Safety
CSA Score Lookup: How to Find Any Carrier's Safety Data in Minutes
By Editorial Team · Updated July 17, 2026 · 11 min read · Editorial standards
On this page 9 sections
Your insurance renewal is in three weeks, a broker just asked for your Vehicle Maintenance percentile, and the carrier you are about to lease onto swears their numbers are clean. So you sit down to do a CSA score lookup and immediately hit a wall: one FMCSA site shows you almost nothing, another wants a PIN you have never heard of, and a third one shows a score under rules that are not even in effect yet. None of them agree on what they are called.
This is not you being slow. FMCSA genuinely runs three separate lookup surfaces, each with a different audience and a different login. Here is which is which, what you can see on each, and the single biggest misconception in this whole search: drivers do not have CSA scores.
CSA score lookup: what is public vs what needs a login
Short answer: anyone can look up any carrier’s inspection and crash history for free on SAFER, but the actual percentile scores are behind a PIN and only the carrier can pull its own. That single distinction explains most of the confusion. When a broker says “your CSA is a 78,” they are quoting something you gave them, not something they pulled off a public page.
Three tools, three jobs:
| Tool | What you get | Who can see it | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| SAFER Company Snapshot (safer.fmcsa.dot.gov) | Operating authority, insurance, fleet size, 24-month inspection and crash counts, out-of-service rates, safety rating | Anyone, no login, any USDOT number | Free |
| SMS (ai.fmcsa.dot.gov/sms) | Full BASIC measures, percentiles, alerts, violation-level detail | Public view is limited for property carriers; the carrier logs in with USDOT PIN to see everything | Free |
| CSA Prioritization Preview (csa.fmcsa.dot.gov/prioritizationpreview) | How your data would look under the forthcoming updated methodology | The carrier, logged in | Free |
| PSP (psp.fmcsa.dot.gov) | An individual driver’s 5-year crash and 3-year inspection history | Enrolled carriers, with the driver’s written consent | $10 per search |
Note what is missing from every row: none of these tell you whether a driver or a carrier is easy to work with. Hold that thought.
How to look up any carrier’s safety data (SAFER, no login)
Start here whenever the carrier is not you. SAFER is the only surface where you can run a CSA score check on a third party without credentials, and it is the right tool for vetting a lease-on partner, a co-broker, or a new customer’s fleet.
Pull the Company Snapshot
Go to safer.fmcsa.dot.gov and search by USDOT number, MC number, or company name. USDOT number is the only one that returns exactly one result; name search on a common name like “Express Trucking” returns dozens.
Required or just smart: Smart. Nothing forces you to do this, but running it before a lease-on takes ninety seconds.
The gotcha: Snapshot data comes from MCMIS and refreshes on a schedule. A crash from last week may not be there yet. Absence of a record is not proof of a clean month.
Read the inspection and out-of-service block
The Snapshot shows 24 months of inspections split by vehicle, driver, and hazmat, each with an out-of-service rate and the national average next to it. This is the closest thing to a free public score. A vehicle OOS rate at triple the national average tells you plenty without any percentile at all.
The gotcha: Small carriers with four inspections can post a 25% OOS rate off a single violation. Always look at the denominator before you draw a conclusion.
Check authority and insurance, not just safety
Scroll to operating status and insurance on file. A carrier can have gorgeous inspection numbers and a revoked authority. For partner vetting, the authority line is often the finding, not the safety data.
Try the public SMS view for what is left
From SAFER you can jump to the SMS profile. For property carriers, FMCSA removed alerts and relative percentiles from public display per the FAST Act, so expect measures and raw data rather than the score itself. Passenger carrier information remains publicly available in full, which is why bus and motorcoach lookups feel so much more complete.
How to check your own CSA scores (SMS + USDOT PIN)
To see your own percentiles, alerts, and the two non-public categories, log into the SMS website with your USDOT number and USDOT PIN. This is the answer to “how to check CSA score” for your own fleet, and it is free. The only real friction is the PIN.
Get or recover your USDOT PIN
Go to safer.fmcsa.dot.gov and use the PIN request option. FMCSA can send it to the email or phone on file, or mail it to your address of record. Mailed PINs take roughly a week to arrive, so do not start this the night before an audit prep meeting.
The gotcha: The PIN goes to whatever contact info is on your MCS-150. If your old safety director’s email is still on file, you are recovering a PIN into an inbox you cannot open. Fix the MCS-150 first.
Understand which PIN you have
FMCSA issues a USDOT number PIN and a separate MC (docket) number PIN. They are not interchangeable. SMS login uses the USDOT PIN.
Log in at ai.fmcsa.dot.gov/sms
Once in, you get the full picture: every BASIC, your measure, your percentile, your alerts, and the underlying violations that produced them. This is the view your insurance underwriter is effectively reconstructing from their own data providers.
Set a monthly cadence
FMCSA updates SMS monthly. Checking once a quarter means a bad month can sit on your profile for eleven weeks before you notice it, and DataQs challenges get harder to support as the paperwork trail cools.
How to preview your score under the new methodology
FMCSA has approved a set of changes to SMS and built a separate site where you can preview your results under them, but the changes are not in effect and no launch date has been announced. The approved changes were published in the Federal Register on November 20, 2024 as the Enhanced Carrier Safety Measurement System. FMCSA’s position is unambiguous: until the updated system is in effect, carriers should continue to use the current SMS website to monitor safety performance.
To preview, log in at csa.fmcsa.dot.gov/prioritizationpreview with the same credentials. The Preview site is refreshed monthly alongside SMS.
What actually changes matters less than what does not. Two mechanics that blogs love to call “new” are already part of the current SMS: the 24-month data window and time weighting that gives recent events more influence than old ones. Both are in the current SMS methodology document today. One genuinely approved change is the violation severity scale, which would move from the current 1-to-10 weighting to a simpler two-value scale. Before you build policy on any specific weight or threshold, confirm it against FMCSA’s own What’s Changing summary rather than a secondary source.
If you see an article claiming the BASICs were replaced or that the overhaul went live, close it. It is wrong, and several of the sites making that claim rank well.
How to read what you’re looking at
Higher is worse. A CSA percentile is not a grade out of 100. It is a rank against peers with a similar number of safety events, and a 78 in Unsafe Driving means 78% of your comparison group performs better than you do. New carriers regularly panic over this backwards.
Three things to internalize:
- The measure and the percentile are different numbers. The measure is your own weighted violation total over 24 months, where 0 is best. The percentile is that measure translated into a peer ranking within your safety event group.
- Intervention thresholds vary by BASIC and by carrier type. FMCSA’s analysis found Unsafe Driving, Crash Indicator, and HOS Compliance most strongly associated with crash risk, so those categories carry lower thresholds. Passenger and HM carriers also face lower thresholds, since their crashes tend to be more severe.
- Two categories are invisible to the public. Crash Indicator and HM Compliance percentiles are not shown publicly for property carriers. If a vendor claims to sell you a competitor’s Crash Indicator percentile, ask hard questions about where it came from.
”Driver CSA score” doesn’t exist. Here’s what does.
Drivers do not have CSA scores. CSA is a carrier-level measurement system, full stop. Search “driver CSA score” and you will land on articles titled exactly that, which then quietly spend 1,200 words describing PSP. The confusion is real and it costs recruiters money, because it sends them looking for a lookup tool that does not exist instead of the one that does.
Here is what is true. Roadside violations are attributed to the carrier whose USDOT number is on the truck. They land in that carrier’s BASICs. The same inspection also attaches to the driver’s record in MCMIS, and the way an employer sees that is the Pre-Employment Screening Program (PSP).
PSP gives you:
- Five years of crash history and three years of roadside inspection history, straight from MCMIS
- A cost of $10 per search, charged whether or not any crash or inspection data comes back
- A hard consent requirement: before you request the record, you must give the applicant a clear and conspicuous written disclosure and obtain written authorization, per the FCRA and FMCSA’s PSP terms
If PSP is new territory, start with what a PSP report actually is, then how to pull one and how to read the results without over-reacting to a single clean-inspection line item. And if you are still untangling which record does what, PSP vs DAC vs MVR is the map.
What none of these lookups can tell you
Run every tool on this page and you will know a driver’s inspection history, their crash involvement, and the safety profile of the carriers on their application. You will still not know the thing that decides whether this hire works out.
PSP does not record that a driver no-showed on day three of orientation. SAFER does not know that he took a load to Laredo and stopped answering the phone. SMS has no field for equipment returned with a wrecked reefer unit and a missing fuel card. MVR shows tickets, not attitude on dispatch. Every one of these records logs what a police officer or a state agency observed. None of them log what the driver’s last four fleets lived through.
That information exists. It is just not in a government database, because the only people who hold it are the safety directors and recruiters who employed the driver before you. CDLScan is the layer that collects exactly that: carrier-reported feedback on reliability, rehire eligibility, and how the working relationship actually ended. CDLScan lists more than 1 million driver reviews and runs well over 20,000 searches a week; the search itself is free, with a full report starting at $2.75.
It is an addition, not a substitute. PSP is the federal record and nothing replaces pulling it with proper consent. But once you have the record, a peer-sourced behavior check answers the question the record structurally cannot: would the people who already employed this driver take him back?
Frequently asked questions
How do I do a CSA score lookup by USDOT number? Enter the USDOT number at safer.fmcsa.dot.gov to pull the Company Snapshot, which is free and public. That gives you 24 months of inspection and crash data plus out-of-service rates. To see actual percentile scores, the carrier must log into the SMS website at ai.fmcsa.dot.gov/sms with its USDOT PIN.
Can I check a CSA score free? Yes. Every FMCSA lookup surface discussed here, including SAFER, SMS, and the Prioritization Preview, is free. Only PSP costs money, at $10 per driver search. Any site charging you for a basic carrier CSA score check is reselling free public data.
Why can’t I see another carrier’s percentiles? Section 5223 of the FAST Act of 2015 required FMCSA to remove alerts and relative percentiles for property carriers from the public SMS display. Passenger carrier information stayed public. Property carriers can see their own complete results by logging in.
Do drivers have a CSA score? No. CSA is measured at the carrier level. The driver-level federal equivalent is the PSP report, which shows five years of crash history and three years of inspection history from MCMIS. Articles promising a driver CSA score lookup are almost always describing PSP.
Were the BASICs replaced in 2026? No. The seven BASICs are the system in effect today. FMCSA published approved changes to the methodology in the Federal Register on November 20, 2024, but has not announced a launch date, and states that carriers should keep using the current SMS website until the updated system is in effect.
What is the CSA Prioritization Preview for? It lets a carrier log in and see how its own data would look under the forthcoming methodology, so it can plan ahead. It is a preview, not a live score, and it is updated monthly alongside SMS.
How long does it take to get a USDOT PIN? FMCSA can send the PIN to the email or phone number on file with your registration, or mail it to your address of record, which typically takes about a week. If the contact information on your MCS-150 is outdated, update it first or the PIN goes somewhere you cannot reach.
How often should I run a CSA score check on my own fleet? Monthly, because that is how often FMCSA refreshes SMS. A monthly cadence also keeps DataQs challenges viable while drivers, dispatch notes, and paperwork are still fresh enough to support the dispute.