PSP vs DAC Report: The Complete Comparison for Recruiters

“PSP vs DAC” sounds like a coin flip — pull one, skip the other, move on. It isn’t. The two reports come from opposite worlds: one is federal safety data the government logged at the roadside, the other is employment history a former boss chose to type into a private database. Treating them as interchangeable is how a “clean” applicant turns out to have a record you never looked at — or how you reject a good driver over a vindictive entry you took at face value. This guide lays the two side by side, adds the MVR that completes the picture, and shows you which to pull, in what order, and how to read each one without getting burned.

The 30-second answer

If you only read one thing: the MVR confirms the license is valid, the PSP shows federal crash and inspection history, and the DAC shows where the driver worked and whether those carriers would take them back. Different sources, different data, no overlap worth relying on.

The rest of this guide breaks down each report, runs PSP and DAC head-to-head, shows where the MVR fits, and tells you the order to pull them in — and where they all leave you blind.

What is a PSP report?

A PSP report is FMCSA’s Pre-Employment Screening Program record: a commercial driver’s five years of DOT-recordable crash data plus three years of roadside inspection history, pulled straight from the federal Motor Carrier Management Information System (MCMIS). (“FMCSA” is the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the agency that regulates interstate trucking.)

The crash side covers serious, federally reportable wrecks — a fatality, an injury treated away from the scene, or any vehicle towed from the scene. The inspection side lists every violation an officer cited at a weigh station or roadside check: hours-of-service (HOS) and logbook errors, equipment defects, moving violations, and whether the driver or truck was placed out-of-service (OOS). The defining quirk: a PSP shows violations cited at roadside even if the driver was never convicted and never paid a fine. That’s a lower bar than a court conviction, which is exactly why a driver can carry a spotless license record and a busy PSP.

For the full breakdown — every field, how to read patterns, and the FMCSA crash-reduction data — see our deep-dive on what a PSP report is and how PSP accident reports and CSA data connect.

What is a DAC report?

A DAC report (Drive-A-Check, now owned and operated by HireRight) is an employer-reported history file on a CDL driver — and unlike the PSP, it is not a government record. It compiles what previous carriers chose to submit: employment dates, reason for leaving, eligibility for rehire (Yes / No / Review), DOT-recordable accidents, drug-and-alcohol test data, and the equipment the driver operated.

Because a DAC report is a consumer report under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), the driver can pull a free copy annually and dispute errors that HireRight must reinvestigate. Its structural weakness is the flip side of its usefulness: entries are self-reported by former carriers, many of whom don’t report at all, and the fields recruiters fixate on — reason for leaving, rehire eligibility — are judgment calls that can be sparse, dated, or filed in anger. For the complete picture, see our DAC report guide and how to get and dispute a DAC report.

What is an MVR (Motor Vehicle Record)?

An MVR is the driving record held by a state’s Department of Motor Vehicles, showing license status (active, suspended, revoked), class, endorsements and restrictions, moving-violation convictions, suspensions, and DUIs. The catch most recruiters miss: there is no national MVR. You must request one from every state where the driver held a CDL or permit in the lookback period, pull it pre-hire, and re-pull it at least once every 12 months. An MVR shows only what a court actually convicted — citations still pending in court don’t appear. It includes no FMCSA inspection data, no DOT crash file, and no employment history. For the screening details, see our guide to the MVR check for CDL drivers.

PSP vs DAC — the head-to-head

Both reports touch a driver’s past, but the trust model is the opposite, and that single distinction should change how you weigh each one. PSP is objective government data — crashes and inspections recorded by enforcement officers, comprehensive within its scope and very hard for anyone to alter or fake. DAC is subjective employer data — what a former carrier decided to enter, useful but only as complete and fair as the reporting carrier chose to make it. Read your PSP as fact. Read your DAC as testimony you still have to corroborate.

A few practical contrasts that matter on the desk:

• Source and authority. PSP comes from FMCSA’s federal MCMIS database; DAC comes from a private consumer reporting agency (HireRight) that aggregates employer submissions. One is a regulator’s record, the other a vendor’s.
• What each is actually good at. PSP answers “is this a safety risk on the road?” — crash and inspection history. DAC answers “what happened at past jobs and would they rehire?” — employment continuity, separations, accidents the employer logged. They almost never cover the same ground.
• How easily it can be wrong. A PSP violation reflects something an officer physically cited at the roadside; it’s documented and hard to game, though it can be mis-attributed (more on disputes below). A DAC entry can be subjective, retaliatory, or simply never filed — a truck returned in good shape and coded “abandoned” is a known failure mode.
• Completeness. PSP is complete within its narrow lane: if there was a recordable crash or a roadside inspection, it’s there. DAC is only as complete as participation — many small and mid-size carriers never report at all, so a thin DAC can mean a clean history or just non-reporting employers.
• How you fix an error. PSP disputes go through FMCSA’s DataQs; DAC disputes go through HireRight under the FCRA. Same goal, completely different process and timeline.

The honest takeaway: PSP vs DAC is not a choice — it’s a pairing. A clean PSP tells you nothing about why a driver left their last three jobs; a glowing DAC tells you nothing about the OOS order they collected in Ohio. Pull both, and read each in its own register.

PSP vs MVR — why they’re not interchangeable

The most common mix-up in driver screening is treating the PSP and the MVR as the same record. They are not. An MVR is a state license record; a PSP is federal crash and inspection data. A driver can have a clean MVR and a PSP full of HOS violations and out-of-service orders — because roadside inspection violations don’t post to the state driving record. The reverse is also true: a PSP won’t show a suspended license or an unsettled DUI. FMCSA’s own PSP-vs-MVR guidance makes the point bluntly — PSP always reflects the original cited violation regardless of conviction, while an MVR shows only events that resulted in a conviction in that state. Pull both; one is never a substitute for the other.

DAC vs MVR — and where the Clearinghouse fits

A DAC report and an MVR rarely overlap at all: the DAC is employer-reported employment history from HireRight, while the MVR is the state’s record of license status and convictions. A clean MVR says the driver keeps their license valid; it says nothing about why they left their last carrier. There’s also a fourth record people lump in here that belongs in any honest comparison — the FMCSA Drug & Alcohol Clearinghouse. Since January 6, 2023, the drug-and-alcohol portion of your pre-hire safety-history investigation is satisfied by querying the Clearinghouse, not by a phone call or a DAC line item. None of PSP, DAC, or MVR replaces that query.

Which report should you pull — and in what order?

For a standard CDL hire, the experienced answer to “PSP or DAC?” is both, plus the MVR and a Clearinghouse query — and the order matters because each gate is cheaper to clear before the next. Run them in this sequence:

1. MVR (every state of licensure) — confirm the license is valid, classed, and endorsed before you spend on anything else. A revoked CDL ends the conversation here.
2. PSP — pull the federal crash and inspection history. This is your objective safety read and the cheapest hard data you’ll buy at $10.
3. FMCSA Clearinghouse query — drug-and-alcohol violations, required for the §391.23 history check since January 6, 2023.
4. DAC report — employment history, separations, and rehire eligibility, to corroborate (or contradict) what the applicant told you.

Each gate closes a different hole, and skipping one leaves it open. Keep in mind that the DAC by itself does not satisfy your mandatory §391.23 safety-performance investigation — you still have to contact prior DOT-regulated employers directly for the accident-history piece. For the full procurement walkthrough, see how to pull a PSP report, the PSP cost, consent, and dispute guide, and how carriers use the FMCSA PSP report.

How to read each report without getting burned

A driver report is a risk profile, not a pass/fail test, and each of the three rewards a different reading style. Read them wrong and you’ll either hire a problem or reject a good driver over noise.

Reading a PSP

Hunt for pattern, not a single bad day. A driver who runs hard miles will collect some violations — that’s normal. The signals that matter:

• Repeat OOS events. One out-of-service is a bad day; three in two years is a habit.
• Clustered HOS and logbook violations suggest a driver who pushes past legal limits to hit deadlines — a real liability.
• Crash frequency relative to miles. Two crashes for an OTR (over-the-road) driver running 130,000 miles a year reads differently than two for a local driver.
• Trend direction. Tapering violations as a driver matured beat a recent pile-up. Recent is more predictive than old.
• Severity over count. A reflector-light write-up is not a brake-defect OOS.

Reading a DAC

Read it like testimony, not a verdict. The “not eligible for rehire” flag is the line everyone fixates on, and it’s also the one most prone to bias because it reflects one former employer’s judgment. A thin DAC may mean a clean history or non-reporting carriers — don’t infer either. Treat a negative entry, especially a contested one, as a lead to verify by phone, not a reason to auto-reject. If a candidate says an entry is wrong and is actively disputing it, that’s not automatically a red flag; inaccurate entries are common enough that the dispute process exists for a reason.

Reading an MVR

This one is closest to pass/fail, but still read the type of conviction. A serious violation (DUI, reckless, a CDL disqualifying offense) carries weight a single fixed-it speeding ticket doesn’t. Confirm the license class and endorsements actually match the job — a Hazmat or Tanker lane needs the endorsement on the record, not just on the application.

Cost and consent, compared

The cost and consent rules diverge as much as the data does, and getting consent wrong is a legal exposure, not a paperwork nicety.

Cost. A PSP is a published, flat $10 per record through the official portal at psp.fmcsa.dot.gov, on top of an annual subscription of $25 for carriers with fewer than 100 power units or $100 for carriers with 100 or more (and for third-party screening providers). HireRight does not publish a flat per-report DAC price — cost depends on your account and volume, usually bundled with DOT employment-verification services. MVR fees are set by each state and typically run a few dollars.

Consent. All three require the driver’s written authorization. PSP uses FMCSA’s specific authorization, which you must keep on file and which FMCSA can audit. MVR and DAC consent falls under the FCRA. And because PSP, DAC, and MVR are all used to make a hiring decision, the FCRA treats them as consumer reports — which means if you decline a driver based in whole or in part on any of them, you owe the adverse-action process: a pre-adverse-action notice with a copy of the report and a summary of the driver’s FCRA rights, time to respond, then a final adverse-action notice. None of this is legal advice; if you’re unsure, talk to an attorney who knows transportation hiring.

Disputes: DataQs for PSP, FCRA for DAC

The single biggest practical difference between the two reports shows up when something is wrong — because PSP and DAC errors travel completely different roads. Knowing both lets you give an applicant a straight answer instead of a shrug.

PSP errors go through FMCSA’s DataQs. If a violation or crash is mis-attributed (wrong driver, wrong carrier, a crash the driver wasn’t at fault in), the fix is a Request for Data Review (RDR) filed at dataqs.fmcsa.dot.gov. The challenge is routed to the state agency or office that filed the original record, which reviews the evidence and corrects MCMIS if warranted. There’s no fixed federal deadline like the FCRA’s, and outcomes hinge on documentation — police reports, inspection records, court dispositions.

DAC errors go through HireRight under the FCRA. The driver flags the entry with HireRight and submits supporting documents (pay stubs, emails, test results). By law, HireRight must reinvestigate within 30 days and correct or delete anything it can’t verify, then notify recent recipients of the report. Unresolved disputes can be escalated to the CFPB or FTC — and HireRight has been there: in 2012 the FTC fined HireRight $2.6 million for accuracy and dispute-handling failures. The lesson for recruiters: an “in dispute” DAC entry is genuinely common, not a tell.

Common mistakes recruiters make

The errors below cost real money — a bad hire in trucking runs $8,000–$50,000 — and almost all of them come from misunderstanding which report does what.

• Treating PSP and MVR as the same check. They cover different ground; a clean one of either tells you nothing about the other.
• Assuming a thin DAC means a clean driver. It often just means the driver’s former carriers didn’t report. Absence of data is not a green flag.
• Taking a “not eligible for rehire” flag as gospel. It’s one employer’s opinion and a frequent target of disputes. Verify before you reject.
• Believing the DAC satisfies §391.23. It doesn’t on its own — you still owe direct prior-employer contact for accident history and a Clearinghouse query for drug/alcohol.
• Skipping the Clearinghouse. Since January 6, 2023, the drug-and-alcohol history check runs through the Clearinghouse, not a DAC line or a phone call.
• Pulling reports without documented written consent. PSP consent is auditable by FMCSA; FCRA consent governs MVR and DAC. No consent, no pull.
• Rejecting on a report without running adverse action. Declining over a consumer report without the FCRA notices is a compliance exposure.
• Disqualifying on a single smudge. Read for pattern and severity, not the first violation you see.
• Forgetting the behavior gap. Even with all four records clean, you still haven’t seen how the driver treated past carriers — the layer covered next.

The blind spot all three share

PSP, MVR, and DAC each capture an official paper trail — federal safety events, license status, and what a former employer formally coded into a database. None of them tells you how the driver actually behaved at past carriers: reliability, no-shows, ghosting after orientation, or an abandoned truck (walking off and leaving the equipment, often hundreds of miles from the yard) that was never reported. A driver can have a clean PSP, a clean MVR, a clean Clearinghouse, and a sparse DAC — and still be the most unreliable hire you make this year, because none of those records is built to capture conduct.

That behavioral history lives only in the heads of the recruiters and dispatchers who dealt with the driver — and in a peer-sourced review database built to surface it. On cdlscan.com you can search a driver by name and read what previous carriers said about showing up, finishing loads, and being worth rehiring — the firsthand read the three reports leave out. It does not replace any required check; it fills the gap they all share. The smart play is to run both: pull the federal records for the safety and license picture, then check the peer driver-review database for the behavior the records can’t see. For more on that reputation layer, see driver reviews vs background check, truck driver reviews, the full truck driver background check workflow, and how driver-rating databases in trucking work.

Glossary

• PSP (Pre-Employment Screening Program) — FMCSA’s pre-hire report showing five years of crashes and three years of roadside inspections from MCMIS.
• DAC report (Drive-A-Check) — HireRight’s employer-reported employment-history file: dates, reason for leaving, rehire eligibility, accidents, drug/alcohol data.
• MVR (Motor Vehicle Record) — a state DMV’s record of license status, class, endorsements, convictions, and suspensions; no national version exists.
• MCMIS (Motor Carrier Management Information System) — FMCSA’s central database of crashes and inspections that PSP data is drawn from.
• FMCSA (Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration) — the federal agency that regulates interstate trucking and runs PSP and the Clearinghouse.
• HireRight — the private consumer reporting agency that owns and operates the DAC report today.
• DataQs — FMCSA’s online system for challenging federal safety data (including PSP entries) via a Request for Data Review.
• FCRA (Fair Credit Reporting Act) — the federal law governing consumer reports; it gives drivers dispute rights and requires employers to run adverse action.
• CSA (Compliance, Safety, Accountability) — FMCSA’s safety-measurement program; the inspection and crash data behind it overlaps with what a PSP shows.
• Clearinghouse — the FMCSA Drug & Alcohol Clearinghouse, the federal database of drug-and-alcohol program violations, queried separately from PSP/DAC/MVR.
• OOS (out-of-service) — an enforcement order shutting down a driver or vehicle at roadside until the violation is fixed; a key PSP signal.
• §391.23 — the federal rule requiring a hiring carrier to investigate an applicant’s safety-performance history with prior DOT-regulated employers.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between a PSP and a DAC report? A PSP report is FMCSA government data — five years of crashes and three years of roadside inspections from the federal MCMIS database. A DAC report is employer-reported employment history run by HireRight: dates, reason for leaving, rehire eligibility, accidents, and drug-and-alcohol data. PSP is objective enforcement data; DAC is subjective employer reporting. They cover different ground, so most carriers pull both.

Is the PSP or the DAC report more important? Neither replaces the other. The PSP is the better read on road-safety risk (crashes, inspections, out-of-service events); the DAC is the better read on employment history and whether past carriers would rehire. The experienced answer is “both, plus the MVR and a Clearinghouse query,” because each one alone has a blind spot.

Do I need a PSP if I already pull a DAC report? Yes. The DAC shows employment history and what former employers reported; it does not show the federal crash and roadside-inspection record that the PSP carries. A driver can have a quiet DAC and a busy PSP, or the reverse.

Does a DAC report show crashes and inspections like a PSP? Only partially and only if an employer reported them. The DAC may list DOT-recordable accidents a carrier chose to enter, but it does not contain FMCSA’s roadside-inspection history or the full federal crash file. For that, pull the PSP.

What’s the difference between a PSP and an MVR? An MVR is your state DMV driving record — license status, endorsements, and convictions. A PSP is FMCSA crash and roadside-inspection data, including violations that were cited but never became convictions. A clean MVR can sit next to a busy PSP, so pull both.

Does a PSP report show employment history? No. PSP contains crashes and roadside inspections only — no employer names, employment dates, reason for leaving, or rehire eligibility. For employment history you need the DAC report and direct prior-employer contact.

How far back does each report go? A PSP covers five years of DOT-recordable crashes and three years of roadside inspections. A DAC reaches roughly seven to ten years of employment history (about three years for drug-and-alcohol data). An MVR typically goes back three to seven years, depending on the state.

How much does each report cost? A PSP is a published $10 per record plus an annual subscription ($25 for carriers with fewer than 100 power units, $100 for 100 or more). HireRight does not publish a flat DAC price — it depends on your account and volume. MVR fees are set by each state and usually run a few dollars.

Do I need the driver’s consent to pull a PSP or DAC? Yes — both require written authorization, as does the MVR. PSP uses FMCSA’s specific authorization form, kept on file and subject to audit; MVR and DAC consent falls under the FCRA. Because all are used to hire, declining a driver over any of them triggers the FCRA adverse-action process.

How do I dispute an error on a PSP report? PSP disputes go through FMCSA’s DataQs system. File a Request for Data Review (RDR) at dataqs.fmcsa.dot.gov; it’s routed to the agency that filed the original record, which reviews your evidence and corrects MCMIS if the challenge holds up.

How do I dispute an error on a DAC report? DAC disputes go through HireRight under the FCRA. The driver flags the entry and submits documentation; HireRight must reinvestigate within 30 days and correct or remove anything it can’t verify, then notify recent recipients. Unresolved disputes can be escalated to the CFPB or FTC.

Is the DAC report accurate? It can be incomplete or biased because it’s employer-reported and voluntary — many carriers don’t report at all, and fields like “reason for leaving” are judgment calls that are sometimes filed in anger. Treat a negative DAC entry as a lead to verify, not a verdict, and remember drivers can dispute errors under the FCRA.

Does pulling a DAC report satisfy the §391.23 safety-history check? No. The DAC can help with the employment-verification piece, but you still must contact prior DOT-regulated employers directly for accident history and query the FMCSA Clearinghouse (required since January 6, 2023) for drug-and-alcohol data. The DAC alone does not check the §391.23 box.

Which reports should I pull, and in what order? For a standard CDL hire: MVR first (confirm the license), then PSP (federal safety record), then a Clearinghouse query (drug/alcohol), then the DAC (employment and rehire eligibility). Each gate is cheaper to clear before the next, and skipping one leaves a hole.

Do PSP, DAC, and MVR show how a driver behaved at past jobs? No — that’s the gap all three share. None captures no-shows, ghosting after orientation, or an abandoned truck that was never formally reported. That behavioral history lives in a peer driver-review database like CDLScan, which you can use alongside (never instead of) the required federal and state checks.