What Is a PSP Report? (FMCSA Pre-Employment Screening)

If you hire CDL drivers, the PSP report is one of the cleanest records you can pull — straight from FMCSA, no employer opinions baked in. It tells you whether a driver has been crashing trucks or failing roadside inspections. It also stays silent on a lot of things recruiters assume it covers. Here’s exactly what a PSP report is, what it shows, what it costs, and where it leaves you blind.

Key takeaways

• A PSP report is FMCSA’s Pre-Employment Screening Program record: a CDL driver’s 5 years of DOT-recordable crash data plus 3 years of roadside inspection history, pulled from the federal MCMIS database.
• It shows every inspection violation cited at roadside — even ones that never led to a conviction — which is why it catches things a state MVR misses.
• It does not include license status, employment history, drug-test results, or convictions.
• It costs $10 per record, with a low monthly subscription, and requires the driver’s written authorization before you pull it.
• FMCSA reports that carriers using PSP saw roughly an 8% lower crash rate and a 17.2% lower driver out-of-service rate — but PSP still can’t tell you how a driver behaved at past carriers.

What is a PSP report?

A PSP report is the record you get from FMCSA’s Pre-Employment Screening Program (PSP) — a federal service that lets motor carriers see a commercial driver’s safety history before hiring. (“FMCSA” is the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the agency that regulates interstate trucking.) The data comes directly from the Motor Carrier Management Information System (MCMIS), FMCSA’s central database of crashes and roadside inspections.

Two things make PSP different from most records you’ll pull:

1. It’s government data, not employer opinion. Unlike a DAC report — which is built from what former employers chose to say — a PSP report comes straight from FMCSA’s records. There’s no “eligible for rehire” flag and no reason-for-leaving. Just crashes and inspections as the feds logged them.
2. It’s pulled for one purpose only. FMCSA restricts PSP to pre-employment screening, and only with the driver’s written consent (more on that below).

PSP launched in 2010 and is operated for FMCSA under contract. When a recruiter says “run his PSP,” they mean this report — the federal crash-and-inspection file on a commercial driver.

What’s on a PSP report — crashes and inspections

A PSP report has two halves, and it helps to read them separately.

The crash side covers the driver’s most recent 5 years of DOT-recordable crashes. A DOT-recordable crash is one serious enough to be federally reported — meaning a fatality, an injury treated away from the scene, or a vehicle towed from the scene. Each entry typically shows the crash date, location, whether anyone was injured or killed, the number of vehicles, and whether a truck had to be towed.

The inspection side covers the driver’s most recent 3 years of roadside inspections — the checks DOT officers run at weigh stations and on the roadside. For each inspection, the report lists every violation cited, whether the driver or vehicle was placed out-of-service (OOS) — meaning shut down on the spot until the problem was fixed — and how severe each violation was. This includes hours-of-service (HOS) violations (the federal limits on how long a driver can be behind the wheel), logbook errors, equipment defects, speeding and other moving violations noted during the inspection, and drug or alcohol violations recorded at the scene.

Here’s the part that trips up a lot of recruiters: a PSP report lists violations cited at roadside even if the driver was never convicted and never paid a fine. A roadside violation goes onto the PSP the moment the officer writes it up. That’s a different bar than a court conviction, and it’s why a driver can have a spotless MVR but a busy PSP.

What a PSP report does NOT include

A PSP report is narrow on purpose. It is not a one-stop background check, and treating it like one is how carriers get burned. According to FMCSA and the program’s own documentation, a PSP report does not show:

• License status — whether the CDL is valid, suspended, or carries the right endorsements. That’s the MVR’s job.
• Employment history — where the driver worked, dates, or why they left.
• Drug-and-alcohol test results — those live in the FMCSA Clearinghouse, a separate federal database.
• Convictions — PSP shows the roadside violation, not the court outcome. If the driver fought the ticket and won, the PSP still shows the original violation.
• Reason for leaving or rehire eligibility — that’s DAC territory, not PSP.

Here’s the quick side-by-side:

This is exactly why most carriers don’t pull PSP alone — they pair it with the MVR, the Clearinghouse, and often a DAC report. For a full breakdown of which record does what, see PSP vs DAC vs MVR.

How much does a PSP report cost?

A PSP report costs $10 per record for a motor carrier, paid through the official PSP portal at psp.fmcsa.dot.gov. Drivers pulling their own report pay the same $10.

On top of the per-report fee, carriers pay a small monthly subscription to keep an account active. As published by the program, the subscription runs $25 a month for carriers with fewer than 100 power units and $100 a month for carriers with 100 or more power units (and for third-party screening providers). High-volume employers also get tiered per-record discounts as their pull counts climb.

So for a typical small fleet, the real cost of a hire’s PSP is the $10 record plus a share of a $25 monthly account — cheap insurance against a crash-prone hire, which is the whole pitch. Compare that to the cost of one bad hire and the math is not close.

Do you need the driver’s consent to pull a PSP?

Yes — and this one is non-negotiable. FMCSA contractually requires that you obtain the driver’s written authorization before pulling a PSP report. Verbal consent that may have been fine for an MVR does not cut it here. You must keep the signed authorization on file, and FMCSA can audit those consents at any time.

There’s a second layer on top of FMCSA’s rule. Because a PSP report is used to make a hiring decision, the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) treats it as a consumer report. That means if you decide not to hire someone based in whole or in part on what’s in the PSP, you have to follow the adverse-action process: send a pre-adverse-action notice with a copy of the report and a summary of the driver’s FCRA rights, give them a chance to respond, then send a final adverse-action notice. PSP itself doesn’t hand you those notice forms — most carriers build them with counsel. None of this is legal advice; if you’re unsure, talk to an attorney who knows transportation hiring.

Does PSP actually reduce crashes?

FMCSA says it does. In a study the agency released to measure the program’s impact, carriers that used PSP on at least a monthly basis saw, on average, an 8% reduction in their crash rate and a 17.2% reduction in their driver out-of-service rate, measured against their own pre-PSP performance and a control group of non-users. FMCSA estimated the participating carriers prevented 863 crashes and kept more than 3,500 drivers from being placed out-of-service at roadside over the study window.

Those numbers are FMCSA’s, and they describe carriers who screen consistently — not a one-time pull on a single applicant. The takeaway for a recruiter isn’t “PSP is magic.” It’s that systematically checking crash and inspection history before you hand over the keys correlates with fewer crashes down the road.

How to read a PSP report (what to actually look for)

A PSP isn’t pass/fail. A driver who runs hard miles for years will collect some violations — that’s normal. What you’re hunting for is pattern, not a single bad day:

• Repeat OOS events. One out-of-service is a bad day. Three in two years is a habit.
• Clustered HOS violations. A run of hours-of-service and logbook violations suggests 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, i.e., long-haul) driver who runs 130,000 miles a year reads differently than two crashes for a local driver who barely leaves the metro.
• Trend direction. Are violations tapering off as the driver matured, or piling up recently? Recent is more predictive than old.
• Severity, not just count. A reflector-light violation is not a brake-defect OOS. Weight the serious stuff.

Read it like a forensic accountant, not a star-rating shopper. The goal is to understand the driver’s risk profile, not to disqualify anyone with a smudge. For the step-by-step on pulling one, see how to pull a PSP report on a driver.

What a PSP report won’t tell you

Here’s the honest limit. A PSP report is excellent at one thing — federal safety events — and blind to almost everything else about how a person actually works.

It will tell you a driver got an HOS violation in Ohio in 2024. It will not tell you that the same driver no-showed for orientation at two carriers, ghosted a dispatcher mid-load, or abandoned a truck (walked off and left the equipment, often hundreds of miles from the yard) after a pay dispute. None of that is a federal safety event, so none of it lands on a PSP. A driver can have a clean PSP, a clean MVR, and a clean Clearinghouse — and still be the most unreliable hire you make this year.

That behavioral history — reliability, no-shows, abandoned loads, how a driver treated their last three carriers — lives only in the heads of the recruiters and dispatchers who dealt with them. A peer-sourced driver-review database like cdlscan.com is built to surface exactly that. Instead of a federal safety file, you search a driver by name and read what their previous carriers actually said about showing up, finishing loads, and being worth rehiring — the reputation layer PSP, MVR, and Clearinghouse all miss. It doesn’t replace your required federal checks; it fills the gap they leave. (CDLScan reports more than 1 million driver reviews and around 23,419 searches a week, and the search itself is free.)

The smart play is to run both: pull the PSP for the safety record, then check the peer reviews for the behavior the safety record can’t see.

Frequently asked questions

What is a PSP report? A PSP report is FMCSA’s Pre-Employment Screening Program record — a CDL driver’s 5 years of DOT-recordable crash data and 3 years of roadside inspection history, pulled from the federal MCMIS database and used by carriers to screen drivers before hiring.

What does a PSP report show? DOT-recordable crashes from the last 5 years and every roadside inspection violation from the last 3 years, including out-of-service events, hours-of-service and logbook violations, equipment defects, and moving violations cited during inspections.

How much does a PSP report cost? $10 per record through the official PSP portal, plus a monthly subscription of $25 for carriers with fewer than 100 power units or $100 for carriers with 100 or more. Drivers pulling their own report also pay $10.

Do I need the driver’s permission to pull a PSP? Yes. FMCSA requires the driver’s written authorization, kept on file and subject to audit. You can’t pull a PSP on verbal consent.

Does a PSP report show convictions or license status? No. PSP shows roadside violations whether or not they led to a conviction, and it does not include license status. For license validity, endorsements, and convictions, pull the state MVR.

What’s the difference between a PSP and an MVR? An MVR comes from the state DMV and shows license status and convictions. A PSP comes from FMCSA and shows federal crash and roadside-inspection data — including violations that never became convictions. They cover different ground, so most carriers pull both.

Does a PSP report include drug-test results? No. Drug-and-alcohol program violations live in the separate FMCSA Drug & Alcohol Clearinghouse, not the PSP.

Will using PSP actually lower my crash rate? FMCSA’s own study found carriers that screen with PSP regularly saw about an 8% lower crash rate and a 17.2% lower driver out-of-service rate. It’s a correlation tied to consistent screening, not a guarantee for any single hire.