Knight-Swift's CEO said something at the WEX OTR Summit this week that every small and mid-size carrier should hear: the company has cut its approved brokerage carrier pool by roughly 70% over the past two years. Not because freight dried up. Because they tightened carrier vetting and decided most carriers didn't clear the bar.
That's one broker. But it's the biggest truckload carrier in the country talking out loud about a shift the whole brokerage side is making quietly. If you run 10 to 500 trucks and any meaningful share of your revenue comes from brokered freight, the question isn't whether brokers are vetting you harder. They are. The question is whether your fleet passes, and whether you'd even know if it didn't.
This post covers what changed, exactly what brokers check in 2026, and how to keep your fleet on the approved list without turning your safety manager into a full-time paperwork clerk.
Three things stacked up in 2026.
1. Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II. On May 14, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that negligent-hiring claims against freight brokers are not preempted by federal law. In plain English: if a broker books a carrier with a bad safety record and that carrier causes a crash, the broker can be sued in state court for picking that carrier. The case involved C.H. Robinson hiring a carrier with a Conditional safety rating. Before Montgomery, brokers in several circuits had a near-automatic defense. Now they don't.
2. Nuclear verdicts. A Texas judge upheld a verdict of more than $600 million against C.H. Robinson in October, on a record where the hired carrier held a Satisfactory FMCSA rating. The U.S. Chamber's new Roadblock report put the average plaintiff verdict in 334 truck accident cases at nearly $28 million. Brokers' insurers are reading these. C.H. Robinson and Landstar both saw their stocks drop double digits in a day this week after disclosing claims expenses were up 27-30%.
3. Organized cargo theft and chameleon carriers. Fraud moved from a few bad actors to organized crime. FMCSA's new Motus registration system now requires government ID to get authority, and the agency has been working chameleon-carrier cases with DOJ and the FBI. Brokers responded by treating every new or thin-history carrier as a fraud risk until proven otherwise.
Put those together and the broker's math changed. The cheapest truck on the board used to be the best truck. Now the cheapest truck with a questionable file is a potential nine-figure liability. Knight-Swift's Adam Miller said it directly: "If you're going to be willing to engage with a carrier that has an unsafe CSA score that's over threshold, you're at risk."
The good news, if you're an established carrier running a clean operation: fewer eligible competitors for the same loads is exactly how rates firm up. Miller's own argument is that stricter vetting could make this recovery last longer than the last one because it keeps the cheapest, least-compliant capacity from flooding back in.
Whether a broker uses Highway, RMIS, Carrier Assure, MyCarrierPortal, Carrier411, or an in-house compliance team, the checklist is converging on the same items. Here's what's on it, and what fails you.
Status must be ACTIVE on FMCSA, not pending or reinstated last week. The bigger change is authority age. RMIS's general onboarding baseline is 30 days. Many brokers now want 6 months. Knight-Swift requires one full year of operating history before a carrier can touch its brokered freight. If you recently got a new MC under a new entity (a restructuring, a second company, a sale), you may have reset your clock without realizing it.
The federal minimum for general freight is $750,000 BIPD. Almost no broker accepts that anymore. The working standard is $1,000,000 auto liability and $100,000 cargo, with the broker listed as certificate holder. The part that trips carriers up: brokers increasingly request the COI directly from your insurance agent rather than accepting the PDF you email, and some confirm the policy number with the carrier's insurer. An ACORD 25 form literally says it confers no rights and limits may have been reduced by paid claims. If your cargo policy excludes the commodity you're hauling (electronics, copper, pharma, refrigerated), a sharp broker will catch that before you do.
Satisfactory or Unrated passes. Conditional is now a hard stop at a growing number of brokerages, because Conditional is exactly what Caribe Transport had in the Montgomery case. Unsatisfactory is an automatic block everywhere. If you're carrying a Conditional rating, getting it upgraded is probably the highest-ROI compliance project on your list this year.
Brokers look at your SMS data, especially Unsafe Driving, HOS Compliance, and Vehicle Maintenance. Alerts (scores over the intervention threshold) are the red flags. Miller acknowledged CSA scores aren't a perfect measure of safety, then said they'll be "a significant factor in litigation" anyway. Whether you agree with the methodology is irrelevant to a broker's lawyer. If you have a bad inspection on your record that shouldn't be there, the DataQs process exists for a reason. Use it.
Does the phone number and email domain on your rate con match what's on your FMCSA record? Brokers now call the number listed on FMCSA, not the one on your signature block. A Gmail address or a mismatched phone is the number one signal of a double-brokered or spoofed load. If your dispatcher uses a personal cell and your FMCSA record has the shop line, fix one of them.
A legitimate carrier can name the driver, the unit number, the trailer, and an ETA before the truck rolls. A broker fronting as a carrier can't. Being able to answer this in 30 seconds is the difference between getting the load and watching it go to the next truck.
This is the part that's genuinely new. Tenstreet launched CarrierProtect on October 26, a product that lets brokers see past your public FMCSA record into your internal operations: how you hire drivers, whether training is scheduled and documented, whether your Driver Qualification Files are current and match your active driver roster, and what you did in writing after an unsafe-driving event. It groups your metrics into quartiles against peer carriers and gives the broker a time-stamped record of what they looked at.
Read that again: brokers are starting to buy private data on whether your DQFs are current. The thing that used to be a DOT audit problem is becoming a get-the-load problem.
None of this requires a compliance department. It requires a system, and the discipline to keep it current. Here's the practical version.
Once a quarter, look at yourself the way a broker would. SAFER for authority and insurance on file. SMS for BASIC percentiles and alerts. Your insurance declarations page for actual limits and exclusions, not the COI summary. Google your MC number and company name. If something looks wrong, you want to find it on a Tuesday afternoon, not when a $4,800 load is sitting on the table.
FMCSA record, load board profiles, email signature, rate confirmation template, website, insurance certificate. Same company name, same phone, same domain-based email. Get a real email domain if you don't have one. This takes an afternoon and removes the most common automated rejection reason.
Every active driver needs a current medical certificate, MVR within 12 months, annual review, road test or equivalent, and a clean application. Every terminated driver needs to be off the roster you'd show a broker. If you read our Driver Qualification File checklist, you already know the medical card rules changed this year. Brokers are about to be able to see whether you kept up.
A harsh-braking alert from your ELD, a speeding ticket, a roadside inspection with a violation. Each one should produce a dated note: what happened, who talked to the driver, what training or corrective action followed. It doesn't have to be elaborate. It has to exist. In the Montgomery world, a carrier with 12 documented coaching conversations looks very different from a carrier with the same 12 events and no paper trail.
Know your renewal date three months out. Ask your agent to proactively send updated COIs to your top brokers and your factoring company at renewal. Confirm your cargo policy covers the commodities you actually haul and the limit the brokers you work with actually require. If you've grown and your limits haven't, that gap will show up at the worst time.
The reason carriers fall out of compliance isn't ignorance. It's that driver files live in a filing cabinet, insurance in an email thread, ELD events in the telematics portal, and inspection reports in a glovebox. When the broker's vetting tool asks "is this current?", nobody can answer in under an hour.
This is the operational case for putting driver records, equipment, documents, and load history in one system. At Truckpedia we built driver and document management into the TMS alongside dispatch and billing specifically because carriers like Brown Dog Carriers told us the same thing: the paperwork isn't hard, it's scattered. When the medical card expiration, the COI, the driver roster, and the inspection history all live where your dispatcher already works, keeping them current stops being a project.
Be honest about where you sit. If your authority is under a year old, you live on spot freight, and your BASICs have an alert or two, the broker door is narrower than it was 24 months ago. Miller said so explicitly.
Your options are not great but they're real:
Carrier vetting used to be a formality: send a COI and a W-9, sign the packet, haul the load. In 2026 it's a competitive filter, and the carriers who clear it are getting access to a shrinking pool of brokered freight at firming rates while the ones who don't are fighting over scraps on the load board.
The bar isn't unreasonable. Active authority, real insurance, no Conditional rating, BASICs under threshold, current driver files, consistent contact info, and a paper trail showing you take safety seriously. Most carriers reading this are 80% of the way there. The last 20% is just keeping it current, which is a systems problem, not a compliance problem.
If you're tired of chasing driver files, COIs, and inspection reports across five different places every time a broker asks, book a Truckpedia demo. We'll show you how carriers running 10 to 500 trucks keep dispatch, billing, and compliance records in one place, so the next time a broker runs your file, you already know what they'll find.