CSA scores for freight brokers: how to read them and why they matter post Montgomery

May 20, 2026 · 11 min read

TL;DR

CSA stands for Compliance, Safety, Accountability. It is the FMCSA program that tracks motor carrier performance across seven categories called BASICs and publishes percentile scores in two of them publicly. For freight brokers, two BASICs matter most for negligent-hiring exposure: Unsafe Driving and Hours of Service Compliance. A carrier in "alert" status on either is a documented red flag that you have to be able to explain if you book the load anyway. Here is how to read CSA scores, what they mean for your liability, and what to capture for the record.

What CSA actually is

Compliance, Safety, Accountability is FMCSA's safety measurement system, rolled out in 2010 to replace SafeStat. The program collects inspection data, crash reports, and compliance review findings from federal and state safety inspectors and scores motor carriers across seven behavioral categories called BASICs (Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories).

The output is publicly available on the FMCSA Safety Measurement System (SMS) website at ai.fmcsa.dot.gov/sms. Anyone can look up any carrier by DOT or MC number, view the percentile scores, and see whether the carrier is in alert status. This is the data layer brokers are now expected to review at the moment of booking.

The seven BASIC categories

Unsafe Driving. Operation of commercial motor vehicles by drivers in a dangerous or careless manner. Includes speeding, reckless driving, improper lane change, inattention. Publicly displayed.
Hours of Service Compliance. Driving while ill, fatigued, or in excess of HOS limits. Includes log-book violations. Publicly displayed.
Driver Fitness. Commercial driver's license, medical certification, qualification compliance.Publicly displayed.
Controlled Substances / Alcohol. Driver impairment violations. Publicly displayed.
Vehicle Maintenance. Brakes, lights, defects, and other mechanical and load securement violations.Publicly displayed.
Hazardous Materials Compliance. Hazmat loading, placarding, paperwork, and handling violations.Publicly displayed (hazmat-authorized carriers only).
Crash Indicator. Pattern and severity of crashes. Not publicly displayed since 2015 after industry pushback on attribution methodology, though available to FMCSA and to carriers about themselves.

How the scoring works

FMCSA assigns each carrier a numerical measure in each BASIC based on inspection results, violations, and crash data from the past 24 months. Carriers are then grouped into peer cohorts by similar exposure (fleet size, miles driven, freight type), and ranked within their cohort. The published score is a percentile rank from 0 to 100, where higher means worse.

Thresholds that matter:

General threshold: 65th percentile. A carrier scoring above the 65th percentile in any of the four general BASICs (Unsafe Driving, HOS, Driver Fitness, Vehicle Maintenance) is in alert status.
Passenger / hazmat threshold: 60th percentile. Lower threshold for passenger carriers and hazmat haulers given the higher consequence of failure.
Controlled Substances / Alcohol: any violation is treated more strictly; threshold is effectively much tighter.

FMCSA marks alert status with a triangle icon on the public SMS page. The icon is the fastest visual scan a broker can run before booking.

Which BASICs matter most for broker liability

All seven BASICs are evidence. Two are dispositive.

Unsafe Driving

The most direct predictor of the kind of crash that produces a negligent-hiring lawsuit. A carrier whose drivers have a pattern of speeding, reckless driving, or inattention is the carrier whose tractor-trailer is going to be involved in the wreck that gets you sued. A broker who booked a carrier in Unsafe Driving alert and cannot explain why is in a difficult position from the first deposition forward.

Hours of Service Compliance

Drivers who run over hours fall asleep. Juries understand this viscerally. HOS alert status is the second-easiest exhibit a plaintiff's lawyer puts on the screen. Pair HOS alert with an actual fatigue-related crash and the case writes itself.

The other five

Driver Fitness, Vehicle Maintenance, Controlled Substances, Hazmat, and Crash Indicator are also material in specific fact patterns. Vehicle Maintenance alerts pair with brake-failure crashes. Controlled Substances alerts pair with impairment cases. Hazmat alerts pair with hazmat releases. Crash Indicator, even though not publicly displayed, surfaces in discovery and reinforces patterns the other BASICs show.

The post-Montgomery context

Before May 14, 2026, brokers in most circuits had a federal preemption defense that knocked out negligent-hiring claims before discovery. CSA scores were a soft signal, useful but not litigation-critical for most brokers.

After the Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, negligent-hiring claims against brokers proceed in state court. The discovery request will ask: did you check the carrier's CSA scores, and if so, when, and what did the scores say? "We don't look at CSA" is a bad answer. "We looked at CSA but did not capture the record" is also a bad answer. The right answer is a contemporaneous snapshot of the scores as they stood at booking, retained in a tamper-proof format. We covered the full case context in the Montgomery explainer.

How to actually check CSA scores

The official source is FMCSA SMS at ai.fmcsa.dot.gov/sms. Search by DOT number, MC number, or carrier name. The carrier snapshot page shows:

Carrier name, address, DOT/MC numbers
Operating authority status
Fleet size (power units and drivers)
Total inspections and crashes in the past 24 months
BASIC scores for each of the publicly displayed categories
Alert status icons
Recent inspection and violation history

Data is refreshed monthly. The score you see this month reflects the carrier's performance over the past 24 months ending at the most recent refresh. The carrier you booked clean in January may show different scores by June if new violations were recorded.

What to capture for the record

At the moment of booking, every carrier file should include:

Screenshot or PDF of the carrier's FMCSA SMS BASIC page showing all displayed BASIC percentile scores
The data refresh date shown on the FMCSA page
The capture timestamp (system-generated, not user-typed)
Notes on any alert-status BASICs and the broker's rationale for booking despite the alert

That last item is the one most brokers skip. A defensible booking decision in the face of a flag is not the absence of a flag; it is the documented rationale that explains why the broker concluded the carrier was acceptable despite the flag. Examples of legitimate rationales:

The alert is in Vehicle Maintenance and the load is a short-haul under 200 miles, well within tractor service intervals
The HOS alert is from violations more than 18 months ago and the past 12 months show no further HOS violations
The Unsafe Driving alert is at the 67th percentile, two percentile points above threshold, and the carrier has been our preferred lane partner for three years with no incidents

The point is not to manufacture justifications. It is to capture the reasoning that was actually present at the booking decision. Defensible decisions are made in writing.

Common misreadings to avoid

Treating "Not Public" as "Not a Problem". New carriers with fewer than three inspections in a BASIC will show insufficient data publicly. That is not the same as a clean record; it is no record. Treat insufficient-data BASICs as unknown, not safe.
Looking only at the safety rating, ignoring BASICs. A carrier can hold a Satisfactory rating from their last compliance review and still be in CSA alert status. The rating and the scores are different artifacts updated on different schedules.
Comparing percentile scores across BASICs. The percentiles are within-cohort. A 70th percentile in Unsafe Driving and a 70th percentile in Vehicle Maintenance are not necessarily the same volume of violations; they rank the carrier within different peer groups against different data sets. Each BASIC has to be read in isolation.
Assuming Crash Indicator is irrelevant because it is not public. It is not public on FMCSA SMS, but carriers can see their own Crash Indicator data and plaintiff's counsel can subpoena it. The data exists and surfaces in litigation.
Booking a carrier when you can see only the DOT's public SAFER snapshot, not the SMS BASIC page. SAFER shows operating authority and the safety rating. SMS shows CSA scores. Both are needed for a complete vetting record.

What to do when a previously clean carrier alerts

Continuous monitoring matters because CSA data updates monthly. A carrier you booked clean in January may go into alert in June. The right workflow when alerts surface:

Log the alert. System-captured timestamp, which BASIC, what changed.
Pause additional bookings with that carrier until the issue is understood.
Contact the carrier and ask. Many alerts have a contained explanation: a single roadside inspection that revealed an issue the carrier has since fixed, a temporary HOS overage during a known crunch.
Document the conversation and the decision. Either remove the carrier from your active roster, or keep them and capture the rationale, in writing, with a recheck date.
Re-evaluate at the recheck date. If the alert persists or worsens, the rationale needs to escalate or you need to stop booking.

Continued booking through an alert with no documented response is the discovery exhibit a plaintiff's lawyer dreams about. The audit trail of monitoring alerts and broker responses is itself the defense.

The bottom line

CSA scores are now a litigation-critical data point for every carrier you book. The two BASICs that matter most are Unsafe Driving and Hours of Service Compliance, both publicly displayed on FMCSA SMS, both updated monthly. Alert status in either is a flag you have to document and address, not ignore.

A defensible CSA workflow looks like: scan all displayed BASICs before booking, capture the snapshot at the moment of booking with a system-generated timestamp, log the rationale for any alert-status BASICs, monitor weekly for changes, log the broker's response to any new alerts on active carriers, and retain the record per your retention policy.

VettedHaul captures all of that by default: snapshot at booking, tamper-proof record, continuous monitoring, alert response logging, subpoena-ready evidence export. Join the waitlist to lock in founding-customer pricing.