Not Rated Doesn't Mean No Problems Found

I pulled a carrier last month — MC-1284719, DOT-3598442 — that had a 94th-percentile score in the Unsafe Driving BASIC and an 88th-percentile score in the Crash Indicator. Two of the worst signals in the FMCSA system, sitting there in the red. Their official FMCSA safety rating? Not Rated.

I've watched brokers see those two words and conclude that the carrier checks out. "They've been around three years and nobody's flagged them." That's not what "Not Rated" means, and the distinction matters a lot more now than it did before May 14, 2026.

What the Three Safety Ratings Actually Mean

Under 49 CFR Part 385, FMCSA can assign one of three formal safety fitness determinations after conducting a compliance review: Satisfactory, Conditional, or Unsatisfactory.

Satisfactory means the carrier met the safety standards in the review. It's not a permanent grade — it means they passed a specific audit at a specific point in time.

Conditional means they didn't meet all the standards but weren't unfit to operate. They're on notice. That's a different animal, and I wrote about it separately, but the short version is: a Conditional carrier with no corrective-action documentation in your file is a problem waiting to happen.

Unsatisfactory means FMCSA found them unfit to operate. Federal law prohibits brokering loads to an Unsatisfactory carrier under 49 CFR § 385.13. That's a hard stop.

Then there's Not Rated. Under § 385.3, "Not Rated" is not a fourth rating — it's the absence of a rating. It means FMCSA has not conducted a compliance review that resulted in a formal safety fitness determination. The carrier hasn't been graded because the grader hasn't shown up yet.

How Common Is "Not Rated"?

Very. Roughly 90% or more of active motor carriers in the United States have never received a formal Satisfactory, Conditional, or Unsatisfactory determination. FMCSA has finite investigative capacity and prioritizes carriers flagged by roadside data, crash reports, or complaints. A small carrier running two trucks in Iowa can operate for a decade without ever hosting a compliance review.

New entrant carriers get a safety audit in their first 12 months under 49 CFR Part 385, Subpart D. That audit is a pass/fail for maintaining basic safety management controls — it does not result in a Satisfactory/Conditional/Unsatisfactory rating. If a new carrier passes their safety audit, they keep their registration. They are still "Not Rated" in the formal sense. A carrier can be in business for 18 months, pass their new entrant audit, and still have no formal safety fitness determination.

So when you look up a carrier on SAFER and see "Not Rated," you might be looking at a clean, well-run three-truck operation that's never had a compliance review. Or you might be looking at MC-1284719 with a 94th-percentile Unsafe Driving score and nobody has gotten around to reviewing them yet. The FMCSA status field doesn't tell you which one.

What "Not Rated" Is Doing in Your File Right Now

Here's the actual problem. Some brokerages treat "Not Rated" as a passing condition and stop there. The carrier is active, their authority is in good standing, they're not Conditional or Unsatisfactory — so they move forward with the load.

That logic worked, imperfectly, in a world where federal preemption protected brokers from most state-law negligent-selection claims. It doesn't work anymore.

Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC was decided by the Supreme Court on May 14, 2026. The unanimous ruling held that the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act does not preempt state-law negligent-selection claims against brokers. You can now be sued in state court for putting freight on a carrier you should have known was dangerous. What you knew — and what you could have known — is the question.

The FMCSA safety rating is one data point, not the whole picture. A plaintiff's attorney who knows what they're doing is going to ask: "What did you look at beyond that rating field?" If the answer is "nothing, because they were Not Rated and we thought that meant no issues were found," you are explaining something a jury will find unreasonable.

Not Rated doesn't protect you. It just means FMCSA hasn't weighed in. It says nothing about what the BASIC data shows, what the inspection history looks like, or what the crash record contains.

The Carrier That Tested This for Me

Let me give you a real-sounding scenario because the abstract version doesn't stick.

I'm a broker running dry van in the Southeast. I get a load — 38,000 lbs of consumer electronics, $280,000 declared value, Chicago to Atlanta, needs to deliver Tuesday. Rate is tight, I'm booking Friday afternoon, I find a carrier I haven't used before: MC-1284719, three years of authority, Not Rated, authority Active, insurance current.

I pull SAFER. Company snapshot looks normal until I open the Safety Measurement System results. Unsafe Driving BASIC: 94th percentile. That means for every 100 comparable carriers, 93 of them have a better unsafe-driving score. Crash Indicator: 88th percentile.

Now I have a choice. I could say "they're Not Rated, the status field doesn't say Conditional, I'm covered." Or I could recognize that "Not Rated" is a neutral data point about FMCSA's workload — and the BASIC scores are actual operational signals about this carrier's behavior.

If I put that electronics load on that carrier and there's a catastrophic crash on I-65, a plaintiff's attorney is going to open with exactly those two numbers and ask me to explain why I used this carrier anyway. The answer "they were Not Rated" does not answer that question. It makes the question worse, because it implies I thought "Not Rated" was sufficient diligence.

What to Actually Look At

The practical fix isn't complicated. It's accepting that the FMCSA safety rating field is one input and treating the rest of the SAFER snapshot as equally important.

For any carrier where the status is Not Rated — which is most of them — the BASIC percentiles are the closest thing you have to a safety fitness signal. Unsafe Driving and Crash Indicator have the strongest demonstrated correlation to crash risk. A score in the alert threshold (typically 65th percentile or above for Unsafe Driving, 65th for Crash Indicator, though thresholds differ by BASIC) warrants either a hard pass or documented exception with the reasoning on file.

Beyond BASICs, look at the inspection history in the SAFER snapshot: how many inspections, what types (Level I through VI), and the resulting vehicle and driver OOS rates. A carrier with 200 inspections has a meaningful sample. A carrier with six inspections in three years — and two of the six resulted in OOS violations — has a thin record that doesn't tell you much either way.

Look at the crash history section. SAFER reports crashes as involving injury, fatality, or tow-away, broken into two reporting periods. A "Not Rated" carrier with zero formal violations can still show two fatal crashes in 36 months. That's a hard conversation you need to have before you tender the load.

For carriers with authority under 18 months, the inspection count is low by definition and the BASICs aren't statistically reliable yet. That doesn't make the carrier dangerous — it means you genuinely have less data, and your file should acknowledge that gap and document how you weighted it.

Where the FMCSR Actually Applies at Load-Tender Time

One citation worth knowing: 49 CFR § 385.3 defines the safety fitness standards FMCSA uses when it does rate a carrier. The criteria include things like driver fitness, controlled substances compliance, Hours of Service, vehicle maintenance, accident rates, and crash involvement patterns.

These aren't just rating criteria. They're the substantive standards that define what a safe carrier looks like. When you're vetting a "Not Rated" carrier and you have no formal FMCSA determination to rely on, these are the dimensions you're independently evaluating using SAFER data, BASIC scores, and inspection history. A carrier with high Unsafe Driving scores and a recent crash history fails the § 385.3 standards in substance, even if FMCSA hasn't formally said so.

That's the frame: "Not Rated" means no formal determination exists, not that no determination is possible. You're doing the analysis yourself. Your file is the record of that analysis.

How I Document This

When I screen a carrier that comes back "Not Rated," the note in the carrier file explicitly acknowledges the status and then goes further:

• Safety rating: Not Rated (no formal compliance review on record; does not indicate pass or fail)
• Unsafe Driving BASIC: [percentile] — [in-alert / below alert threshold]
• Crash Indicator BASIC: [percentile] — [in-alert / below alert threshold]
• Vehicle OOS rate: [%] vs national average [%]
• Driver OOS rate: [%] vs national average [%]
• Inspection count: [N] — sample size [adequate / thin]
• Crash history: [N] recordable crashes in 36 months, [breakdown of injury/fatal/tow]
• Vetting decision: [approved / declined / approved with conditions]
• Conditions if any: [e.g., "Limited to lanes under 500 miles pending additional inspection history"]
• Documented by: [name, date, time, data source]

That last line matters more than people realize. You need to be able to show not just what you found but when you found it — before or after the load moved.

If a carrier is "Not Rated" and the BASIC data looks clean, that note still says "Not Rated — reviewed BASIC data, inspection history, and crash record; all within acceptable parameters." If the BASICs are elevated, the note says that too, along with the decision and the reasoning. If I'm declining, the note says "declined — Unsafe Driving at 94th percentile, Crash Indicator at 88th percentile, Not Rated status means no formal compliance review exists; risk profile not acceptable for load type."

The version of that note that gets me through a deposition is the one that shows I understood what "Not Rated" meant, looked at the right underlying data, and made a documented decision. The version that doesn't is the one that says "status: Not Rated — OK to use."

The One Thing to Stop Doing

Stop treating the FMCSA safety rating field as a binary pass/fail with three outcomes: Satisfactory (good), Conditional (caution), Unsatisfactory (stop). That framework is missing the most common outcome, which is no determination at all.

"Not Rated" is information, but it's information about FMCSA's review schedule, not about the carrier's safety record. The carrier's safety record is in the BASIC percentiles, the inspection history, and the crash data. Those exist whether or not a compliance review has happened.

You have to look at both. The safety rating tells you whether FMCSA has formally weighed in. Everything else tells you what the data shows. After Montgomery, the question in front of a jury isn't "what did FMCSA officially say about this carrier?" It's "what could you have found with reasonable diligence?" The answer is almost always: a lot more than "they were Not Rated."

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— Mason Lavallet

Founder, DOTScreener.com