CSA scores: what follows you between carriers

You do not have a CSA score. Recruiters say "your CSA" all the time, and it is wrong — the Safety Measurement System scores motor carriers, not drivers. What follows you personally is a different federal record built from the same roadside inspections, and that one can cost you a job before anyone calls your references.

What CSA actually is

CSA stands for Compliance, Safety, Accountability. It is FMCSA's enforcement program, and the Safety Measurement System is the math inside it. SMS takes every roadside inspection and state-reported crash tied to a carrier's DOT number, sorts the violations into seven categories called BASICs, and ranks that carrier against other carriers with a similar number of inspections.

BASIC	What lands in it
Unsafe Driving	Speeding, reckless driving, lane changes, seat belt, phone use
Hours-of-Service Compliance	Log violations, false logs, over-hours driving
Driver Fitness	Invalid license, no medical card, missing endorsement
Controlled Substances/Alcohol	Use or possession while on duty
Vehicle Maintenance	Brakes, lights, tires, defects found at the roadside
Hazardous Materials Compliance	Placarding, packaging, shipping paper violations
Crash Indicator	State-reported crashes, weighted by severity

Two things decide how much any single violation moves the number. Severity — FMCSA assigns each violation a weight — and age. In the current methodology, events in the past six months carry a time weight of 3, events six to twelve months old carry a 2, and anything older carries a 1. After 24 months, the event drops out of the carrier's SMS calculation entirely. That is FMCSA's own SMS methodology document, not an industry rumor.

The result is a percentile from 0 to 100, where 100 is the worst. Cross the intervention threshold in a BASIC and the carrier starts getting warning letters, then investigations. Not every BASIC is public: for property-hauling carriers, the Crash Indicator and Hazardous Materials Compliance BASICs are hidden from the public SMS site.

Why the carrier's number is your problem

Your inspections roll up into your carrier's percentile. You are one truck in a fleet, so one violation rarely moves a large carrier at all — but a small carrier with twenty trucks feels every one. That is why a fleet safety director will sit you down over a logbook violation that cost you nothing personally. It cost them.

It also shapes who will hire you. A carrier sitting near an intervention threshold in Unsafe Driving gets selective about the driving records it takes on, and a carrier already under investigation for hours-of-service compliance will not take a driver with two log violations in the past year. Nobody explains this in the interview. They just stop calling.

The record that is actually yours: PSP

The Pre-Employment Screening Program is where your own history lives. A PSP record pulls from FMCSA's Motor Carrier Management Information System and contains the most recent five years of crash data and the most recent three years of roadside inspection data, from any state, attached to your name and license number.

It shows every inspection, not just the bad ones. A clean Level I with no violations appears there too, and a run of clean inspections is a genuinely good thing for a hiring manager to see. It shows violations whether or not you were ever cited, because a roadside violation is not a ticket — an inspector can write a violation on the report and hand you nothing to pay.

A carrier cannot pull it without you. Federal law requires your written consent — a signature or electronic signature — before a PSP record is released to a prospective employer, and the carrier has to certify each request is for pre-employment screening only. That consent form is usually buried in the online application you filled out at two in the morning. You signed it.

Get your own copy before a recruiter does

Request your record through FMCSA's PSP site. Drivers can order their own; there is a small fee for a driver copy, and the amount is listed on the site — check it there rather than trusting a number in a forum post. You will need identity verification and your CDL number.

Do this before you start applying anywhere, not after you get turned down. Most drivers who find an error find it because a company already saw it. Reading your own record also tells you something useful: whether inspections you half-remember from two years ago actually produced violations, and whether a carrier ever logged a crash against you that you thought was closed.

Challenging something that is wrong

The system for this is DataQs. You file a Request for Data Review, it routes to the state agency or federal office that submitted the record, and that agency decides. You will need a Login.gov account. Attach documents — the inspection report, the citation, certified court paperwork. An RDR with no evidence is an opinion, and it loses.

Two specific things are worth knowing.

Adjudicated citations. If a citation tied to a roadside violation was dismissed or you were found not guilty, FMCSA's policy for inspections conducted after August 23, 2014 is that the violation is removed from both SMS and PSP once you submit certified court documentation. If you were convicted of a different, lesser charge, the violation stays but is marked as a conviction of a different charge and its SMS severity weight drops to 1. If you were convicted as cited — or the charge was dismissed on payment of a fine — it stays as written. This is the reason to care what you plead to, and it is covered in FMCSA's adjudicated citations fact sheet.

Crashes. The Crash Preventability Determination Program lets a crash be reviewed for preventability through the same DataQs system. FMCSA expanded it to 21 crash types effective December 1, 2024 — struck in the rear, struck while legally stopped or parked, struck by a wrong-way driver, animal strikes, infrastructure failures, and others. A crash found not preventable comes out of the Crash Indicator calculation and the determination appears in PSP. FMCSA has been reporting review times averaging around 90 days, so file early.

Winning a DataQs is not automatic and the reviewer is often the same agency that wrote the record. File anyway. It is free and there is no other route.

Where the rules are going

FMCSA has spent years rebuilding SMS. A Federal Register notice published November 20, 2024 confirmed the agency is moving ahead with a large redesign: BASICs renamed to compliance categories, controlled substances and alcohol folded into Unsafe Driving, Vehicle Maintenance split in two, roughly 959 roadside violations consolidated into about 116 violation groups, severity weights simplified from a 1-to-10 scale down to 1 or 2, and percentiles calculated only for carriers with violations in the past twelve months.

It is not live. As of this writing in September 2026 the public SMS site still runs the seven BASICs, and the CSA Prioritization Preview is still a preview that carriers log into through the FMCSA Portal. FMCSA said a follow-up Federal Register notice will announce the launch date. If someone tells you the new scoring is already in effect, check the CSA site yourself.

None of the redesign changes PSP. Five years of crashes, three years of inspections, your name on it either way.

What to do next

Order your PSP record today, even if you have not started school. It should come back empty, and an empty record is exactly what you want to hand your first employer alongside a clean Clearinghouse query. Then learn what an inspector is actually looking at, because how a roadside inspection works is what determines what ends up on that report for the rest of your career — and it starts influencing which companies will hire you from your very first month.

If you are still deciding whether to train at all, you can start an application and pick a Monday class start whenever you are ready.