.

What to look for:

  • Authority status per type. A carrier can hold common, contract, and broker authority separately. Confirm the one you care about is active, not just applied-for.
  • Insurance on file. There should be a current liability filing (BMC-91X) from an insurer, and a BOC-3 on file. No insurance on file with active authority is a red flag, it can mean coverage lapsed and revocation is coming.
  • Effective and cancellation dates. A recent cancellation with no replacement filing tells you the carrier may be about to lose authority.
  • Pending revocation. FMCSA posts pending revocations (often for a lapsed insurance filing). If you see one, the clock is ticking on that authority.

Reading these two together, SAFER for the snapshot and Motus for the authority/insurance detail, tells you almost everything you need before you trust a company or before you assume your own filings are clean.

The two most common things people miss

  • Active authority does not mean active insurance. SAFER can show "authorized" while an insurance cancellation is working through the system. Check the filing detail in Motus, not just the status line.
  • A stale MCS-150 causes problems that look like insurance problems. If your biennial update is overdue, your record can flag or deactivate, which cascades into filings and downloads. If it's been a while, file it. We walk through it in filing your MCS-150, and the DOT lookup basics in how to look up a DOT number.

How McClure helps

If you pull your own record and something looks off, a missing insurance filing, a pending revocation, a stale MCS-150, that's usually fixable, and often it's a filing problem rather than a coverage problem. Send us your DOT number and we'll read the record with you and get the filings straight. Start here. And if you're vetting a carrier you're about to work with and you're not sure how to read what you're seeing, ask us; we do it every day.