The PSP Report: How to Get One, and How to Read It

A PSP report is FMCSA’s Pre-Employment Screening Program record for one commercial driver: five years of crash history and three years of roadside inspection history, pulled from the Motor Carrier Management Information System (MCMIS). It costs $10.00 per search, it requires the driver’s signed consent on an FMCSA-supplied form, and — in the agency’s own words — “the PSP record does not contain a score.”

That last point is the one that decides whether the report is worth anything to you. PSP hands you raw history with no ranking, no fault column and no recommendation. Two jobs follow from that, and most carriers only do the first one well: getting the report cheaply and fast, then reading it correctly when the crash section and the inspection section disagree.

This article covers both. The first half is the ordering mechanics — cost, consent, enrollment, and the process failures that make carriers pay twice for the same record. The second half is attribution: how to tell a careless driver from a competent driver who kept getting handed junk equipment, using the regulation numbers that already assigned each duty to a party.

What is in a PSP report, and what is not?

A PSP report is two different datasets stapled together, and they were built to answer two different questions. FMCSA’s Pre-Employment Screening Program pulls a commercial driver’s five-year crash history and three-year inspection history out of the Motor Carrier Management Information System (MCMIS). The crash file and the inspection file are populated by different people, under different rules, with different standards of proof — so a clean record on one side and a loud record on the other is not a contradiction. It is the normal output of the system.

The crash side is a count of events, not a judgment. A crash is recordable when it meets the federal definition of an accident in 49 CFR 390.5 — the threshold States apply when they report crashes into MCMIS: a fatality, a bodily injury where someone gets immediate medical treatment away from the scene, or one or more vehicles incurring disabling damage that requires the vehicle to be transported away from the scene by a tow truck or another motor vehicle. That definition contains no fault test at all. A driver rear-ended at a red light by a distracted motorist and a driver who jackknifed on dry pavement both produce one line in the same column.

The inspection side is a record of conditions found at a moment in time. It shows what a roadside inspector wrote down, including violations that never became a citation and citations that were later thrown out in court. It also includes inspections with nothing wrong: the authorizing statute, 49 U.S.C. 31150(a), directs FMCSA to make crash reports, inspection reports containing no driver-related safety violations, and serious driver-related violation reports available to pre-employment screeners. Clean inspections are part of the record on purpose, and they are the denominator most recruiters forget to look at.

So the mixed report is telling you something real. Eleven violations over three years is a different fact if the driver also sat through twenty-six clean inspections in the same window than if he was inspected fourteen times total. Count both before you form an opinion.

Why does PSP cost more than it should at most carriers?

The fee is almost never the problem; the sequencing is. A PSP driver report is priced like a lookup and used like a decision, and carriers that treat the two as the same step end up paying for searches that never informed a hire.

Three patterns account for most of the waste. First, pulling too early — running PSP on every applicant who filled out a web form, when a large share of them will never answer the phone back. Second, pulling twice — a recruiter searches, the safety manager searches again a week later because nobody saved the PDF or nobody could find it. Third, pulling and then stalling — the search runs, the report comes back with an out-of-service inspection, and the file sits for four days while somebody figures out what the adverse action process is supposed to look like.

None of that is a PSP problem. It is a process problem, and the fix costs nothing except deciding, once, who does what and in which order.

There is a fourth pattern worth naming separately because it is not just expensive, it is a violation. PSP is a pre-employment system. The account holder agreement states plainly that information obtained from the PSP database “may only be used for pre-employment screening of Applicants, and only by the Monthly Account Holder.” The same agreement warns that accessing PSP for any purpose other than pre-employment screening, and without having first obtained the applicant’s consent, “may well be such a violation” of 18 U.S.C. 1001 — false statements in a matter handled by the executive branch, carrying fines or imprisonment. You do not run PSP on a driver already on your payroll to see how his year went.

What does PSP actually charge you, and when?

Two charges, on two different clocks: an annual subscription tied to your fleet size, and a per-search transaction fee billed monthly. FMCSA publishes both on the PSP enrollment page, and the per-record price falls when you request records simultaneously.

Sources: the two motor carrier rows come from the PSP fee structure at psp.fmcsa.dot.gov and the PSP Monthly Account Holder Agreement; the industry service provider row comes from the separate ISP Account Holder Agreement, which sets “a $10.00 fee for each search run.”

A note on the tier boundary, because the two FMCSA sources word it differently. The public fee page reads “fewer than 100” and “more than 100” power units, which leaves a fleet of exactly 100 in neither bucket. The binding contract is unambiguous: the Monthly Account Holder Agreement sets the fee “for motor carriers with 100 or more power units” at $100.00 “and for motor carriers with 99 or fewer power units it is $25.00.” At exactly 100 power units you are in the $100 tier. Go by the agreement you sign, not the web copy.

The footnote on the fee table is the part people miss: “Quantity discounts are available for simultaneous record requests.” Running forty searches across a month at a keystroke each gets you forty charges at $10.00. Running forty in one batch is where $9.25 lives; $9.00 does not start until the forty-first record. If you are a small carrier at 99 power units or fewer, the tiers do not apply to you at all — your rate is $10.00 and your lever is volume avoided, not volume discounted.

One quirk to plan around: FMCSA’s published table lists 100 records in both the 41–100 tier ($9.00) and the 100+ tier ($8.75), so the same table gives two prices for a batch of exactly 100. Confirm the rate with NIC Federal before batching that number, or batch 99 or 101 and remove the ambiguity.

A few other billing facts from the Monthly Account Holder Agreement that shape how you should set the account up:

• Invoices are auto-debited. NIC Federal prepares invoices electronically and charges them by direct debit or credit card “approximately five calendar days after the invoice is made available.” Credit card payment may carry a surcharge.
• Past due accounts accrue 1.5% per month, or the legal limit, whichever is less — plus collection costs.
• Cancelling does not refund the subscription. You may terminate in writing at any time, but NIC Federal “will retain the annual subscription payment.”
• Ten user IDs come with the annual fee. Need more? You buy an additional account and get ten more, and all accounts must share the same signer/administrator.

Where does PSP belong in your hiring funnel?

Right at the point where a candidate becomes real — after the phone screen, in the same batch as the MVR and the Clearinghouse query, never before the signed consent packet. PSP is not a qualification requirement; it is a decision input, and it should sit where a decision is actually being made.

It helps to keep the mandatory steps and the optional ones straight, because PSP is the only one on this list that federal rules do not require you to run — the full set of required checks is elsewhere.

Read that Clearinghouse row carefully, because the common misreading is expensive. The query deadline is not “before he turns a wheel.” Safety-sensitive functions under Part 382 include time waiting to be dispatched, inspecting or servicing the vehicle, and attending a loaded vehicle. Put a driver on the yard doing pre-trip work before the query clears and you are already outside the rule.

That last row is the whole scheduling argument. Because nothing in Part 391 forces PSP to happen by a certain day, it is the step that gets deferred, and deferral is what turns a $10 lookup into a week of dead time. Give it an artificial deadline of your own: PSP runs in the same sitting as the MVR request, or it does not run.

One more mechanical fact that determines what PSP can and cannot do for you: it draws five years of crash and three years of roadside inspection data from FMCSA’s Motor Carrier Management Information System (MCMIS), per the PSP site, and — FMCSA’s own words — “the PSP record does not contain a score.” It is raw history, not a verdict. Nothing in it ranks the driver for you. If you want a comparable read on driving history state by state, that is what the MVR does and PSP does not, and the difference between PSP and a DAC-style employment history file matters more than most recruiters realize.

How do I set PSP up so one person can run it at volume?

Six steps, and only the first two are one-time. The rest are the operating routine.

How do I stop paying for the same record twice?

Kill the duplicate at the source: one owner per candidate, one saved artifact per search, and a rule about when a search is allowed to happen at all. Everything else is bookkeeping.

Bad: A driver applies Monday online. A recruiter runs PSP that afternoon to “get ahead of it,” before the phone screen. Wednesday the driver stops answering. Thursday a second recruiter picks up the same file from the shared inbox, does not see any note, and runs it again. Two charges, no hire, no artifact, and a PSP access log with two searches nobody can tie to a documented consent because the release was in the general onboarding PDF the driver never got to.

Good: The signed standalone PSP authorization comes back with the application, because it is page two of the packet. The candidate clears the phone screen Tuesday. He goes into Thursday’s batch with eleven others. The recruiter who owns the file runs the batch, downloads all twelve PDFs into the applicant records the same hour, and stamps each candidate record with the search date. Any second person opening that file sees the report is already there. One charge, one artifact, one audit trail.

Four rules that produce the “good” column reliably:

1. A search requires a live candidate. Define “live” once — usually cleared phone screen plus signed authorization — and make it the trigger.
2. One owner per candidate file. The owner runs the search; nobody else does.
3. The PDF lands in the file before the tab closes. Not later, not from memory.
4. Never re-run to “check for updates.” A second search on a driver you have already screened is a second $10, and once he is your employee it is not permitted at all.

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Now read the thing you just paid for

The report is on your desk. The easy ones sort themselves in ten seconds: a driver with three tow-away crashes and a pile of speeding violations needs no method.

The one that eats your afternoon is the mixed report — crash section empty for five years, inspection section carrying eleven violations across three different carriers, most of them brakes, lights and tires. Nothing on the page tells you whether you are looking at a careless driver or a competent driver who kept getting handed junk equipment. FMCSA credits PSP users with an 8 percent lower crash rate and a 17 percent lower driver out-of-service rate on average, per a 2013 agency study — but that lift only lands if the person reading the report can tell those two cases apart.

The rest of this article is how.

Whose duty was it? Match the violation to the regulation that created it

Start attribution with the rule number, because the FMCSRs already assigned most of these duties to a specific party, and the assignment rarely lands on the driver alone. Vehicle condition is a carrier obligation before it is ever a driver obligation. Hours of service is a driver obligation that the carrier is separately required to enforce. That structure is your map.

49 CFR 396.3 puts systematic inspection, repair and maintenance of every vehicle under a carrier’s control squarely on the motor carrier, and requires maintenance records be kept for one year and for six months after the vehicle leaves the carrier’s control. 49 CFR 396.17 bars a carrier from using a CMV unless each component in Appendix A passed an inspection within the preceding 12 months. Meanwhile 49 CFR 396.13 requires the driver to be satisfied the vehicle is in safe operating condition before driving, and 49 CFR 392.7 separately bars him from driving unless he is satisfied that eleven enumerated parts — service and parking brakes, steering, lighting devices and reflectors, tires, horn, wipers, mirrors, coupling devices, wheels and rims, emergency equipment — are in good working order.

Both duties exist at once, which is exactly why a brake violation on a PSP report is ambiguous on its face and resolvable in context. The other half of the map is 49 CFR 390.11: wherever the regulations impose a duty on a driver, it is the motor carrier’s duty to require observance of it. On paper, there is no such thing as a violation the carrier had nothing to do with.

Use the right-hand columns as hypotheses, not verdicts. The test that turns a hypothesis into an answer is the one in the next section: whether the pattern moved with the driver or stayed with the truck.

How do you run the attribution read, step by step?

Sort by employer and by duty owner before you sort by severity. The instinct is to scan for the worst single line. The mixed report punishes that instinct, because the worst single line is usually a vehicle defect and vehicle defects are the least informative thing on the page. Run these six steps instead. On a report with a dozen entries, in our experience it runs about a quarter of an hour.

What does a clean crash section actually prove?

Less than most recruiters read into it, and the reason is structural. Five years of no DOT recordable crashes is a genuinely good sign, but it is a five-year window on events severe enough to clear the 390.5 threshold — a fatality, an injury treated away from the scene, or disabling damage that forces a vehicle to be hauled off by a tow truck or another motor vehicle. Everything below that line is invisible. Backing incidents, curb strikes, trailer damage in the yard, a load shift that cost the customer money: none of it produces a federal crash record, and all of it is the sort of thing a previous employer knows and the report does not.

The inverse is also true and gets drivers unfairly screened out. A driver who was struck in the rear while legally stopped at a traffic control device carries that crash on his PSP for five years, and it looks identical to one he caused, unless somebody filed the RDR. Being struck in the rear by a motorist, and being struck while legally stopped at a traffic control device, are both on FMCSA’s list of 21 eligible CPDP crash types. The determination is only there if his former carrier bothered — which is itself a fact about the carrier, not the driver.

Practical rule: treat the crash section as a screen for severity and frequency, and treat the inspection section as your behavioral evidence. It records far more events, at a far lower threshold, and it is the only part of the report that shows a pattern.

How do you keep the decision defensible?

Write down the reasoning, not just the outcome. A hiring file that says “declined — PSP” is worthless in an audit and worse in litigation. A file that says “eleven violations, nine of them Vehicle Maintenance and all nine at one carrier, twenty-two clean inspections, no crashes, hired with a 90-day pre-trip audit” shows a documented, job-related process.

Three practical habits make the difference. Keep the MVR and the safety performance history responses in the file inside the 30-day window 391.23 sets, with the good-faith-effort documentation where an employer never replied. Record what the driver said about each cluster in his own words. And keep the FCRA sequence intact and dated when you decline, because the pre-notice and the adverse action notice are two separate obligations with the applicant’s response window between them. If your state adds its own rules on top of the federal ones, verify the current requirement before relying on the federal minimum — this is a summary of how the federal framework works, not legal advice for your operation.

Pair the PSP read with the state-side record. The MVR check for CDL drivers captures convictions, which is the one thing the inspection section explicitly does not: an inspection violation is what an officer observed, and it is not the same object as a conviction that survived a court.

What a PSP report still cannot tell you

PSP only knows what an inspector wrote down. It draws from MCMIS — roadside inspections and FMCSA-reportable crashes — so it is a record of the moments a driver came into contact with enforcement. Between those moments it is silent, and for a driver with a clean three years of inspections, “silent” is most of the file.

That is not a flaw in the program; it is the program’s scope. Neither the PSP report nor the 391.23 investigation is designed to answer the question a mixed report raises, and it is worth being blunt about that rather than pretending a harder read will get you there. PSP records conditions and events. The mandated previous-employer inquiry records accidents and drug and alcohol history. Between them, nothing captures the operational reality that produced the pattern: whether the equipment was maintained, whether dispatch scheduled runs that could not be made inside 49 CFR 395.3’s 11-hour driving limit and 14-hour window, whether the driver wrote up defects that were ignored.

Federal data also has a hard edge in time. Inspection history runs three years and crash history five, and FMCSA holds carrier-side safety events in SMS for 24 months. A driver’s conduct at an employer four years ago simply is not in the file, and neither is any of it if he was never inspected. You can finish the whole process correctly, hold a $10 record and a null result, and still not know whether other carriers had a different experience with this driver — a walked-off load, a truck abandoned at a terminal, a pattern of no-shows that never once produced a violation because none of it happened at a scale house.

That gap is where peer reputation does work the federal record cannot. A driver reputation search returns reviews written by the carriers that employed him, tied to the period they employed him — which is the one thing that turns “nine maintenance violations at Carrier A” from an ambiguity into an answer. If three other fleets describe the same driver as someone who deadheads with a written-up unit rather than argue, the cluster belongs to Carrier A’s shop. If two describe him as a guy who signs pre-trips without walking the truck, it belongs to him.

Say the obvious part plainly: this is an additional layer, not a substitute. The MVR inquiry, the safety performance history investigation and the driver qualification file required by 49 CFR 391.51 are legally mandatory and nothing here replaces any of them. Reputation data is what you add on top when the mandatory record comes back ambiguous — and on mixed reports it comes back ambiguous most of the time.

The practical reason to slot it into this exact step rather than a later one: a name search takes seconds and cdlscan lists it as free as of July 2026, so it does not add latency to the process the first half of this article was about speeding up. Run it in the same sitting as the batch. If the name comes back with employer-reported history, you have a question to ask on the next call, and you have it before the offer instead of after the truck is gone. If it comes back empty, you have lost nothing.

If you want the fleet-side view instead, our notes on the CSA scoring system cover how the same inspections land on the carrier, and the comparison of what carriers see in a DAC report covers the employment-side record PSP deliberately excludes. For the state-by-state driving history PSP does not carry, see the MVR check.

Frequently asked questions