An Active MC Number Doesn't Mean They Can Haul Your Freight

About two years ago, a colleague of mine — twelve years in freight, not someone who cuts corners — submitted a load to what looked like a solid carrier. MC number issued fourteen months prior. Active authority status on SAFER. Insurance certificate on file with a $1M primary liability limit. She did the T-call. Dispatcher sounded competent. She booked it.

Three days later, the shipper called asking where a $94,000 load of industrial controls equipment was. The tracking pin was somewhere in rural Tennessee. When she finally got a driver on the phone, it was a completely different carrier — MC-1247893, DOT-3567102, running flatbeds out of Georgia. The entity she booked didn't own a single truck. They had broker authority only. Not motor carrier authority. It said so right on SAFER. Nobody checked.

That load recovered eventually. The double-broker situation got expensive and embarrassing. And the whole thing could have been caught in about ten seconds before the load ever moved.

What the Authority Status Section Actually Shows

Pull up any carrier on safer.fmcsa.dot.gov. Look at the "Authority Status" section. You'll see a table listing authority types with their current status. Most brokers see the first row with "Active" next to it and stop reading. The green badge is enough.

The problem: that badge just means something is active. It doesn't tell you which type of authority is active.

Here's what the types mean in plain English:

CM — Common Motor Carrier of Property. This is the authority a for-hire trucking company needs to pick up your freight and move it. If you're booking a carrier via a standard bill of lading arrangement — which covers the overwhelming majority of commercial truckload moves — the entity you're booking needs active CM authority. Under 49 USC § 13902, a person can only provide transportation as a motor carrier if they're registered to do so. CM authority is that registration. No CM, no legal authority to haul your load.

CS — Contract Motor Carrier of Property. Authorizes hauling under specific contractual arrangements with particular shippers rather than for the general public. The ICCTA in 1995 largely dissolved the practical legal distinction between common and contract carriage for general commodities, but FMCSA still tracks them separately. Both CM and CS let the entity operate trucks. If you see only CS authority with no CM, it's not automatically disqualifying — but it's worth asking whether a written contract with your shipper exists rather than just a standard rate confirmation.

BK — Broker of Property. Under 49 USC § 13904, broker authority is a completely separate registration from motor carrier authority. A company registered as a broker can arrange transportation by motor carriers. It cannot operate trucks. It cannot pick up your freight and haul it. If the entity you're booking has only active BK authority — no CM, no CS — they are legally prohibited from moving your freight themselves. They will hand it off to someone else. Every time. By definition.

FF — Freight Forwarder. Takes legal responsibility for the shipment but moves it through underlying carriers. Different liability structure from a standard carrier relationship. Booking an FF as a direct motor carrier creates a confusing liability chain, particularly when you need to file a cargo claim or when there's an accident.

The check is simple: Does this entity have active CM or CS authority? If not, stop before you tender.

Why Brokers Keep Missing This

SAFER's interface doesn't help. The company snapshot leads with a "Carrier Operation" summary and a status badge that says "Active" if anything is active. Your eye goes there. You note "Active authority." You move on.

But that badge represents whichever types are active — and if only BK is active, it's still going to show a carrier as having active authority. You have to scroll down into the table and read each row to understand what you're actually looking at.

I've reviewed carrier files from brokerages with real vetting processes — written SOPs, TMS integrations, carrier approval workflows — where a broker correctly pulled the SAFER snapshot, correctly noted "Authority: Active" in their log, and still booked an entity that had zero legal authorization to move freight with trucks. The snapshot was in the file. The authority type was never read.

The Legal Dimension After Montgomery

Before Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, decided May 14, 2026, most broker defense arguments leaned on FAAAA preemption to block state-law negligent selection claims. The Supreme Court killed that defense unanimously. Brokers can now be sued in state court for negligently selecting an unsafe carrier.

Here's the specific exposure around authority type: if you book an entity with only broker authority as your carrier, you haven't just made a bad vetting decision — you've unknowingly added a second brokerage layer to the transaction. The entity you booked is legally a broker. They'll source the truck from someone else. That someone else — maybe it's MC-1247893 with a 9-month-old authority and an OOS rate of 22% — is the one putting rubber to road. You never vetted them. You didn't know they existed.

After Montgomery, the question in front of a jury isn't whether you intended to double-broker the load. It's whether you knew, or should have known, that the entity you selected wasn't authorized to haul freight. One field on SAFER answers that question conclusively. If you don't check it, that question has a bad answer for you.

The Combined-Authority Carrier Problem

The trickier case — and the more common one — is the entity that holds both CM and BK authority. This is legitimate. Plenty of mid-size carriers operate a fleet and also broker excess capacity they can't cover with their own trucks. It's not fraud. But it creates a gap.

You approve them as a carrier based on their CM authority, their insurance, their SAFER snapshot. The load goes out. That carrier decides this particular load doesn't work with their available equipment, so they broker it out quietly using their BK authority. Your rate confirmation might prohibit subcontracting. Or it might not. Either way, you never knew it was happening, and the driver who shows up isn't the driver or carrier you expected.

This is why I treat combined CM+BK authority as a flag that requires one additional step, not a hard no. I pull their inspection history and cross-reference it with their MCS-150 fleet count. A company showing 180 inspections over three years with a reported 40-truck fleet that also holds broker authority is probably using the BK authority for genuine overflow. A company with 4 inspections, a 2-truck fleet, and broker authority is probably primarily a broker who acquired a couple trucks as window dressing. The ratio between inspection count and reported fleet size tells you which mode they actually operate in.

On the T-call, I also ask directly: "Will you be hauling this with your own power, or are you potentially arranging through another carrier?" I write down the answer and note it in the load record. That conversation, documented, is the difference between a defensible selection and one that looks like you weren't paying attention.

The Five-Second Check

If you aren't already doing this, here's how it works:

Pull the SAFER snapshot at safer.fmcsa.dot.gov using the MC# on your rate confirmation. Scroll past the badge. Find the Authority Status section and read each row:

• CM or CS active: the entity can legally operate trucks on your load.
• BK only: hard stop. This is a broker, not a carrier.
• FF only: this is a freight forwarder, not a standard motor carrier relationship.
• CM+BK: permitted, but apply extra scrutiny — fleet-count-to-inspection ratio, T-call confirmation on who's hauling.

That's it. Before you sign any rate confirmation, before the truck rolls.

One thing to watch: authority status can change. A carrier's CM authority can lapse while their BK authority remains active. If you approved a carrier six months ago based on active CM status and haven't rechecked, you don't know what you're looking at today. This is one of the arguments for ongoing monitoring rather than one-time approval — though even then, you should be looking at authority type, not just the active/inactive flag.

How I Document This

In the carrier vetting record, I note the specific authority types active at the time of approval. "CM-Active. No BK authority." Or "CM-Active, BK-Active — fleet count vs. inspection ratio reviewed, carrier confirmed own-power haul on T-call 2026-06-25." The SAFER snapshot with the date stamp goes in the file.

If a carrier holds only BK authority, the note is brief: "BK-only authority per SAFER snapshot. Not approved for direct carrier selection." That entity doesn't get into the carrier file. If I need to route freight through them as a sub-broker, that's a completely different conversation that requires a separate broker agreement and independent vetting of whoever they source.

The authority type is a baseline fact about who you're dealing with. Most brokers never check it because the green "Active" badge seems sufficient and because nothing in the standard carrier onboarding checklists I've ever seen asks for it explicitly. But it's right there on SAFER, it answers a critical question about the entity's legal capacity to haul your freight, and missing it has cost brokers real money — and real legal exposure — when the load ends up in the hands of a carrier they never approved.

Scroll past the badge. Read what's actually listed.

— Mason Lavallet

Founder, DOTScreener.com