Your $75K Bond Is the Wrong Thing to Worry About — And the Right Thing to Know Cold

A broker I know got a subpoena three weeks after a rear-end accident outside Knoxville. Three serious injuries. The carrier's $750K BIPD policy was in coverage dispute — the insurer was arguing the load had been transferred in a way that voided the transit endorsement. Plaintiff's counsel filed against both the carrier and the broker, and on day six of litigation the bond documentation request came in.

He had no idea what his BMC-84 actually covered. He couldn't tell his defense attorney whether his filing was a surety bond or a trust fund or why that distinction mattered. He didn't know what his surety company's claims process looked like, whether his AM Best rating was A or B-, or whether his bond had lapsed and been reinstated at any point in the last three years.

That's not rare. The $75,000 broker bond is the thing you set up when you get your authority, renew every year, and file away without thinking about it. Until litigation forces you to think about it under pressure.

After Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, decided unanimously by the Supreme Court on May 14, 2026, freight brokers can be sued in state court for negligent carrier selection. Justice Barrett's opinion held that the FAAAA doesn't preempt those state-law claims — reversing the 7th and 11th Circuit preemption precedent that brokers had relied on for years. That changes what plaintiff attorneys look at when they open your file. Your bond is on that list.

What the Bond Is Actually For

First, a clarification that trips up a lot of brokers.

The BMC-84 surety bond and the BMC-85 trust fund are YOUR filings — as the broker. FMCSA requires them under 49 CFR § 387.307 as a condition of holding property broker authority. The minimum has been $75,000 since 2013, when Congress raised it from the embarrassing $10,000 floor that had been on the books since the 1980s.

This bond is not cargo insurance. It is not liability coverage for accidents your carriers cause. It's a financial security instrument that protects shippers and motor carriers if you — the broker — fail to pay for services rendered, misrepresent your capacity, or otherwise commit fraud in your intermediary role. Think of it as a backstop against broker insolvency and financial fraud. Not against carrier crashes.

That said: post-Montgomery, plaintiff counsel looks at your entire operation when building a negligent-selection case. They're not necessarily collecting on your bond — $75K doesn't move the needle in a wrongful death case. But your bond status, your surety company, your history of lapses and reinstatements, and the financial story your filing tells about your operation — all of it is discoverable. And some of it matters.

BMC-84 vs BMC-85: Not Just Two Names for the Same Thing

The BMC-84 is a surety bond. You pay a premium to a licensed surety company — typically a fraction of the $75K face amount, somewhere between a few hundred and a couple thousand dollars per year depending on your credit and the surety's risk model — and they back your $75K obligation. If a valid claim is filed against your bond, the surety pays up to $75,000 and then exercises its contractual right to recover from you under your indemnification agreement.

The BMC-85 is a trust fund agreement. Instead of a surety company standing between you and a claim, you or your financial institution maintain $75,000 in liquid assets held in a trust arrangement with a qualified trustee. Claims are paid from that trust.

Same dollar amount. Same regulatory requirement under § 387.307. Very different mechanics.

The claims process diverges in ways that matter. On a BMC-84, your surety company has its own underwriting team and claim analysts. They evaluate whether the claim meets their coverage criteria before they pay. That scrutiny cuts both ways — it filters out bad-faith or spurious claims, but it also means legitimate claims go through a review process that can take weeks. A well-run surety company is your ally when a claimant is trying to collect on something you don't owe. A slow-moving or understaffed one becomes a liability when you need a claim resolved and reinstated quickly.

On a BMC-85, claims go against the trust assets directly. Less intermediary friction in theory. But you're also less insulated from aggressive claimants, because there's no underwriting layer standing between the trust and the claimant's attorney. If the trustee gets served with a proper demand, that process moves differently than a surety claim.

Neither structure is objectively better. But you should know which one you have and what happens procedurally when it's tested. If you have to look it up because you can't remember, that's a problem.

The Post-Montgomery Relevance

Under 49 CFR § 387.307(a), your bond or trust fund must be "available to pay any final judgment recovered against such broker for failure to carry out its contracts, agreements, or arrangements for the transportation of property." That's the statutory purpose — broker non-payment and fraud, not carrier torts.

But discovery doesn't respect narrow regulatory language. In a negligent-selection case, plaintiff's counsel is building a picture of your brokerage as an operation. Were you running a real compliance process, or a box with an MC number that passed loads? Your bond is one piece of that picture.

A broker who has maintained uninterrupted BMC-84 coverage through a rated, licensed surety company, with clean renewal history and a current effective date, looks like a broker who takes the licensing requirements seriously. A broker who let coverage lapse for 12 days in 2024, reinstated it two weeks before the accident, and is using a surety company with a B rating from AM Best — that tells a different story. Not necessarily a fatal one, but a story that plaintiff's counsel will read aloud to a jury.

One more thing: under 49 CFR § 387.307(d), if your bond is cancelled or a trust fund arrangement is terminated, FMCSA must receive 30 days' prior written notice. A surprise cancellation — the kind that happens when a premium payment gets missed — shows up in the FMCSA Licensing & Insurance database as a cancellation notice with an effective date. That filing is public. Anyone can pull it. A plaintiff's expert who specializes in broker compliance is going to pull it.

How to Look This Up in About 90 Seconds

Go to carrier.fmcsa.dot.gov. Search your MC number. Click on "Insurance." Look for the BMC-84 or BMC-85 entry.

What you want to see: Status active. A recognizable surety company or financial institution. An effective date that matches your actual renewal history. No pending cancellation notices.

What you don't want to see: A lapse in coverage. A surety company you don't recognize. A gap between an old policy's cancellation and a new one's effective date. An insurer that isn't licensed to write surety bonds in your state.

If anything looks off, call your compliance attorney before you call the surety company. The discovery obligation runs from when you knew or should have known — not from when you got around to dealing with it.

Now check the carrier's side of the same database. For every carrier you tender loads to, there should be a BMC-91 on file — the motor carrier's certificate of public liability insurance, the endorsement that MCS-90 and the minimum financial responsibility requirements under 49 CFR Part 387 actually live in. The BMC-91 is NOT the same as an ACORD 25. It's the federal filing the insurer submits directly to FMCSA to confirm coverage is in place. Cross-referencing the carrier's BMC-91 against the ACORD 25 they sent you is one of the simplest coverage checks most brokers skip entirely.

I use MC-1247893 / DOT-3567102 as my training example for this lookup: search the DOT number, pull the Insurance tab, confirm the insurer name matches the ACORD 25, confirm the effective and expiration dates are current, confirm the coverage limits meet the minimums for the commodity and lane. For a standard dry van load, that's $750K BIPD minimum under § 387.9. For a temperature-controlled pharma load or a high-value shipment, I want cargo limits at $250K or more — not because the regulation requires it, but because the claim exposure on a $180K load of medical devices is real.

The BMC-91X, for reference, is the same endorsement but specific to household goods carriers. If you're tendering freight to a carrier whose only federal insurance filing is a BMC-91X, you've got a coverage gap on non-HHG loads. It's worth knowing the difference.

Your Own Bond Is Part of Your Carrier File Protocol

I audit my own BMC-84 status every quarter, same way I audit carrier insurance. Here's what that looks like:

Pull the L&I page for my MC number. Screenshot it. Timestamp the file. Confirm the surety company's AM Best rating is current. Re-read the indemnification provisions of my bond agreement — specifically, what triggers the surety's right to recover from me and what the claims submission process looks like. That last step takes maybe ten minutes and I only do it once a year in a slow period, but having read it means I know the answer if I'm asked under oath.

If I get a subpoena or a claim notice that touches the bond:

• Pull the bond document same day
• Notify the surety company in writing, same day
• Get my attorney on the phone before I say anything to the claimant's counsel

None of this is complicated. It's just infrastructure that most brokers treat as invisible because they've never needed it. Post-Montgomery, that's a choice I wouldn't make.

The Bigger Point

Most brokers think of the $75K bond requirement the way they think of their DOT authority registration fee — an annoying cost, a box to check, something the compliance department handles. What it actually is: a public filing that tells a story about your operation to anyone who knows how to read FMCSA's licensing and insurance system.

Plaintiff attorneys who specialize in post-accident litigation against brokers know how to read it. Carriers deciding whether to haul for you can look it up. Your defense lawyer is going to ask you about it in the first phone call after a claim.

Know what's on file. Know whether it's a BMC-84 or BMC-85. Know your surety company. Know whether your coverage has ever lapsed and for how long. That's not a lot of information to carry — and not knowing it in a deposition is the kind of thing that makes juries suspicious of everything else you say about how you run your brokerage.

How I Document This

My carrier vetting records are carrier-specific. My bond documentation lives in a separate compliance folder, audited quarterly:

• FMCSA L&I screenshot for my own MC number (timestamp in filename)
• Surety company AM Best rating (date of lookup)
• Bond certificate with current effective/expiration dates
• Indemnification agreement — annotated with what triggers surety recourse against me
• Log of any cancellation notices, reinstatements, or changes in surety company

When I tender a load, I also log:

• Carrier's BMC-91 confirmed in FMCSA L&I (date, policy number, insurer)
• ACORD 25 received and cross-referenced (insurer name matches, dates current, limits meet threshold for the load)
• If anything was out of the ordinary — coverage gap, unfamiliar insurer, expiration within 30 days — I note that and what I did about it

Neither checklist is long. Both of them exist. That's the difference between a broker who can explain his compliance process in a deposition and one who can't.

— Mason Lavallet

Founder, DOTScreener.com