How to Pull a PSP Report on a Driver

Pulling a PSP report on a driver isn’t hard, but it has gates you can’t skip: you have to be enrolled with FMCSA, and you have to hold the driver’s signed authorization in your hand first. Order one without that consent and you’ve broken federal rules. Here’s exactly how a carrier enrolls, gets the right consent, pays for the record, and reads what comes back, plus where the report leaves you guessing.

Key takeaways

• A PSP driver report is FMCSA’s Pre-Employment Screening Program record: five years of crash data and three years of roadside-inspection history, pulled from the federal MCMIS database.
• You must enroll first through psp.fmcsa.dot.gov (the portal is run by NIC Federal, LLC, now part of Tyler Technologies) and get the driver’s written or electronic consent on FMCSA’s mandatory form before each pull.
• Cost is $10 per record, plus an annual subscription of $25 (fewer than 100 power units) or $100 (100 or more). Reports come back fast — usually on-screen within minutes.
• A PSP shows what happened at the roadside, not how a driver behaved at past carriers — no-shows, abandoned trucks, or chronic job-hopping never appear.

What a PSP report shows (so you order the right thing)

A PSP driver report is a snapshot of a commercial driver’s safety record from the federal Motor Carrier Management Information System (MCMIS) — specifically five years of DOT-recordable crashes and three years of roadside inspections, including any violations written up during those inspections. It does not show license status, employment history, or drug-and-alcohol program violations; those live on the MVR (Motor Vehicle Record, the state DMV’s driving-record file), the DAC report, and the FMCSA Clearinghouse, respectively.

One thing to set expectations on early: the PSP reports every Commercial Motor Vehicle (CMV) crash the driver was involved in, regardless of fault. A driver rear-ended at a red light shows the same crash entry as one who caused it. The report doesn’t assign blame, so you read it for patterns, not single events.

How to pull a PSP report on a driver: the 6 steps

Here’s the full sequence from “we don’t have an account” to “the report is on my screen.” Most carriers do this once, then reuse the account for every future hire.

1. Enroll your company at psp.fmcsa.dot.gov as a Monthly Account Holder with NIC Federal.
2. Set up your Login.gov account with multi-factor authentication once your enrollment is activated.
3. Give the applicant the FMCSA Disclosure and Authorization form and get it signed before you do anything else.
4. Log in and order the record by entering the driver’s name and license details.
5. Pay the $10 per-record fee (billed monthly to your account).
6. Read the report — crashes and inspections, on-screen within minutes — and retain the signed consent for at least five years.

The two steps people get wrong are #3 (ordering before the form is signed) and #6 (tossing the consent form too early). Both are compliance failures, so the rest of this guide walks through them in detail.

Step 1: Enroll your company with FMCSA

You can’t pull a PSP driver report as a one-off; your carrier has to be enrolled first. Go to psp.fmcsa.dot.gov and register as a “Monthly Account Holder.” The portal and billing are operated by NIC Federal, LLC (NICF) — now part of Tyler Technologies — under contract with FMCSA, not by the agency directly.

Enrollment means completing the Monthly Account Holder Agreement: you initial each page, fill in your company details (organization name, DOT number, number of power units, billing info), and submit it by email to [email protected], by fax, or by courier. FMCSA says to allow up to ten business days for processing. Once your account is activated, you’ll get instructions to create a Login.gov account — the federal sign-in system with multi-factor authentication — which is required to access PSP from then on.

If your business isn’t a motor carrier (say you’re a staffing firm or service provider), you don’t enroll the same way; you contact NICF to see whether you qualify for access as an industry service provider.

Step 2: Get the driver’s written consent (the part you can’t skip)

Federal law requires you to have the driver’s written or electronic consent before you access their PSP report — every single time. And not just any consent: FMCSA mandates that you use its exact PSP Disclosure and Authorization form, word for word, as a stand-alone document. You can’t bury it inside your general application or fold it into another background-check consent — the language has to stand on its own.

A few rules that trip up new account holders:

• One form, one pull. A signed authorization is good for a single PSP record request. Need to pull the same driver again later? Get a fresh signature.
• Keep it five years. You must retain each signed form for no less than five years.
• It carries FCRA duties. The form discloses the driver’s rights under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA, the federal law governing background reports). If you reject a driver based on what’s in the PSP, you owe them the adverse-action steps: a pre-adverse notice with a copy of the report and a summary of their rights, time to respond, then a final notice.

Treat the consent form as the gate, not a formality. No signed authorization, no pull — full stop.

Step 3: Order the record and pay the fee

Once you’re enrolled and holding a signed form, ordering is the easy part: log in, enter the driver’s name and license information, and submit the request. The report is generated almost immediately and displayed on screen, so there’s no multi-day wait the way some employment-verification checks run.

Here’s what it costs, all in:

Usage fees are totaled and billed monthly to your account. You can pay by electronic check (ACH), credit card (which adds a surcharge), or paper check. So a small fleet running a handful of hires a year is looking at the $25 subscription plus $10 per driver — cheap insurance against a bad seat (an empty or wrongly filled driver position).

Step 4: How to read the PSP report

The report comes back in two parts: a crash section (five years) and an inspection section (three years). Read them for trends, not isolated dings.

• Crashes: Remember the report lists every crash regardless of fault. Two or three not-at-fault rear-end hits over five years tell you little. A cluster of crashes in the same conditions — backing, lane changes, fatigue-coded events — is worth a conversation.
• Inspections and violations: Look for repeated hours-of-service (HOS) violations (the 11-hour driving / 14-hour on-duty limits), logbook falsification, or speeding written up at the roadside. A driver with 40 clean inspections and one minor violation reads very differently from one with five inspections and three serious violations.
• Out-of-service (OOS) orders: These flag the driver or vehicle being pulled off the road during an inspection — a heavier signal than a standard violation.

If a driver insists an entry is wrong, the fix isn’t through you. Neither you nor FMCSA’s contractor can edit the safety data. The driver — or you — challenges it through DataQs, FMCSA’s request system, which routes the dispute to the state that reported it.

Can drivers pull their own PSP report?

Yes — and it’s worth knowing, because applicants often show up with one. A driver can order their own PSP record at psp.fmcsa.dot.gov for the same $10 fee, with no subscription required. The report generates on screen right away, same as the carrier-side pull. Drivers who want a no-cost option can instead submit a Privacy Act request to FMCSA for a free copy, though that route is slower.

A self-pulled PSP a candidate hands you is a useful starting point, but it isn’t a substitute for ordering your own with a signed authorization — you still need the consent and the record in your own account to satisfy your process and your FCRA paper trail.

What the PSP report won’t show you

Here’s the honest limit. A PSP driver report is built from roadside events and crashes — what happened when a CMV met a scale house or an inspector. It is genuinely useful for that. But a perfectly clean PSP tells you nothing about how a driver behaved at their last three carriers. No-shows after orientation. Trucks abandoned mid-load in a different state. Walking off over a dispatch dispute. Chronic 30-day job-hopping. None of it leaves a roadside violation, so none of it touches the PSP.

That’s the exact gap that bites recruiters. A driver can carry a spotless PSP and a spotless MVR and still be the person two former fleets would never rehire — because the behavior that got them let go never became a citation. The records system simply doesn’t capture reputation.

That’s the layer a peer-sourced driver-review database like cdlscan.com is built to add. Instead of guessing what a clean report leaves out, you can search a driver by name and read what their previous carriers actually wrote — the reliability, attendance, and rehire-worthiness signals the PSP can’t see. It doesn’t replace your PSP, MVR, DAC, or Clearinghouse checks; it fills the blind spot behind them. (CDLScan lists more than 1 million driver reviews and runs roughly 23,419 searches a week, and the search itself is free.)

For how these records stack up against each other, see PSP vs DAC vs MVR.

Frequently asked questions

How do I pull a PSP report on a driver? Enroll your carrier at psp.fmcsa.dot.gov, create a Login.gov account, get the driver’s signed FMCSA authorization form, then log in, enter their license details, and order the record for $10. The report appears on screen within minutes.

How much does a PSP driver report cost? $10 per record, plus an annual subscription of $25 for fleets with fewer than 100 power units or $100 for 100 or more. There’s no separate enrollment fee.

Can I get a free driver PSP report? Carriers can’t pull one for free — it’s $10 per record. A driver can get a free copy of their own report by submitting a Privacy Act request directly to FMCSA, though that’s slower than the $10 online pull.

Do I need the driver’s consent to pull a PSP report? Yes. Federal law requires written or electronic consent before each pull, using FMCSA’s exact stand-alone Disclosure and Authorization form. One signed form covers a single request, and you must keep it for at least five years.

How long does it take to get a PSP report online? Almost instantly. Once you submit the request through the PSP portal, the report is generated and displayed on screen, usually within minutes.

What’s on a PSP report for a CDL driver? Five years of DOT-recordable crashes and three years of roadside-inspection history from the federal MCMIS database, including any violations recorded during those inspections. It does not include license status, employment history, or drug-and-alcohol violations.

Who runs the PSP system — is it FMCSA? The program is FMCSA’s, but the portal and billing are operated by NIC Federal, LLC (now part of Tyler Technologies) under federal contract. Records come from FMCSA’s MCMIS database.

How does a driver fix a wrong entry on their PSP? Neither the employer nor FMCSA’s contractor can edit safety data. The driver (or carrier) files a challenge through DataQs at dataqs.fmcsa.dot.gov, which routes it to the state that reported the crash or inspection.