Data study · figures retrieved 2026-10-12
The truck at your dock probably belongs to a company with one truck.
We counted every active motor carrier in the US federal register, all 2,240,835 of them, by fleet size, by whether they have ever been given a safety rating, and by how recently they last updated their registration. Three findings, one of which we have not seen published anywhere, and every query is at the bottom so you can run it yourself.
59.0%
operate a single truck
1,182,672 carriers declare one power unit, of 2,003,863 reporting a fleet size at all.
97.6%
have never been safety rated
Only 53,006 of 2,240,835 active carriers hold a rating of any kind.
49×
less likely, if you run one truck
A single-truck carrier is rated at 0.8%, against 39.1% in the 101 to 1,000 band.
Reach against size
The smaller the carrier, the less likely it crosses a state line
The census records whether a carrier operates interstate or only within one state. Crossed against fleet size it produces a second monotonic climb, and a crossover point that is useful if you receive freight: 27.7% of single-truck carriers are interstate, rising to 81.0% in the 101 to 1,000 band. The balance in each band is almost entirely intrastate without hazardous materials.
| 1 | 27.727.7% | |
|---|---|---|
| 2 to 5 | 3535.0% | |
| 6 to 10 | 47.747.7% | |
| 11 to 20 | 57.757.7% | |
| 21 to 50 | 66.466.4% | |
| 51 to 100 | 7272.0% | |
| 101 to 1,000 | 8181.0% |
| Power units | Active carriers | Interstate | Share interstate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1,182,672 | 327,909 | 27.7% |
| 2 to 5 | 618,280 | 216,692 | 35.0% |
| 6 to 10 | 103,316 | 49,299 | 47.7% |
| 11 to 20 | 50,887 | 29,369 | 57.7% |
| 21 to 50 | 29,846 | 19,811 | 66.4% |
| 51 to 100 | 10,196 | 7,340 | 72.0% |
| 101 to 1,000 | 6,884 | 5,575 | 81.0% |
The crossover sits in the 11 to 20 band, at 57.7%. Below it a carrier is more likely than not to be a local operation; above it, more likely than not to work across state lines. That is a smaller company than most people would guess.
What it changes at a bay is expectation rather than procedure. The single truck most likely to appear at your dock belongs to a company that is not only small but local, which is consistent with it being a subcontractor on the last leg rather than the carrier named on your paperwork. It has no bearing on how carefully anybody drives, and this page makes no claim about any individual carrier.
The More than 1,000 band is excluded above, for the reason set out in the rating section: 2,099,979 power units is the largest figure self-reported in the active register, and the band stops behaving like a population of fleets somewhere above five thousand declared units. Its computed figure of 25.9% is in the dataset and is not shown, because a number we believe is an artefact does not belong in a chart.
Finding one
Fleet size is not a bell curve. It is a cliff.
The largest single group of carriers in the United States, by a wide margin, is companies with exactly one truck. 89.9% of carriers that report a fleet size run five or fewer. The tail is long but thin: only 1,782 carriers declare more than a thousand power units.
| 1 | 1,182,67259.0% | |
|---|---|---|
| 2 to 5 | 618,28030.9% | |
| 6 to 10 | 103,3165.2% | |
| 11 to 20 | 50,8872.5% | |
| 21 to 50 | 29,8461.5% | |
| 51 to 100 | 10,1960.5% | |
| 101 to 1,000 | 6,8840.3% | |
| More than 1,000 | 1,7820.1% |
This is the figure worth carrying around, because it contradicts the mental picture almost everybody has. The name on the trailer at your bay is frequently a broker or a shipper, and the company that actually owns the vehicle and employs the driver is more likely to be a one or two person business than a national brand.
It explains a great deal that receiving departments find baffling. Why the driver cannot authorise anything, or agree to wait, or accept a rejected pallet back without a phone call. Why paperwork practice varies so wildly between two deliveries arranged by the same broker. Why a claim can take weeks to reach somebody with the authority to settle it: there may be only one such person, and they may be driving.
Finding two · the one we have not seen published
The chance a carrier has ever been rated rises steeply with its size
Cross-tabulating rating coverage against fleet size shows an almost perfectly monotonic climb: 0.8% of single-truck carriers have a rating, rising to 39.1% among the 101 to 1,000 band. Between the two ends of the working range that is roughly a 49-fold difference in the odds of ever having been looked at.
| 1 | 0.80.8% | |
|---|---|---|
| 2 to 5 | 2.72.7% | |
| 6 to 10 | 7.87.8% | |
| 11 to 20 | 13.713.7% | |
| 21 to 50 | 20.420.4% | |
| 51 to 100 | 27.227.2% | |
| 101 to 1,000 | 39.139.1% | |
| More than 1,000 | 15.215.2% |
| Power units | Active carriers | Rated | Share rated |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1,182,672 | 9,385 | 0.8% |
| 2 to 5 | 618,280 | 16,634 | 2.7% |
| 6 to 10 | 103,316 | 8,018 | 7.8% |
| 11 to 20 | 50,887 | 6,988 | 13.7% |
| 21 to 50 | 29,846 | 6,095 | 20.4% |
| 51 to 100 | 10,196 | 2,775 | 27.2% |
| 101 to 1,000 | 6,884 | 2,693 | 39.1% |
| More than 1,000 | 1,782 | 270 | 15.2% |
Two things this does not say, and both matter. It does not say small carriers are less safe: rating coverage measures where review effort has gone, not how anybody drives. And it does not say ratings are handed out by size; a rating follows a compliance review, and reviews are prioritised, so larger operations with more vehicles and more inspections naturally attract more of them.
The practical consequence is what makes it worth knowing. If you look up the carrier delivering to you and find no rating, you have learned almost nothing, because you were overwhelmingly likely to find nothing whatever the carrier is like. The signal only runs one way: a conditional or unsatisfactory rating is a documented finding, and there are just 11,915 of those in the entire register.
An anomaly we previously flagged without explaining, now checked. Rating coverage climbs steadily across every band and then falls back to 15.2% in the largest one. The cause appears to be the band itself rather than the carriers in it. Power units are self-reported on the MCS-150, and the largest value in the active register is 2,099,979: one carrier declaring nearly as many power units as there are active carriers in the whole country, of which there are 2,240,835. Behaviour inside that band changes sharply above roughly five thousand declared units, which is what a field carrying mistyped numbers looks like rather than a real population of enormous fleets. That is enough to explain an odd figure in any statistic computed over the band, including this one, so we now exclude it from the reach cross-tab below and report the rest.
Finding three
“Active” does not mean operating
Carriers keep their registration current by filing an MCS-150. Only 50.0% of active records were updated in the last two years, and 417,069 carry an update date more than a decade old.
| Updated in the last 2 years | 1,119,39150.0% | |
|---|---|---|
| 2 to 5 years ago | 250,35811.2% | |
| 5 to 10 years ago | 175,4587.8% | |
| More than 10 years ago | 417,06918.6% | |
| No usable date | 278,55912.4% |
This is the caveat that should attach to every other number on this page, including ours. The register counts registrations, not operating companies, and a substantial share of those registrations have not been touched in years. Any figure derived from it: the two million total, the fleet size distribution, the rating shares: describes the register rather than the road.
Two smaller cuts
By operation type
| Intrastate, non-hazmat | 1,531,71468.5% | |
|---|---|---|
| Interstate | 704,04331.5% | |
| Intrastate, hazmat | 1220.0% |
Where they are registered
| CA | 328,85714.7% | |
|---|---|---|
| TX | 193,9688.7% | |
| FL | 157,0077.0% | |
| NY | 129,6715.8% | |
| GA | 107,9074.8% | |
| PA | 82,4213.7% | |
| MI | 78,0923.5% | |
| MN | 76,2343.4% | |
| WI | 65,6192.9% | |
| IL | 55,9882.5% |
What this changes at your bay
Do not read an absent safety rating as a red flag. 97.6% of carriers have none. If you screen carriers on that basis you will reject almost all of them, including the good ones, and the screen tells you nothing about the specific company in front of you.
Do read a conditional rating as one. It is rare: 11,915 carriers across the whole register, and it means a review actually found something.
Expect the driver to have no authority. If the company has one truck, the person at your dock may be the owner, or may be the only employee, and either way the decision you want may not be theirs to make. Note the exception on the paperwork and take it up with whoever booked the freight rather than negotiating at the bay.
Do not assume a national name means a national fleet. Much freight moves on brokered capacity supplied by exactly these small carriers. Your contract may be with a large company and your pallet may be on a truck owned by somebody with one.
All of which points the same way as everything else on this site: the evidence you can produce at the moment of delivery is worth more than the diligence you can do beforehand. What signing actually commits you to is the practical companion to this page.
Method
Every figure comes from the Motor Carrier Census published by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration through the US Department of Transportation’s open data service. It is a public dataset and requires no key.
The counting is done by the publisher, not by us. Each figure is produced by an aggregation query executed on their service, which returns a total rather than rows; we store that total together with the query that produced it and the date it ran. Nothing is sampled, extrapolated or rounded up.
Population. All records with an active status code. This is the register’s own definition of active and includes every registered entity, not only long-haul freight carriers.
Fleet size. The declared power units field, self-reported by the carrier on its registration. Records reporting zero or nothing are counted separately rather than folded into the smallest band, because a blank is a fact about the paperwork and not a fleet of nothing.
Rating coverage. Two aggregations over the same population: all carriers by fleet size, and those with a non-null safety rating by fleet size: divided band by band. Using one query per band would have meant enumerating every possible power unit value, which breaks silently the first time a carrier reports a number nobody enumerated.
Refresh. A scheduled job re-runs every query weekly. It republishes only when a figure has actually changed, so the date on this page is the date the numbers were true rather than the date a script last ran.
What this data cannot tell you
- It counts registrations, not companies that are trading. Nearly a fifth of active records have not been updated in over a decade, and some of those businesses no longer exist.
- Fleet size is self-reported and not verified. A carrier that has grown or shrunk since it last filed will be counted where it filed, not where it is.
- Rating coverage is not a safety measurement. It records where compliance review effort has gone. Nothing here supports a claim that small carriers are less safe, and we are not making one.
- A single carrier can appear once regardless of how much freight it moves, so none of these counts are weighted by volume. Two million carriers do not each move a two-millionth of US freight.
- State is the physical address on the registration, not where the carrier operates. A carrier registered in one state may run entirely in another.
- Operation type uses the publisher's coding, which we report as given rather than reinterpreting.
Check it yourself
These are the actual queries. Each one opens the publisher’s service and returns the same counts these charts are drawn from. If a number here is wrong, one of these links will show it.
- 01Total active carriershttps://data.transportation.gov/resource/az4n-8mr2.json?%24select=count(1)&%24where=status_code%3D'A'
- 02Fleet size distributionhttps://data.transportation.gov/resource/az4n-8mr2.json?%24select=power_units%2Ccount(1)&%24where=status_code%3D'A'&%24group=power_units&%24limit=50000
- 03Safety ratingshttps://data.transportation.gov/resource/az4n-8mr2.json?%24select=safety_rating%2Ccount(1)&%24where=status_code%3D'A'&%24group=safety_rating
- 04Rated carriers by fleet size, the second half of the cross-tabhttps://data.transportation.gov/resource/az4n-8mr2.json?%24select=power_units%2Ccount(1)&%24where=status_code%3D'A'%20AND%20safety_rating%20IS%20NOT%20NULL&%24group=power_units&%24limit=50000
- 05Interstate carriers by fleet size, the second half of the reach cross-tabhttps://data.transportation.gov/resource/az4n-8mr2.json?%24select=power_units%2Ccount(1)&%24where=status_code%3D'A'%20AND%20carrier_operation%3D'A'&%24group=power_units&%24limit=50000
Source: Motor Carrier Census, FMCSA, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, US Department of Transportation. Figures retrieved 2026-10-12 and recomputed whenever the dataset is pulled again.
Questions
- How many motor carriers are there in the United States?
- 2,240,835 entities were recorded as active in the FMCSA motor carrier census when these figures were last retrieved, on 2026-10-12. That is every registered entity with an active status code, which is broader than the number of companies actually hauling freight on any given day.
- What is the average fleet size of a US trucking company?
- An average is the wrong statistic for a distribution this skewed, because a handful of very large fleets drag it far above what is typical. The useful figure is the shape: 1,182,672 active carriers declare exactly one power unit, and 89.9% of those reporting a fleet size run five or fewer.
- Do most trucking companies have a safety rating?
- No. 97.6% of active carriers hold no safety rating at all. A rating is only assigned after a compliance review, and most carriers have never had one, so an absent rating is the ordinary condition rather than a warning about a particular company.
- Are small carriers less likely to be safety rated?
- Substantially. 0.8% of single-truck carriers hold a rating, against 39.1% of those in the 101 to 1,000 band: roughly a 49-fold difference. That is a statement about how review effort is distributed, not about how safely anybody drives.
- What does a conditional safety rating mean?
- That a compliance review found the carrier lacked adequate safety management controls at the time of that review. 11,146 active carriers hold one, against 41,091 rated satisfactory and 769 unsatisfactory.
- Is the FMCSA carrier register up to date?
- Partly. 50.0% of active records were updated in the last two years, while 417,069 carry a registration update date more than ten years old. An active status code therefore does not mean a company is currently operating.
- Can I reproduce these numbers?
- Yes, and the exact queries are published on this page. Each one runs against the US Department of Transportation's own open data service, so the counting is done by the publisher rather than by us. Following a link returns the same figures the charts are drawn from.
Using these figures
The underlying dataset is US federal public domain and free to use. If any of this is useful in something you are writing, take it. A link back is welcome and not a condition. Cite the retrieval date rather than the year: the numbers move, and this page moves with them.
Written by Hamza Rivera, founder, dockcount. Figures retrieved 2026-10-12. How these pages are built, sourced and corrected is set out on the editorial standards page.