The MCS-90 Is Not Cargo Insurance — A $280K Mistake Brokers Keep Making

I've seen this go sideways in exactly the same way three times in my career. A load disappears — theft, fire, doesn't matter — and the broker gets on the phone with the carrier's insurer expecting a cargo claim to get processed. The insurer tells them the MCS-90 doesn't apply to cargo loss. The broker thinks the insurer is wrong. The insurer is not wrong.

The MCS-90 is one of the most misunderstood documents in freight brokering, and the confusion costs brokers real money.

What the MCS-90 actually does

The MCS-90 is a federally mandated endorsement under 49 CFR § 387.7. Carriers operating in interstate commerce must file it — or have it filed by their insurer — as a condition of operating authority. The endorsement says, essentially: if the carrier causes an accident and their underlying insurance fails to respond, the insurer who signed the MCS-90 will pay the injured public anyway, up to the statutory minimum.

That's it. It's a public protection mechanism. The federal government wanted to ensure that a badly hurt family isn't left with nothing because a carrier's policy had some obscure exclusion or the carrier let coverage lapse. The MCS-90 backstops that. Minimum amounts under § 387.9 are $750,000 for general freight, higher for hazmat.

The MCS-90 has nothing to do with your shipper's freight. Nothing. It is a public liability instrument. It addresses bodily injury and property damage from accidents. It does not cover cargo theft, cargo loss in transit, cargo damaged in a rollover.

The $280K scenario

MC-1581047 / DOT-4023889 — a carrier I'm going to call Riverside Logistics, because I've changed the details but the pattern is real. They had solid SAFER numbers when I pulled them. Forty-seven power units, six years of authority, OOS rate in the single digits. ACORD 25 on file showed active coverage and an MCS-90 endorsement in the remarks section.

What I didn't catch: the cargo section of that ACORD 25 listed a $100,000 cargo policy with a $50,000 deductible. On a $280,000 shipment of consumer electronics moving from Memphis to a retailer in New Jersey.

The load went missing somewhere in Ohio. Full theft — the trailer was dropped at a rest stop, the tractor driven away, the freight gone by morning. I filed a cargo claim. The carrier's insurer processed it: $100K limit, minus the $50K deductible, minus depreciation adjustments, final check to my shipper for $41,800.

My shipper had $280,000 worth of product on that truck.

My contingent cargo coverage kicked in for some of the gap. But my contingent cargo had a $50K per-occurrence limit. So the shipper recovered maybe $90K total out of $280K lost. I ate the relationship, which was worth ten times that over the course of a year.

The MCS-90 that I'd spotted on the ACORD 25 and mentally filed as "covered" had absolutely nothing to do with any of it.

The specific lines you should actually be reading

When you pull an ACORD 25, there are five boxes that matter for cargo. I've written about ACORD 25 verification before, but the MCS-90 angle deserves its own callout because it's a separate trap.

First: look for a line that says "Motor Truck Cargo" or "Cargo" under the "Type of Insurance" column. If it isn't there, there is no cargo coverage on this certificate. The MCS-90 in the remarks box does not substitute for it. The MCS-90 being present tells you the carrier has operating authority and has filed proof of public liability — full stop.

Second: look at the cargo limit. Under 49 CFR Part 387, FMCSA only requires public liability coverage — they don't mandate a minimum cargo policy at all. A carrier can have a perfectly clean MCS-90 and a $25,000 cargo policy with a $20,000 deductible. Legally compliant. Useless on a high-value shipment.

Third: check the expiration date on the cargo line specifically. I've seen certificates where the public liability was current and the cargo endorsement had lapsed two months prior. The insurer let the cargo line drop, the broker didn't notice because the overall certificate was still active.

Fourth: verify it. The ACORD 25 is self-reported. It's generated by the carrier or their agent. Errors happen; fraud happens. The FMCSA's L&I database shows insurance filings the insurer actually submitted to the agency. If a carrier tells you they have $1M cargo coverage but their L&I filing only shows the BMC-91 liability filing and nothing cargo-specific, that's a gap worth a phone call before you book the load.

Fifth: compare the cargo limit to the shipment value. This sounds obvious. Brokers still skip it.

Why brokers fixate on the MCS-90

Part of it is that the MCS-90 is the most visibly "federal" part of the insurance certificate. It has a specific form number, it's required by DOT, and it shows up explicitly in SAFER filings. It feels official. Carriers know to have it; when you see it, your brain registers "compliant carrier."

Part of it is that cargo claims feel theoretical until they happen. You've probably tendered a thousand loads where the cargo coverage never mattered because nothing went wrong. The sample teaches you the wrong lesson.

And part of it is that the ACORD 25 is designed for a general commercial audience, not specifically for freight brokers evaluating cargo risk on a specific lane. The layout doesn't prominently separate "this is the stuff that matters for accidents" from "this is the stuff that matters if the freight is lost or damaged." You have to know what you're looking for.

The post-Montgomery version of this problem

After Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, the Supreme Court made clear that state-law negligent selection claims against brokers are live in every state. Your vetting process and its paper trail are now discovery targets in any accident lawsuit, but cargo claims have their own version of the same exposure.

If a shipper loses $280K worth of cargo and can show that you had the carrier's ACORD 25 in hand before tender — and that a competent freight broker would have noticed the cargo limit was $100K on a $280K load — that's a direct negligence claim. Not from an accident, from cargo loss. And the argument is simple: you knew or should have known the cargo coverage was inadequate, you booked the load anyway, the shipper got hurt.

That's not a hypothetical. That's the kind of case a plaintiffs' attorney in Ohio or Tennessee would file without blinking.

The shipper conversation you should be having at booking

Most brokers don't tell their shippers what the carrier's cargo limit is. I get it — it feels like an invitation for the shipper to back out, or to demand you find a carrier with higher limits, which costs more. But the alternative is discovering the coverage gap after a claim.

The cleaner approach: know the cargo limit before you book the load. If the load value exceeds the carrier's cargo coverage, either find a different carrier, confirm your own contingent cargo limit covers the difference, or disclose the gap to the shipper and document that conversation. One sentence in your load confirmation: "Carrier cargo insurance limit is $250K per occurrence; shipper is responsible for cargo values exceeding this amount." Boring? Yes. Protective? Absolutely.

That sentence in discovery is the difference between "broker failed to disclose known coverage gap" and "broker disclosed coverage limit and shipper accepted the arrangement."

How I document this

For every load, I note the carrier's cargo insurance limit from the ACORD 25 alongside the load value in my carrier selection record. If the cargo limit is under 125% of the load value, I flag it and either verify directly with the insurer or require a fresh COI before dispatch. If I verify via the FMCSA L&I database, I note the date I checked and the filing I found. If there's a gap between the cargo limit and the load value, I log whether I disclosed that to the shipper and what they said.

Three lines in a notes field. Takes thirty seconds. In a cargo claim, those three lines show that you actually looked at the coverage — not just that an ACORD 25 was somewhere in a folder.

DOTScreener pulls the FMCSA L&I filing data so you can cross-check what's on the certificate against what was actually filed with the agency. It doesn't replace calling the insurer when the stakes are high enough to warrant it, but for routine loads it closes the gap between "I got a COI" and "I verified what's actually on file at FMCSA."

The MCS-90 showing up on that certificate is good news — it means the carrier has bothered to file proof of public liability and isn't operating without the federally required endorsement. That's a real data point. It just has nothing to do with whether your shipper's freight is covered if the trailer burns.

Know the difference. Document the difference. The shipper whose $280K load gets stolen at a rest stop in Ohio is going to be asking you the same questions, and the time to have the answers is before the load moves.

— Mason Lavallet

Founder, DOTScreener.com