Public doesn’t mean readable.
Every time an inspector walks a truck, the result becomes a federal record. Multiply that by every weigh station and patrol unit in the country, and you get one of the most detailed public datasets in transportation — that almost nobody can use.
A roadside inspection ends with a Driver/Vehicle Examination Report — and a copy of every line on it flows into MCMIS, FMCSA’s Motor Carrier Management Information System. The agency publishes those records as public data extracts: 242,229 inspections in May 2026 alone, each with its violations, out-of-service orders, and location. It is all free, and it has been for years.
It is also, for practical purposes, illegible — millions of rows of coded violation identifiers across multiple linked files, refreshed on a federal release cadence, with no map, no trend line, and no answer to the only questions a working carrier actually has: where am I likely to get stopped, and what will they write up? Most owners first encounter their own inspection data as a line item on an insurance renewal — months after they could have done anything about it.
The data was always public. Readable is a different thing.
So we made it readable — and free. The Inspection Insights Hub rebuilds itself every week from the latest federal release: out-of-service rates by state and county, the violations inspectors cite most, week-over-week movers, and an enforcement-blitz radar. This article is the field manual for it: what the numbers mean, how a safety manager actually uses them, and the current headline findings — requoted fresh every week, citable, embeddable, no login.
Where the trucks get stopped.
The out-of-service rate measures how often an inspection ends with a vehicle or driver pulled off the road, per 1,000 inspections. This is the live national picture — the same snapshot the full hub runs on, baked into this page when the data refreshes.
Rates are per 1,000 inspections — divide by ten for a percentage. The full hub adds county-level hot spots, the complete violation ranking, BASIC mix, weekly movers, and a blitz radar.
Read it like a safety manager.
A national statistic is trivia until it changes what your fleet does this week. Here is how a working safety desk turns each panel of the map into an operating decision — before the next inspection, not after.
Where is my exposure?
Enforcement is not evenly distributed. This month, Arizona is parking trucks at 37.1% per inspection while Mississippi clears all but 12.3% — roughly a 3.0× spread between the strictest and gentlest high-volume states. If your lanes cross the hot states on the map, that is where pre-trip discipline pays off first.
Exposure also compounds. FMCSA’s Inspection Selection System reads your carrier’s history at the scale: a poor record means more stops, more stops mean more violations, and every violation feeds your CSA BASICs for twenty-four months. The map tells you where the wheel of that loop spins fastest.
Do this week
Pull your last 12 months of inspections, group them by state, and lay them over the map. That's your real exposure profile — not where you're domiciled, where you're inspected.
What are they writing up?
The most-cited codes are not exotic. They are the things a disciplined pre-trip catches: inspection paperwork, lamps, tires, brake hoses. The current national top five, refreshed weekly:
Note what leads the list. The single most-cited violation in the country is documentation — proof of the annual periodic inspection that 49 CFR § 396.17 requires to physically travel with the vehicle. A compliant fleet fails roadside for a sticker. Your vehicle-side checklist is the counter-inspection: run it before they do.
Do this week
Walk one truck against the current top-10 list this week, treating each code as a checklist line. Most of these citations are visible from the ground in fifteen minutes.
Would we survive a Level I today?
A Level I North American Standard Inspection is the full event — driver credentials and the complete vehicle walk-around. The driver side fails on paperwork more than on conduct: an expired medical certificate, an ELD the driver can’t transfer at the window, logs that don’t reconcile. The driver-side checklist is everything an inspector will ask for, in the order they ask for it.
The vehicle side is brakes-first reality — but as the table above shows, the cheapest failures are the visible ones. A truck that passes its own yard inspection rarely surprises anyone at a scale.
Do this week
Run a cab audit this week: medical-certificate expiry dates, the ELD transfer steps on a card in every truck, and the § 396.17 inspection report or decal physically on every unit.
What do we do after a bad stop?
An out-of-service order is a process, not just a bad day: the vehicle cannot legally move until the listed repairs are made, and the carrier certifies the corrections back to the issuing agency on a 15-day clock (49 CFR § 396.9). Then the record posts to MCMIS — and that is when the second job starts.
Verify what posted. Mis-keyed DOT numbers, wrong drivers, and violations that don’t match the paper happen routinely, and an erroneous violation drags your BASICs for two years if you let it stand. FMCSA’s DataQs process exists exactly for this — documented, specific challenges win; vague ones lose.
Do this week
Put a standing step on the safety calendar: verify every new inspection record within a week of it posting, and file a DataQs review on anything that's wrong — every time.
The current headline findings.
These numbers are computed from the latest snapshot every time the page rebuilds — quote them, link them, take them. Each one carries its own attribution; the copy button puts the finding, the source, and the link on your clipboard.
11,852
citations · May 2026
The most-cited truck violation in America right now: “Operating a CMV without documentation of a periodic inspection.” — 11,852 citations in May 2026.
99%
OOS conversion · May 2026
99% of “Tires - All others, leaking or inflation less than 50% of the maximum…” citations ended with the vehicle ordered out of service — the trip ends on the shoulder.
37.1%
Arizona OOS rate · May 2026
Trucks inspected in Arizona were placed out of service at 37.1% this month — 1.7× the national rate of 21.4%.
72.7%
of all violations · May 2026
72.7% of every roadside violation in America falls in a single CSA BASIC: Vehicle Maintenance. The truck, not the driver, fails most inspections.
▲ 38.2%
week over week
Fastest-rising violation this week: “Roll-on/Roll-off/Hook Lift Containers - Improper securement of a…” — up 38.2% week over week.
State superlatives consider only states with at least 500 inspections in the month, so a quotable rate can’t be a small-sample artifact. Violation detail covers May 2026; it posts on a few weeks’ lag behind inspection counts.
What this is — and is not.
Transparency is the price of being citable. Here is exactly where the numbers come from, what they measure, and the lines we deliberately do not cross.
The source
Public FMCSA MCMIS roadside-inspection data extracts published on data.transportation.gov. We ingest the federal releases, aggregate them, and rebuild this page and the live hub weekly — typically Mondays. Inspection counts refresh ahead of violation-level detail, which the source publishes on a lag of a few weeks.
What “out of service” means
An out-of-service order under the CVSA North American Standard Out-of-Service Criteria: the vehicle or driver may not return to service until the condition is corrected — for vehicles, per 49 CFR § 396.9(c), the unit is stickered and may not be operated until every listed repair is made. We report rates per 1,000 inspections; prose in this article uses the equivalent percentage.
The BASICs shown here
Each violation rolls up to a CSA BASIC under FMCSA’s Safety Measurement System categories. Six of the seven BASICs appear in this data; the seventh, Crash Indicator, is built from crash records rather than roadside violations, so it cannot be derived from inspection data and we do not estimate it.
Severity weights are a proxy
Where the hub references severity weights, they are a Trucking Comply proxy of the SMS severity methodology — documented here — not official FMCSA scores. We publish the proxy so the ranking logic is inspectable.
What we will not publish
No per-carrier ratings, no reconstructed CSA scores, no driver or personal information — aggregate situational awareness only. Trucking Comply is a private compliance-services company; we are not affiliated with, or endorsed by, FMCSA or any government agency.
◇ Dataset disclaimer — ships with every snapshot
Aggregated from public FMCSA MCMIS roadside-inspection data. Trucking Comply is not affiliated with or endorsed by FMCSA. Severity weights are a TC proxy of the SMS methodology, not official CSA scores.
Cite it. Embed it.
This page exists to be referenced. If you're writing about inspection trends, enforcement, or carrier safety, the data and the visuals below are free to use with attribution.
◇ Cite this data
Plain-text citation — drop it in a footnote or a source line. The page rebuilds weekly, so the data-through date in your copy stays accurate to what you saw.
Trucking Comply, “Truck Out-of-Service Rates by State” — aggregated from public FMCSA MCMIS roadside-inspection data, data through Jun 7, 2026. https://www.truckingcomply.com/resources/truck-out-of-service-rates-by-state
◇ Embed the live stat card
A self-updating snapshot card — national OOS rate, inspection volume, the current strictest state, and the most-cited violation. It refreshes when our data does; you never have to touch it again. The attribution line below the iframe is part of the snippet.
<iframe src="https://www.truckingcomply.com/insights/embed" width="100%" height="380" style="border:0;max-width:720px" title="US truck roadside inspection statistics — Trucking Comply" loading="lazy"></iframe> <p style="margin:6px 0 0;font:12px/1.4 sans-serif">Source: <a href="https://www.truckingcomply.com/resources/truck-out-of-service-rates-by-state">Truck Out-of-Service Rates by State — Trucking Comply</a></p>
Live preview — this is the real embed
◇ Working on a story?
If you need a cut of the data we don’t publish — a specific state, county, corridor, or violation family over time — write to [email protected] and we’ll run it. Methodology questions answered, sources shown, same-week turnaround for press.
Questions people ask the data.
Short, straight answers — the same text our structured data ships to search engines.
What is a truck out-of-service (OOS) rate?
It is the share of roadside inspections that end with the vehicle, the driver, or both placed out of service under the CVSA North American Standard Out-of-Service Criteria. An out-of-service vehicle is stickered and may not be operated again — per 49 CFR § 396.9(c) it cannot even be towed away under its own power, short of removal by crane — until every repair listed in the out-of-service notice is completed. Our map expresses the rate per 1,000 inspections; divide by ten for a percentage.
What is a good out-of-service rate for a trucking company?
Lower than the national average. In recent data roughly one in five US roadside inspections ends with an out-of-service order. FMCSA’s Inspection Selection System compares a carrier’s own history against national figures — run consistently above average and your trucks get flagged for more inspections, which produces more violations, which raises the score again. Insurance underwriters read the same number at renewal.
What are the most common truck violations right now?
Vehicle-maintenance violations dominate — roughly seven in ten of all roadside violations in recent months. The most-cited individual codes are almost all catchable in a pre-trip: missing periodic-inspection documentation, inoperative lamps, underinflated or leaking tires, and chafed brake hoses. On the driver side, ELD form-and-manner issues, log falsification, and missing medical certificates lead. The live table on this page refreshes weekly with the current ranking.
Is this the same as my CSA score?
No. These are aggregate national statistics computed from public FMCSA data. Your CSA/SMS percentiles are carrier-specific, computed only by FMCSA, and depend on your own inspection history, fleet size, and time weighting. Where this site references severity weights, they are a Trucking Comply proxy of the SMS methodology, not official scores. Trucking Comply is not affiliated with or endorsed by FMCSA, and nothing here rates any individual carrier.
Where does this inspection data come from, and how often does it refresh?
From the public FMCSA MCMIS roadside-inspection data releases published on data.transportation.gov. We ingest the federal extracts, aggregate them — no carrier ratings, no personal information — and rebuild the map, the tables, and this article every week, typically on Mondays. Violation-level detail posts on a few weeks’ lag behind inspection counts, so violation tables cover a slightly earlier window than the inspection map.
Bookmark the map. Then check your own numbers.
The national picture refreshes here every week — that’s the backdrop. Your own inspection history, BASIC trend, and renewal calendar are what move your insurance and your broker access. Trucking Comply watches both sides for you.
Inspections piling up faster than you can answer them? DOT audit assistance is what we do all day.