How the numbers are made
Every number on this site is computed from published federal files. This page documents the sources, the joins, the rules and — just as important — what the data cannot tell you.
| Dataset | Publisher | What we use it for | Scale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Motor Carrier Census | FMCSA | Licence status, authority type, cargo classes, legal & DBA names, fleet size, addresses | >2M records |
| SMS carrier measures | FMCSA | Roadside inspection counts and vehicle out-of-service rates | 716,198 rows |
| SMS crash file | FMCSA | Reportable crashes, fatalities, injuries per DOT number | 258,353 rows |
| SOI migration data | IRS | State-to-state household moves — the lane and state pages | All state pairs |
| Geographic mobility | U.S. Census | Mover rates and demographic context | National |
| Hawaii HHG tariff | Matson | The only published ocean rate sheet — Hawaii cost pages | 27 origins |
Federal files downloaded 14 August 2026; refreshed quarterly. Matson tariff effective 1 June 2026 – 31 May 2027. Source links appear in the footer of every page and beneath every table.
From the full census we keep a carrier only if it meets all four tests:
That yields 19,524 carriers. It deliberately excludes freight-only truckers, brokers without trucks, and paper companies with authority but no equipment. It also means our counts differ from headlines that count all “moving companies” loosely.
Safety data is joined to the census on the USDOT number — the one identifier every file shares. 98.8% of our carriers match cleanly into the SMS files; the remainder are carriers too new or too small to appear there yet, and their safety fields are shown as blank, never as zero.
For city pages, 18,940 carriers (97% coverage) are geocoded and matched to a city when their registered principal place of business is within 50 road-region miles of the city center. A carrier can therefore appear on several nearby city pages — that mirrors how movers actually serve metro areas.
No city page is published with fewer than 3 complete carrier records. Where a state hub has no qualifying Phase-1 city, it links only to the data it can support. We would rather publish fewer pages than pad thin ones.
The carrier's federal identifiers. The USDOT number is the one to check first: it is how you verify any mover against FMCSA's SAFER system, and how you find the legal entity behind a trade name. 23.7% of licensed movers operate under a DBA that differs from the legal entity holding their authority — the legal entity is the one liable for your shipment, so we print both names.
When a truck is inspected at the roadside, serious violations place the vehicle “out of service” until fixed. The national median vehicle out-of-service rate among movers with inspection history is 18.2%; the worst tenth exceeds 42.9%. A high rate is a maintenance signal. But note the denominator: 48% of licensed movers have never been inspected at all — for them, absence of violations is absence of evidence, not evidence of safety.
Crash counts are reportable crashes from federal files. FMCSA itself cautions that these counts are not fault-assigned — a mover's truck struck while parked appears in the same column as one that caused a pile-up. We publish the counts because they are part of the record; we do not label any carrier “dangerous” from them.
The strongest signal, and the rarest: only 9.5% of licensed movers hold any federal safety rating. Ratings also age — the median rating on file is 18 years old, and 78.3% are ten or more years old — so we print the rating date wherever we print the rating.
The federal files behind this site were last downloaded on 14 August 2026. We re-pull the full FMCSA census and SMS files quarterly and rebuild every page from scratch — no number on this site is typed by hand. If a carrier's current federal record disagrees with our copy, call (866) 297-2360 and we will correct it promptly.
The raw dataset behind our research is downloadable from the unrated-mover study, so every claim we make can be checked against the same file we used to make it.