What is FMCSA?

FMCSA the lead federal government agency responsible for regulating and providing safety oversight of commercial motor vehicles (CMVs), FMCSA's mission is to reduce crashes, injuries, and fatalities involving large trucks and buses.

FMCSA partners with industry, safety advocates, and state and local governments to keep our nation's roadways safe and improve CMV safety through regulation, education, enforcement, research, and technology.

CSA is FMCSA's data-driven safety compliance and enforcement program designed to improve safety and prevent commercial motor vehicle (CMV) crashes, injuries, and fatalities. CSA consists of three core components; the Safety Measurement System (SMS); interventions; and a Safety Fitness Determination (SFD) rating system to determine the safety fitness of motor carriers.

How it's score?

The SMS uses data from roadside inspections and crash reports from the last two years, and data from investigations to identify and intervene with motor carriers that pose the greatest risk to safety.

FMCSA updates the SMS once a month and organizes the data into seven Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories (BASICs). The SMS groups carriers by BASIC with other carriers that have a similar number of safety events and then ranks carriers and assigns a percentile to prioritize them for interventions. To learn about SMS's effectiveness, visit the SMS Effectiveness Test page.

Complete SMS results are available to enforcement users and carriers that are logged into their own safety profiles. For more information on what SMS data is available to the public, review this FAQ.