For shippers

The vetting desk you don’t have

Manufacturers and distributors tendering freight directly don’t get a brokerage’s carrier desk. The file is that desk: free, in seconds, cited to federal records line by line.

What the file shows you

Authority and its history — grants, revocations, reinstatements and suspensions, dated, with FMCSA's reason where one is recorded.
Insurance on file — amount against the required minimum, and the filing history that shows whether it has been steady or has lapsed before.
Safety data as FMCSA publishes it — the safety rating (most carriers are "Not rated", and the page says what that means), inspections, out-of-service results, crashes and cited violations.
Documented warning signs, each tied to the government record behind it, with the measured historical rate for carriers that show the same pattern.

How it fits your day

Check. Pull the file on any carrier bidding your lane before you award it.
Monitor. Track your approved carrier list. Daily checks, an email when a material change appears, one daily digest for the smaller ones, and nothing at all when nothing changed.
Prove. When your insurer or your customer asks how carriers were selected, the Dated Verification Record answers with dates and sources, not memory.

What the record covers — and what it doesn't

The record is a facts-only PDF of what the federal sources showed for a carrier while you tracked it, with the source and date on every line and the log of each daily check. A record shows both the date of what it describes and the date it was generated, carries a reference number and a tamper-evident hash, and can be checked by anyone you hand it to at carrierarchive.com/verify. It covers only the days the carrier was under watch: a check that never ran cannot be written up afterwards, which is exactly why the watch is worth setting up before the load moves.

The number behind the patterns

The patterns on a file are documented record facts, not opinions, and the composite of them was measured before it was shown to anyone: in a preregistered, single-shot test on 166,237 eligible held-out carriers, 22.4% of carriers flagged by the composite had an involuntary revocation of operating authority recorded within the observation window (95% CI 21.2–23.7%) versus 11.0% of the full eligible cohort — at least 1.6x by point estimate. Address matches were excluded from that test. The outcome measured was revocation, not crashes, fraud, unpaid invoices or business closure. How it was measured, in plain English, is on the methodology page.

Questions shippers ask

We tender a few hundred loads a year to a dozen carriers. Is this overkill?

Tracking a dozen carriers is a few minutes once and then nothing until something changes. Ten are free; the daily check runs whether you log in or not.

Can the whole traffic team use one account?

Yes. Users are free on every plan. Each person gets their own login and their own alert settings, and the account's log shows who added or removed each carrier.

What if a carrier we use loses its authority?

Authority revoked or suspended is a critical change: you get an email the day it appears in the federal files, one per carrier, and it cannot be switched off while you track that carrier. The change is also on the carrier's file and in any record you request later.

Pull a file now

Free. No signup. Type an MC or USDOT number, or a company name.

Also for: Freight brokers · Forwarders & 3PLs · Factoring companies · Moving a household · Carriers and owner-operators

Carrier Archive is an independent, privately operated service and is not affiliated with FMCSA or any government agency. Every fact on a carrier file is cited to its federal source and date; indicators describe documented record patterns and are not accusations about any carrier. The decision to use a carrier is yours; we do not select or recommend carriers. Nothing on this page is legal advice. Federal files checked daily.