OOS and Accident Rates

Alright, let's talk about out-of-service rates and accident rates — two safety metrics that live right on the Summary tab when you open up a DOT report.

As soon as you land here, you'll see four different out-of-service rates for the motor carrier: vehicle, driver, hazmat, and overall. Right off the bat, you're seeing that specific carrier's out-of-service percentage for each one — no extra clicks needed.

Now, if you hover over any one of these, you'll get a comparison against the national average out-of-service rate. And this is where it gets useful — if the carrier's rate is above the national average, it'll be highlighted in red. That's your quick visual cue that something needs a closer look.

That same hover also tells you what actually goes into the calculation. So for example, the driver out-of-service rate is built from four BASICs: unsafe driving, hours of service, driver fitness, and controlled substances. The vehicle out-of-service rate, on the other hand, is just vehicle maintenance. And on top of that, you'll see the number of relevant inspections behind each rate — so you know exactly how much data you're working with.

Now let's talk about accident rate. This one shows up as one of three values: unsatisfactory, which is red, satisfactory, which is green, or none — meaning there just wasn't enough data to calculate it.

A satisfactory rate means the carrier is at or below 1.5 accidents per million miles. That threshold — 1.5 — is set by the FMCSA, not by us. And when you hover over the rate, you'll see exactly what it's based on: the number of crashes in the past two years, and the mileage the carrier reported on their MCS-150. So in this example, we're looking at three crashes over two years against their reported mileage. If that math pushes them above 1.5, the rate flips to unsatisfactory.

One thing worth calling out clearly, because it trips people up a lot: accident rate is not the same thing as the crash indicator BASIC score. The accident rate is a straightforward regulatory calculation — crashes per million miles, full stop. The crash indicator is a percentile ranking that compares this carrier against its peers. Two completely different metrics, and they can absolutely show different results for the same carrier. So don't let a strong crash indicator score fool you into assuming the accident rate is satisfactory, or vice versa — always check both.