FMCSA Motus explained for factors and brokers

Motus is the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's new online registration system, and since May 2026 it is where every carrier, broker and freight forwarder applies for a USDOT number and operating authority, updates its record and files changes. It replaced the Unified Registration System (URS), the registration functions of the FMCSA Portal, and the Licensing and Insurance (L&I) system that FMCSA inherited from the Interstate Commerce Commission. FMCSA says Motus now serves as the unified registration system that federal law requires under 49 U.S.C. 13908. The name is Latin for movement or progress, not an acronym.

FMCSA was direct about why it built the system. Its April 2026 Federal Register notice lists the fraud it is responding to: identity theft, hijacking of FMCSA motor carrier accounts, the selling of motor carrier numbers and personal identification numbers, and fake initial registrations. That list is also a fair description of how a fraudulent client reaches a factor, which is why Motus matters to your underwriting even though you will never file anything in it.

This guide covers what changed, what didn't, and how to read carrier data now that FMCSA runs two generations of records side by side. If you only need the answer on MC numbers, read Is the MC number going away?.

Motus rolled out in two phases, on top of a registration overhaul FMCSA first attempted more than a decade earlier. The dates below come from FMCSA's Federal Register notice, FMCSA's registration pages, and the update notes on FMCSA's own open datasets.

Motus adds three layers the old systems lacked: a Login.gov sign-in, an identity check on the person, and a verification check on the business.

1. 1

   Login.gov sign-in

   Every Motus user signs in through Login.gov, which requires two-factor authentication such as a code sent to a phone or email. To claim an existing USDOT record, the company official must use the same Login.gov email address that was on file in the FMCSA Portal.

2. 2

   Identity verification

   On first login, the user photographs a government-issued ID (identity card, driver's license, passport or resident card) and scans their face with a phone, tablet or webcam. FMCSA says all new applicants must pass this check, and that roughly 800,000 existing registrants will be verified when they first access Motus. IDEMIA provides the capture and verification service.

3. 3

   Business verification

   FMCSA says Motus also checks the company: its legal name, principal place of business, ownership structure, company officials, and state and federal registration status. CLEAR runs this service.

One point trips people up. Login.gov is the sign-in; the face-and-ID check is a separate FMCSA step inside Motus, and the business check is a third step. When someone tells you a carrier is “Login.gov verified,” ask which of the three they mean.

It makes one kind of fraud harder: inventing a carrier from nothing. A person now has to show a real government ID and a matching face to register a new USDOT number, and the business has to pass its own check. That is real progress, and it is also why fraud keeps moving toward identities that already exist.

Here is what it does not do. It verifies the person who registered or claimed the record, at that moment. It doesn't verify the person emailing your verification desk today, it doesn't stop someone who later takes over a carrier's email or phone, and FMCSA's public datasets don't say which person passed the check.

The fraud patterns that live in this gap, from PIN phishing to bought authorities, are covered in carrier identity theft.

FMCSA randomized them to fight fraud. In its words: “To help prevent fraud, Motus will randomize all newly issued USDOT Numbers and operating authority docket numbers. Existing USDOT and docket numbers will not change.” Before the cutover, numbers were issued in sequence, so a higher number meant a newer registration, and many brokers and factors used that as a shortcut.

That shortcut is now wrong. A USDOT number issued in October 2026 can be lower than one issued in June, and new docket numbers in the Motus datasets carry eight digits after the MC prefix. Compute age from dates instead: the USDOT registration date and the authority grant date. Our carrier check does this from FMCSA's datasets.

The one-docket-per-authority change matters for lookups. A company that gets both carrier and broker authority in Motus will hold two separate MC numbers under one USDOT number. Search and file by USDOT, and store every docket number under it.

If you pull FMCSA data yourself, or rely on a vendor that does, this is the part that matters most. FMCSA's legacy “All With History” datasets on data.transportation.gov (Carrier, AuthHist, insurance, insurance history, Revocation, BOC-3 and others) now carry the same note: “This dataset was last refreshed on 05/14/2026 and will no longer be updated.”

New activity lives in separate Motus datasets, created on 2026-06-03 and refreshed daily, each published as a daily-difference file and an all-with-history file. They are not a copy of the old files. On 2026-10-19 the Motus Carrier (All With History) dataset held 165,918 rows, 125,497 of them active authorities, while the frozen legacy Carrier file lists 402,107 entities with an active authority as of its last refresh.

So a complete carrier history now has two parts: the legacy record up to 2026-05-14 and the Motus record after it. Anything that reads only Motus will miss older carriers whose records haven't been touched since the cutover. Anything that reads only legacy data will miss every grant, suspension, reinstatement and insurance change since May.

Quirks to handle when you merge them

• Dates are MM/DD/YYYY in the legacy L&I files and YYYYMMDD in Motus and the Company Census.
• Legacy files zero-pad USDOT numbers to eight characters; Motus doesn't. Strip leading zeros and store USDOT as a number.
• Motus can list one USDOT number several times, once per authority, and a docket can appear more than once as its status changes. FMCSA's own dataset notes say not to assume either is unique.
• Motus status reasons are text and not always consistently cased, so normalize them before you count anything.

1. 1

   Key on USDOT

   Normalize the USDOT number and treat every MC number as a child record of it.

2. 2

   Pull the legacy history

   Authority grants, revocations, insurance filings and BOC-3 records up to 2026-05-14.

3. 3

   Layer Motus on top

   Grants, suspensions, reinstatements and insurance changes since the cutover.

4. 4

   Compute ages from dates

   Use the earliest grant date for authority age, never the number.

5. 5

   Resolve conflicts at the source

   When legacy and Motus disagree, check the carrier's record in Motus's public search and note the date you checked.

6. 6

   Stamp every fact

   Record the dataset and as-of date next to each fact in the file, so an auditor can see what you knew and when.

No. FMCSA kept MC, MX and FF docket numbers and their prefixes, and existing numbers did not change. Its Federal Register notice says the Phase II release “will not include the implementation of safety registration, the elimination of MC/FF numbers, or changes to the Form BOC-3 filing process,” after stakeholders asked for more time. FMCSA's registration page says those changes “will be open for public comment in a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking.”

A bill in Congress, the SAFER Transport Act (H.R. 8267), would phase MC numbers out, but it has not passed. The details, including what else the bill would change, are in Is the MC number going away?.

• Make the USDOT number the primary key on every application, file and lookup, and capture every docket number under it.
• Retire any rule that infers carrier age from the size of a USDOT or MC number.
• Read authority and insurance history from both the frozen legacy datasets and the daily Motus datasets.
• Ask new clients whether their company official has claimed the USDOT record in Motus, and who that official is.
• Verify the applicant as a person (government ID and live selfie) and tie them to the carrier, because the Motus identity check isn't visible to you.
• Confirm the bank account belongs to the carrier's legal entity before the first advance.
• Treat any change to a carrier's phone, email, address, officers or bank details as a trigger to re-verify, using a written bank-change procedure for payment changes.
• Check authority and insurance status again at funding time, not only at onboarding.
• Watch the daily Motus files for insurance-related suspensions and BOC-3 cancellations on active clients.

None of this needs new software to start. It needs a written procedure and the discipline to follow it on busy days. The carrier vetting checklist puts the whole process in one place.