How this site works

Methodology, data sources and disclaimer

Last updated 2026-08-04

The premise of this site is narrow and worth stating plainly: FMCSA already did the verification. Whether a carrier’s operating authority is active, whether it has insurance on file, whether it is under an out-of-service order — these are matters of federal record, not opinion. What the government’s own tools don’t do well is present that record to someone who is moving once in their life and needs an answer in two minutes. That gap is the entire job here.

What this registry covers

18,400 carriers that hold, or previously held, federal operating authority for household goods. A carrier is included when FMCSA’s Licensing & Insurance system flags its docket for household goods and that authority has been granted at some point — active today or not.

Three kinds of company you will not find here:

• Local, intrastate-only movers. If a company never crosses a state line, it is regulated by its state, not FMCSA, and has no federal household goods authority to check.
• Brokers. Companies that sell you a move and hand it to a carrier hold broker authority, which is a different thing. Always ask which USDOT number will be on the truck.
• Freight carriers. A trucking company hauling pallets is not a household goods mover, even though both hold USDOT numbers.

One deliberate judgement call: FMCSA’s census file has a self-reported "household goods" cargo checkbox, and its Licensing & Insurance file has a granted-authority flag. Requiring both drops roughly a third of carriers that demonstrably hold active household goods authority, because the checkbox is filled in by the carrier and the authority flag is the government’s own record. We use the authority flag to decide who belongs here, and treat the cargo checkbox as corroborating detail.

A related trap worth naming, since it would otherwise make this site confidently wrong: SAFER’s "Operating Authority Status" line reads "AUTHORIZED FOR: Motor Carrier of Household Goods", and that line describes the class of authority on record — it can still appear for a carrier whose authority was later revoked. Likewise, the census file’s docket status field indicates that a docket number is on file, not that authority is currently active. We derive authority from the Licensing & Insurance carrier record and corroborate it against the authority-history and revocation files, which are the sources that actually settle it.

Sources and refresh cadence

Two speeds, and it would be dishonest to present them as one. The registry backbone is a clean daily bulk pull. Complaint history is not — there is no bulk export of the complaint database, only a public search tool, so that one field legitimately lags the rest of a profile.

Why complaint counts say "not yet verified"

The National Consumer Complaint Database publishes no bulk file. Checking it means querying a federal server once per carrier, and we would rather do that slowly and politely than hammer a government system for the sake of filling in a field faster. Carriers are checked on a rolling schedule, so a carrier’s complaint timestamp will legitimately be older than its authority timestamp.

"Not yet verified" never means zero. It means we have not looked. The link on every profile runs the exact search we would run.

How verification labels are assigned

There is no score and there are no stars. A star rating implies a precision that regulatory data does not have, and inventing one would be the fastest way to make this site less honest than the record it reports. Every carrier lands in one of three states:

Active & Authorized

FMCSA records show this carrier holds active operating authority for household goods, has the required insurance on file, and is not under an out-of-service order. This describes the carrier’s regulatory standing on the dates shown — it is not a recommendation or an endorsement.

Authorized — Flagged

This carrier holds active household goods authority, but one or more federal records stand out: an open out-of-service order, a missing insurance filing, or an Unsatisfactory or Conditional safety rating. The specific reason is listed below — this label never stands in for the underlying fact.

Not Currently Authorized

FMCSA records show no active interstate household goods operating authority for this USDOT number. A company in this state should not currently be operating as an interstate household goods carrier. Records do change — confirm the current status directly with FMCSA using the links on this page before acting on it.

A carrier is Flagged rather than Active & Authorized when any of these is true: an out-of-service order is on file and not rescinded; a required BIPD or cargo insurance filing is missing; FMCSA has assigned an Unsatisfactory or Conditional safety rating; or a revocation action is pending. The profile always names which one — the label never stands in for the underlying fact.

Complaint counts are never folded into these labels. A carrier can be fully authorized and still have complaints on file. Mixing the two would hide exactly the distinction a person needs to see.

Data integrity rules

• Nothing is matched by name alone. Every record ties to a USDOT number. Two companies with similar names are two records, never merged.
• Unchecked is never rendered as clean. A null complaint count displays as "not yet verified" — never as blank, and never as zero.
• Every fact carries its source and date. The verification trail on each profile names the federal system behind each field and the day it was last confirmed.
• Conflicts are shown, not resolved silently. If our copy of a record disagrees with a live FMCSA lookup — which happens during sync lag — the more recent value wins and the discrepancy is noted rather than papered over.
• No editorial conclusions. We state what the record says. We never tell you a company is good, bad, or a scam. That call is yours, and the links to check it yourself are on every page.

What money can and cannot do here

The verification layer is not for sale, and it isn’t a policy we could quietly change — there is no mechanism in this codebase for payment to influence a carrier’s status, because none was ever built.

• No paid listings, no featured placement, no pay-to-remove.
• Authority, safety, insurance and complaint data are identical whether a carrier pays us anything or not. No carrier pays us anything.
• Quote modules on state, city and guide pages are affiliate links, clearly labelled as advertising and kept off company profiles entirely. See our affiliate disclosure.

Corrections and disputes

Every company page has a correction form. It goes to [email protected], an inbox checked periodically — not a monitored support line.

1. Tell us the USDOT number and which field looks wrong.
2. We re-pull that carrier’s records from the federal source.
3. If our copy was stale or mis-derived, we correct it on the next build and the timestamp on the page updates.
4. If the federal record itself is wrong, we can’t change it — that has to be corrected with FMCSA directly, and we’ll point you to the right system.

Pages we deliberately don’t build

• City pages are only generated where at least 10 carriers are based in that city. A page listing two companies is a thin page that helps nobody.
• State hubs with fewer than 8 carriers are kept out of search indexes, though they remain reachable.
• Long state lists paginate at 150 carriers; continuation pages are noindexed so they don’t compete with the hub.
• The registry is capped at 18,400 published profiles to stay inside our host’s per-deployment file limit. Every carrier with active or recently-held authority is published; when the cap binds, the profiles dropped are the most dormant lapsed registrations, ordered by the age of their last MCS-150 filing (7,100 at the current build). Those carriers remain searchable at FMCSA via the links on this page.

Disclaimer

MoverVerify makes no warranty as to the completeness, accuracy or currency of any information on this site. Federal records change daily and our copy can lag. Complaints reflect filings that have not necessarily been investigated or substantiated. Nothing here is an endorsement, a recommendation, or advice about whether to hire any company.

Verify directly with FMCSA before making a decision. Every company page links to the three federal systems that hold the authoritative record.

See also our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.