Where you hire matters to what the government knows. Nationally, 48.0% of licensed movers have no roadside inspection on record. In Louisiana it's 65.3% — with Virginia (59.6%), Ohio (57.7%), Florida (56.7%) and Texas (55.6%) close behind. In the most-inspected states, the never-inspected share drops by half.
The gap isn't about mover quality — it's enforcement capacity and geography. Roadside inspection is a state-run program layered on federal rules, and states differ enormously in staffing, weigh-station coverage and priorities. A carrier registered in a light-touch state can run for years without a single federal data point being generated about it.
We say this in every table and we'll say it here: never-inspected does not mean unsafe. It means unexamined — and it means the burden of checking shifts to you. In high-gap states, the questions you ask (binding estimate? valuation level? references with dates?) do the work the inspection data can't.
Method: share of carriers with zero inspections in the FMCSA SMS file, by physical-address state, states with 100+ licensed HHG carriers. Full table in the study. Retrieved 14 August 2026.