Safety
CSA Score: How It Works Today and What's Changing
By Editorial Team · Updated July 17, 2026 · 12 min read · Editorial standards
On this page 9 sections
Half the internet will tell you your CSA score runs on seven BASICs. The other half will tell you FMCSA scrapped them and rebuilt the whole thing. Only one is true today, and if you guess wrong you will spend a quarter chasing a number that does not exist while the real one climbs. Meanwhile the score you actually have is deciding whether an investigator knocks, what your renewal quote looks like, and whether a shipper’s risk team quietly drops you from the approved list.
Here is the honest version, verified against FMCSA’s own documents, plus the one FMCSA tool that shows where you land under the system that is coming.
What is a CSA score?
A CSA score is a percentile ranking of your carrier against a peer group of similar carriers, calculated from roadside inspection violations and reportable crashes over a rolling 24-month window, and published in FMCSA’s Safety Measurement System. CSA stands for Compliance, Safety, Accountability, the FMCSA enforcement program the scoring feeds.
One clarification does more work than anything else here: CSA scores are a carrier metric, not a driver metric. There is no such thing as “a driver’s CSA score,” no matter how many job ads imply otherwise. What a driver carries is a five-year record of roadside inspections and three years of crash data, and that lives in the Pre-Employment Screening Program report. To evaluate a person, you want PSP and how driver data feeds carrier CSA numbers, not the SMS percentile.
The practical consequence: when you hire a driver who collects violations, they do not follow him. They land on you. Your DOT number absorbs everything he does at roadside from day one, and it stays absorbed for two years.
The seven BASICs you’re scored on today
Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories, or BASICs, are the seven buckets every violation gets sorted into. They are live and authoritative today. Not all are visible to the public: under the FAST Act of 2015, FMCSA removed certain property-carrier data from public display, and the Crash Indicator and Hazardous Materials Compliance percentiles are now hidden. You see your own by logging in with your DOT number and PIN.
| BASIC | What lands in it | Public percentile? |
|---|---|---|
| Unsafe Driving | Speeding, reckless driving, improper lane change, following too close, texting, seat belt | Yes |
| Crash Indicator | Pattern of state-reported crashes meeting reportable standards, weighted for severity | No (carrier login only) |
| Hours-of-Service Compliance | HOS limit violations, false or missing logs, ELD violations | Yes |
| Vehicle Maintenance | Brakes, lights, tires, defects, load securement, required repairs | Yes |
| Controlled Substances/Alcohol | Impairment and possession violations at roadside | Yes |
| Hazardous Materials Compliance | Leaking containers, placarding, HM paperwork failures | No (carrier login only) |
| Driver Fitness | Invalid or improper license, medical certification failures, driver qualification file gaps | Yes |
Two things worth sitting with. The Crash Indicator being non-public does not make it harmless; FMCSA still uses it to prioritize you for intervention, and insurers ask you to pull it. And crashes that FMCSA’s Crash Preventability Determination Program finds Not Preventable get listed as “Reviewed - Not Preventable” and are excluded from your Crash Indicator measure and percentile. If you are not contesting eligible crashes there, you are volunteering to carry weight that is not yours.
How your CSA score is actually calculated
Your percentile in each BASIC is built in four moves: every violation gets a severity weight, that weight is multiplied by a time factor based on how recent it is, the weighted total is normalized by your exposure into a measure, and that measure is ranked against carriers with a similar number of safety events. The output is a percentile from 0 to 100. Higher is worse.
The mechanics that matter, per FMCSA’s SMS methodology:
Severity weight. Violations currently carry a severity weight on a 1 to 10 scale. A burned-out marker lamp and a 15-over speeding ticket are not the same object.
Time weighting. Recency is punished on purpose. Violations from the last six months count three times; six to twelve months back, twice; one to two years back, once. Then they fall out of the window entirely at 24 months.
Peer grouping. You are not compared to the whole industry but to a safety event group of carriers with a similar volume of inspections or crashes, so a 40-truck fleet is not measured against a national LTL carrier.
Intervention thresholds. Cross the threshold in a BASIC and you become an FMCSA priority. For general (property) carriers: 65% for Unsafe Driving, Crash Indicator and HOS Compliance, and 80% for Vehicle Maintenance, Controlled Substances/Alcohol, Hazardous Materials Compliance and Driver Fitness. The first three are lower because FMCSA’s analysis found those categories have the strongest relationship to crash risk. Passenger and HM carriers face different thresholds, so confirm yours on the SMS site rather than assuming the property-carrier figures apply.
So what is a good CSA score? Any BASIC percentile comfortably under its threshold, with nothing trending upward. There is no gold star at zero and no letter grade. Chasing a specific number is the wrong frame. The right one: a rising Unsafe Driving BASIC six months from now is already baked in by the hires you make this month.
The time weighting is the cruelest part of the CSA score calculation and the most misunderstood. A speeding ticket written last week hits your measure at triple weight. If it was validly issued you cannot appeal it away, train it away, or maintenance it away. You wait it out for 24 months while it decays. That asymmetry is the whole argument for putting effort upstream of the violation instead of downstream.
What’s changing, and why there’s still no date
FMCSA has an approved package of SMS changes. It is not in effect. The current SMS remains authoritative until FMCSA says otherwise, and FMCSA has stated a Federal Register notice will publish with significant lead time before anything switches over.
| In effect today | Approved and coming (no date) |
|---|---|
| Seven BASICs | Renamed compliance categories |
| Vehicle Maintenance as one category | Split into Vehicle Maintenance and Vehicle Maintenance: Driver Observed (driver-spottable defects separated from mechanic-identified ones) |
| Controlled Substances/Alcohol as its own category | Folded into Unsafe Driving |
| Severity weights on a 1 to 10 scale | Simplified to 1 or 2 |
| ~2,000 individual violation codes | Consolidated into roughly 100 violation groups of similar safety behaviors |
| Current thresholds | HM adjusts to 90%; Driver Fitness adjusts to 90% for general carriers |
| Current data sufficiency rules | Percentiles calculated only for carriers with cited violations in the past 12 months, extended across HOS, both Vehicle Maintenance categories, HM and Driver Fitness |
Two traps. Nothing in the right column is live, and any source telling you the overhaul already happened is describing a system you are not being judged by. And several things blogs sell as “new” are simply the current SMS: the 24-month window and time weighting by recency are today’s rules, not tomorrow’s.
How to see your future score today
FMCSA built a tool for exactly this and almost nobody uses it. The CSA Prioritization Preview shows where you would land under the forthcoming methodology, using your real data, right now.
Go to the preview site
Visit csa.fmcsa.dot.gov/prioritizationpreview. Smart, not required. Gotcha: this is a preview, not your official record. Nothing here changes your current standing or what an investigator sees today.
Log in with your DOT number and PIN
You need your USDOT PIN, the same credential that unlocks your non-public BASICs on SMS. Required to see your own numbers. Gotcha: if nobody at your company knows where the PIN is, request it now. It arrives by mail, not instantly.
Compare the two views side by side
Pull your current SMS percentiles and your preview percentiles into one sheet. Smart. Gotcha: expect movement even with identical data. Collapsing 2,000 violation codes into ~100 groups and 10 severity levels into 2 reshuffles which violations dominate your measure.
Find where you get worse, not better
The useful output is the delta. If Controlled Substances/Alcohol violations get pulled into Unsafe Driving, a carrier with drug and alcohol history sees Unsafe Driving move. Smart. Gotcha: improvements are not a plan. Only the categories that deteriorate tell you where you are exposed.
Recheck after the Federal Register notice
The preview reflects an approved methodology that has not launched. Required if you plan around it. Gotcha: treat it as a directional read, not a forecast, and verify the current methodology with FMCSA before making decisions with real money attached.
What a bad CSA score actually costs you
Three bills, in escalating order of pain.
FMCSA interventions. Cross a threshold and you enter the intervention pipeline: warning letters, then targeted roadside inspections, then off-site or on-site investigations. An on-site investigation is days of staff time and open books, and if it produces an unsatisfactory safety rating your operating authority is on the table. Carriers inside their first year should read what the new entrant safety audit checks, because a fresh DOT number and a climbing BASIC is the fastest route to an audit.
Insurance. Underwriters pull your BASICs. A high Unsafe Driving or Crash Indicator percentile is a loss-cost signal, and it prices in at renewal, sometimes as a decline rather than a number. This one recurs annually whether or not anything else happens.
Shipper contracts. Large shippers and brokers screen carriers against CSA data and set their own cutoffs, frequently stricter than FMCSA’s. You usually will not get a rejection letter explaining it. The freight just stops. Building the underlying discipline is covered in how to build a trucking safety program and the broader DOT compliance requirements for trucking companies.
Your CSA score is a list of people you hired
Strip away the percentile math and a CSA score is not an abstract company metric. It is arithmetic performed on things individual human beings did at roadside. The 15-over ticket was a person. The falsified log was a person. The out-of-service brakes the driver signed off on in his pre-trip were a person.
Every lever most carriers pull is downstream of that. Maintenance programs, refresher training, coaching, telematics: all valuable, all working on consequences after the violation is already in your score and time-weighted at triple strength. The only genuinely upstream lever is not hiring the driver who brings the violation with him.
And here is the gap. Your formal checks show records, not behavior. An MVR shows convictions. A PSP report shows inspections and crashes at prior carriers. A clearinghouse query shows drug and alcohol violations. All required, all real, and none of them shows the things that never generated a record: the no-shows, the abandoned load in Amarillo, the quit-on-dispatch, the trailer returned with damage nobody wrote up, the “eligible for rehire: no” a former safety director would say out loud but never put in writing.
Those behaviors are the leading indicator. The driver who abandons a load under pressure is the same driver who runs 15-over to make up time. The record shows you the second one after it costs you. His last three employers already knew about the first.
That is the layer a peer-sourced driver reputation database fills. Carriers report what a driver was actually like to employ, and the next carrier reads it before the offer goes out instead of after the inspection. 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.
To be direct about the boundary: this is an added behavior layer, never a replacement for a required record. It does not substitute for an MVR, a PSP report, a clearinghouse query, or your employment verification obligations. Run all of those. Then check what past carriers reported about a driver to see what the records structurally cannot show, and read more on how driver reviews work in practice.
Frequently asked questions
What is a CSA score?
A CSA score is a percentile ranking of a motor carrier against a peer group of similar carriers, calculated from roadside inspection violations and reportable crashes over a rolling 24-month window and published in FMCSA’s Safety Measurement System. It runs 0 to 100, and higher is worse.
Do individual drivers have CSA scores?
No. CSA scores belong to carriers, not drivers, despite how often job postings suggest otherwise. The driver-level equivalent is the Pre-Employment Screening Program report, which shows five years of roadside inspections and three years of crash data for one person.
How is a CSA score calculated?
Each violation gets a severity weight, currently on a 1 to 10 scale. That weight is multiplied by a time factor: three times for violations in the last six months, two times for six to twelve months, one time for one to two years. The weighted total is normalized by your exposure into a measure, and the measure is ranked against carriers in a similar safety event group to produce your percentile.
What is a good CSA score?
Any BASIC percentile safely below its intervention threshold with no upward trend. For general property carriers the thresholds are 65% for Unsafe Driving, Crash Indicator and HOS Compliance, and 80% for Vehicle Maintenance, Controlled Substances/Alcohol, Hazardous Materials Compliance and Driver Fitness. Passenger and HM carriers have different thresholds, so confirm yours on the SMS site.
Did FMCSA replace the BASICs?
Not yet. The seven BASICs are the system in effect today. FMCSA published approved changes in a Federal Register notice on November 20, 2024, including renaming BASICs to compliance categories, but no effective date has been announced. FMCSA states carriers should continue using the current SMS website until the updated system is in effect.
Which BASICs are visible to the public?
Unsafe Driving, HOS Compliance, Vehicle Maintenance, Controlled Substances/Alcohol and Driver Fitness percentiles are public for property carriers. Crash Indicator and Hazardous Materials Compliance are hidden from public view under the FAST Act of 2015, and you must log in with your DOT number to see your own.
Can I get a crash removed from my Crash Indicator?
Sometimes. Crashes found Not Preventable through FMCSA’s Crash Preventability Determination Program are displayed as “Reviewed - Not Preventable” and excluded from your Crash Indicator measure and percentile. Only eligible crash types qualify, and you have to submit the request; nothing happens automatically.
How do I see my score under the new methodology?
Log in at the CSA Prioritization Preview (csa.fmcsa.dot.gov/prioritizationpreview) with your DOT number and PIN. It shows where your real data lands under the approved methodology. It is a preview only and does not affect your current standing.