How to Claim Your MOTUS Profile (Phase II): A Step-by-Step Guide for Carriers and Brokers

MOTUS — FMCSA's new, identity-verified registration system — opened its second phase in Q2 2026, and that's the one that affects almost everyone reading this. Phase I (December 8, 2025) was for supporting companies: insurance and bond filers, BOC-3 process agents, and transportation service providers. Phase II is for the regulated entities themselves — motor carriers, brokers, and freight forwarders — and the first thing you do in it is claim your existing USDOT record.

If you've ever set up a government login, you mostly know the drill. But MOTUS adds real identity verification, and there's one specific detail that causes the majority of failed claims. This is the practical walkthrough: what to have ready, the exact steps, where people get stuck, and the calm operational read for those of us on the vetting side.

Before you start: what to have ready

Claiming goes smoothly when you gather these first. Stopping halfway to find a document is what turns a ten-minute task into a frustrating afternoon.

• The Login.gov email of your company official. This is the big one — more on it below. It must be the same email the company official used in the legacy FMCSA Portal. Find it before you do anything else.
• A valid government-issued photo ID — driver's license, state ID card, passport, or permanent resident card.
• A smartphone for the facial-scan step of identity verification. Login.gov matches a live selfie against your ID photo.
• Your USDOT number and basic company details (legal name, address) to confirm the record you're claiming is the right one.

The one detail that trips most people up

Here it is, up front, because it's the single most common reason a claim fails:

When the emails match, MOTUS recognizes you as the authorized official for that USDOT number and lets you claim the record in a couple of clicks. When they don't match — a different address, a typo, a personal Gmail where the Portal had a company domain — MOTUS can't automatically tie you to the record, and you're routed into a manual resolution process with FMCSA that can take days.

So before you create anything: confirm which email your company used as the official contact in the old FMCSA Portal, and use that exact address for Login.gov. If you genuinely no longer have access to that mailbox, that's worth sorting out before you start, not mid-claim.

Step by step: claiming your USDOT record

1. Go to the MOTUS portal at motus.dot.gov and choose to create a company account / sign in.

2. Sign in with Login.gov using the company official's email (the matching one from above). If you don't have a Login.gov account yet, you'll create one here — Login.gov is the government's shared, secure sign-in service, not something MOTUS-specific.

3. Complete identity verification. This is mandatory and cannot be skipped or delegated to a third party. You'll:

- Upload or photograph your government-issued ID, and

- Take a live facial scan with your phone so Login.gov can confirm the ID belongs to you.

This step is exactly why MOTUS exists — it's the wall that makes it much harder for someone to register or hijack a carrier identity that isn't theirs.

4. Link and claim your existing USDOT record. Because you signed in with the matching company-official email, MOTUS can connect you to your existing record and import your company data automatically — so you're reviewing pre-filled information instead of re-typing everything.

5. Review, update, and certify. Walk through the imported data, correct anything that's stale, and certify it. That certification is you formally standing behind the accuracy of the record.

Once certified, you're set up in MOTUS and can manage your registration lifecycle — authority, the biennial MCS-150 update, insurance filings — from the one portal going forward.

If identity verification fails

Identity verification trips occasionally — a worn ID, a poor photo, a name that doesn't match across documents. If you get stuck:

• Call the FMCSA Contact Center at 1-800-832-5660. They handle MOTUS registration questions.
• For identity issues that can't be resolved online, FMCSA may refer you to an in-person verification option to confirm your identity another way.

Neither is a dead end — they're just the fallback path when the automated check can't clear you. Don't abandon a half-finished claim; finish it through support so your record isn't left in limbo.

A note for brokers and freight forwarders

If you hold broker or freight-forwarder authority, Phase II is yours too. You claim your record the same way, and your broker authority and your BMC-84/BMC-85 financial-responsibility filing move into MOTUS alongside it. The upside, beyond housekeeping: because every claimed record is now tied to a verified identity, the broker authority record you — and the shippers who rely on you — screen against gets harder to fake.

What this means if you're the one vetting carriers

This is the quiet part that matters most on the diligence side. A registration system with real identity and business verification at the front door makes the foundation data everyone screens against more trustworthy. The classic chameleon-carrier move — shut down a bad record, re-register clean under a new name and number — gets materially harder when claiming a record requires proving who you actually are.

But — and this is the honest read — claiming a MOTUS profile is a registration event, not a diligence event. It does not:

• Verify, for your specific load, that the carrier's certificate of insurance is real and in force (that still comes from the carrier's agent).
• Continuously monitor a carrier's authority, insurance, and safety status between tenders.
• Produce the dated, retained record of what you checked and when that documented diligence depends on.

So the division of labor holds, just on firmer ground. MOTUS makes it harder to be a fraudulent or chameleon carrier. The work of confirming a specific carrier is sound for a specific load — and keeping the evidence that you did — is still the broker's, and it's exactly what DOTScreener is built to make routine: pull the FMCSA public record, freeze it into a dated screening record with the carrier's attestations, and keep it. As MOTUS makes that underlying record more identity-verified, the documented diligence built on top of it only gets stronger.

If you operate authority of any kind: claim your profile, match that email exactly, keep your data current. It's a small piece of housekeeping that quietly hardens the whole system everyone in freight depends on.

— Mason Lavallet

Founder, DOTScreener.com

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Sources

• FMCSA — Move into Motus — official overview and phase information
• FMCSA — Motus Quick-Start: A Guide to Your First Login (PDF) — first-login and identity-verification steps
• motus.dot.gov — the MOTUS portal
• Federal Register — Availability of Motus, FMCSA's New Registration System (April 29, 2026)
• Overdrive — FMCSA's Motus: Carriers can claim profile in the new registration system
• FMCSA — AskFMCSA / Contact Center — registration support (1-800-832-5660)