The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration maintains safety records on every registered motor carrier in the US. This includes inspection history, violation counts, crash data, and safety ratings. The FMCSA SAFER system is public, but it was designed for one-off lookups, not bulk data extraction or automated compliance monitoring.
Why automate this?
Freight brokers are legally required to verify carrier safety ratings before tendering loads. Insurance underwriters pull carrier history before writing commercial auto policies. Shippers need to vet new carriers before adding them to approved lists. Compliance teams at trucking companies monitor their own records for unexpected changes. Doing this manually for more than a handful of carriers is impractical. Automated extraction lets you run batch lookups, schedule recurring checks, and flag changes.
What data you get
The FMCSA Carrier Safety Search scraper returns structured records including:
- USDOT number and MC number
- Legal name and DBA
- Physical address and state of operation
- Safety rating and rating date
- Total inspections (driver and vehicle)
- Out-of-service violation counts and rates
- Crash involvement (fatal, injury, tow-away)
- Operating status (authorized, not authorized, revoked)
- Carrier type (private, for-hire, broker)
You can search by company name, USDOT number, or state. Results are returned as JSON.
How it works
The scraper queries the FMCSA SAFER search interface and carrier detail pages. It handles pagination for name searches and extracts the full safety profile for each matching carrier. A maxResults limit controls how many carriers are returned per run.
Common use cases
Freight brokers run nightly batch checks on their carrier pool and flag any that drop to conditional or unsatisfactory ratings. Insurance teams use it to pull carrier histories for renewal underwriting. Compliance officers at fleets monitor their own FMCSA record for discrepancies. Data aggregators building carrier intelligence products use it as a primary source.
Getting started
The actor runs on Apify. Provide a carrier name or USDOT number, set a result limit, and run. Output is structured JSON. Schedule it for recurring compliance monitoring or run on-demand for carrier vetting.
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