Guide

Reading a USDOT safety rating

Last updated 2026-08-04

A federal safety rating is not a customer-satisfaction score and not a quality grade. It is the outcome of a compliance review: an FMCSA investigator examines a carrier’s records — driver qualifications, hours of service, drug and alcohol testing, vehicle maintenance, crash history — and assigns one of three ratings. Most carriers have never had one done.

The four things you’ll see

Satisfactory

FMCSA assigned a Satisfactory rating at its most recent compliance review. It means the carrier had adequate safety management controls in place at the time of that review. It is genuinely good news, with one caveat: reviews are point-in-time, and a rating from 2013 describes a company that may no longer exist in the same form.

Conditional

FMCSA assigned a Conditional rating, meaning deficiencies were found at the most recent compliance review. The carrier can still legally operate. Something was found to be out of order — often recordkeeping or maintenance practices — and was serious enough to withhold a Satisfactory rating but not serious enough to shut them down. Worth asking about directly.

Unsatisfactory

FMCSA assigned an Unsatisfactory rating at its most recent compliance review. This is the serious one. For a household goods carrier, an Unsatisfactory rating that isn’t corrected within the statutory window becomes an out-of-service order — the carrier is prohibited from operating. If you see it, check whether an out-of-service order has followed.

Not Rated

This is the most common result, and the most misread. "Not Rated" does not mean a carrier failed a review, and it does not mean they passed one. It means no compliance review has produced a rating. FMCSA doesn’t have the inspectors to review every one of the millions of registered carriers, so most — including plenty of excellent, long-running moving companies — simply have never been reviewed.

Treat "Not Rated" as an absence of information, not as a signal in either direction. It's the reason this site never folds the safety rating into a single score: doing so would turn "we don't know" into a number, which is precisely the kind of false precision that makes safety data useless.

What a rating doesn’t cover

Whether they’ll break your things. Cargo handling is barely touched by a compliance review, which is focused on highway safety.
Whether the estimate will hold. Pricing disputes are the single most common moving complaint and are invisible to safety ratings.
Whether they’ll show up. Nothing in this system measures reliability.

For those, the consumer complaint database is more informative than the safety rating — which is why we show complaint counts as their own separate fact rather than blending them into a status.

Where the rating on this site comes from

Directly from FMCSA’s Company Census File, along with the date the rating was assigned. Both appear on every company page, and both link back to the federal record so you can confirm them. See the methodology for refresh cadence.