C.H. Robinson Is Cutting Carriers Over Safety Scores. Montgomery Explains Why.

The largest freight broker in North America has started telling carriers they can no longer book its freight — and the reason it's giving is their safety scores. A FreightWaves report this week documented C.H. Robinson sending out a notice titled "Changes to carrier eligibility," and carriers have been sharing the email directly. The decision two weeks ago that explains the timing is Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC — the Supreme Court case that, on May 14, ended the freight industry's longest-running liability shield.

Here is what the notice says, what it means, and why it almost certainly won't be the last one.

What the notice actually says

The email is short and unambiguous. It opens with the safety framing you'd expect:

Then the substance:

And the consequences, verbatim from the "What this means for you" section:

• Effective immediately, the carrier can no longer book loads on Navisphere Carrier or manually through its aligned representative.
• Loads currently in transit continue to delivery as planned.
• In-transit loads are paid once delivered, and all existing payables process in full as normal.

So the money owed is honored — this isn't a stiff. It's a forward-looking booking cutoff: no new freight until the carrier's scores come back under Robinson's bar.

The detail that matters most: it's Robinson's model, not the FMCSA's

Read the language carefully. The carrier "exceeds intervention thresholds for C.H. Robinson's scoring model based on data from the FMCSA." That phrasing is doing a lot of work.

The FMCSA's own CSA intervention thresholds — the percentile at which a carrier in a given BASIC gets flagged for government attention — are public and fixed. But Robinson is not applying the government's threshold. It's applying its own commercial threshold, built on the same public FMCSA data, and set stricter than the regulator's.

Why the cutoff is a rational response

Connect the two and the eligibility email stops looking like a coincidence.

Before May 14, the marginal carrier — above the FMCSA radar but not flagged, a few percentile points into a BASIC, a couple of crashes — was a revenue opportunity with a preemption shield behind it. If something went wrong, the broker expected the negligent-selection claim to get dismissed before discovery.

After May 14, that same marginal carrier is a liability. The claim no longer dies on preemption; it proceeds to the merits, and the merits turn on whether Robinson exercised ordinary care in choosing a carrier whose risk was sitting in plain sight. The cheapest way to win a negligent-selection case is to never select the negligent carrier. So the broker re-prices the risk: tighten the threshold, cut the carriers above it, and document a "consistent safety and compliance standard" you can show a jury.

That last part is not incidental. "As part of our ongoing commitment to safety" and "consistent safety and compliance standards" is the exact language a defense lawyer wants in the record. The email isn't only an operational notice — it's evidence of a documented, uniformly-applied selection policy. That's precisely the kind of paper trail Montgomery now makes valuable.

This is the leading edge, not the whole story

C.H. Robinson is the biggest broker in the market, so it moves first and loudly. But nothing about this is specific to Robinson. Every broker in the country read the same 9-0 decision, and every broker now faces the same math. Expect the same letter, in different letterhead, across the brokerage industry over the coming weeks.

What it means depending on where you sit:

What carriers should do if they get the email

• Pull your own FMCSA record first. Know exactly which BASIC is over threshold and by how much. You can read the same public data the broker is reading in the DOTScreener carrier directory.
• Fix the underlying data, not just the score. BASIC percentiles are driven by inspections and violations over a 24-month window. Clean inspections and successful DataQs challenges move the number; wishing doesn't.
• Don't assume it's only Robinson. If you're over one broker's threshold, you're likely near others'. Get ahead of it.
• Document your remediation. When you do get back under the bar, the record of what you fixed is worth keeping.

Where DOTScreener fits

The whole episode is a live demonstration of what we built DOTScreener to do. Brokers are being told, by the Supreme Court, that they have to (1) check carrier safety against a defined standard and (2) be able to prove they did it, on every load. The eligibility email is one broker's blunt version of step one.

DOTScreener does both as a single workflow: it pulls the live FMCSA snapshot at the moment of selection, applies your written acceptance policy — including thresholds stricter than the FMCSA's if that's your call — and produces a tamper-evident carrier-selection file as a byproduct. You get the risk decision and the defensible record in the same motion, instead of a mass email after the fact.

A broker that can show a consistent, documented, per-load standard is in a fundamentally stronger position after Montgomery than one improvising threshold cutoffs under legal pressure. The carriers getting these emails are the leading indicator. The documentation is the lesson.

Frequently asked questions

Why is C.H. Robinson removing carriers based on safety scores?

C.H. Robinson sent carriers a "Changes to carrier eligibility" notice moving those that exceed its internal scoring thresholds to "non-certified" status, cutting off their access to book loads on Navisphere Carrier effective immediately. The timing follows the Supreme Court's May 14, 2026 decision in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport, which held that brokers can be sued for negligently selecting unsafe carriers — giving brokers a strong legal incentive to drop higher-risk carriers from their networks.

Is C.H. Robinson's threshold the same as the FMCSA's?

No. The notice says carriers exceed "C.H. Robinson's scoring model based on data from the FMCSA" — meaning Robinson applies its own commercial threshold, built on public FMCSA data but set stricter than the government's intervention thresholds. A carrier can be below the FMCSA's flag level and still exceed the broker's internal cutoff.

What was decided in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport?

On May 14, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that the FAAAA does not preempt state-law negligent-selection claims against freight brokers, because such claims fall within the statute's safety exception. Brokers owe a duty of ordinary care when selecting carriers. The named broker defendant was C.H. Robinson.

Will carriers still get paid for loads in transit?

Yes. According to the notice, loads currently in transit continue to delivery as planned, in-transit loads are paid once delivered, and existing payables process in full. The change is a forward-looking booking cutoff, not a withholding of money already owed.

Are other brokers likely to do the same thing?

Almost certainly. The Montgomery decision applies to every broker, not just C.H. Robinson, so the same negligent-selection exposure — and the same incentive to tighten carrier-eligibility thresholds — exists industry-wide. C.H. Robinson is simply the largest and moved first.

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Related reading

• Montgomery v. Caribe: What Brokers Must Do Now
• Shipper Liability for Carrier Selection After Montgomery
• CSA Intervention Thresholds: The 65% That Makes a Carrier Sue-able
• Look up any carrier's FMCSA record in the directory