Official sources
The FMCSA Company Census File (az4n-8mr2) supplies active USDOT registrations, contact information, physical addresses, fleets and cargo. Motus AuthHist (yu5v-wbh6) supplies authority-grant events; Motus Carrier (inys-ebih) adds authority context. All are downloaded from data.transportation.gov through its official open-data API.
One carrier, one USDOT
The full database contains one row per active USDOT number. Corporate groups with multiple USDOT numbers remain separate. Packs use physical US address states; the national pack is exactly the 50 states plus DC. Active registration does not prove current operations.
Contact checks
Emails are checked for syntax and obvious placeholders, not by SMTP or inbox verification. Shared emails and likely service-provider addresses are flagged. Phone formats are normalized; a phone may be personal or wireless. Missing fields stay empty.
Daily discovery
Daily checks compare stored snapshots, registration dates and new authority grants. A persistent USDOT ledger publishes each newly discovered carrier once, including first-seen date and event labels. Late filings can appear after their registration date. Reactivation and authority grants are distinct from new registrations.
Freshness
The website shows both FMCSA data date and publication time. A source may not change daily. A failed refresh leaves the last complete publication available. MCS-150 dates and filing-age columns let you judge each record’s age.
Official datasets: Company Census, Motus AuthHist, Motus Carrier.