FMCSA Carrier Census Scraper (USDOT)

US trucking, bus and freight companies from FMCSA's official Company Census — the registry behind every USDOT number, updated daily. For each carrier: USDOT and MC numbers, legal and DBA name, phone, email, company officers, physical and mailing address, power units, trucks, drivers, cargo types, hazmat flag, operation type, safety rating and a link to its SAFER snapshot.

Find newly registered carriers in a state, filter by fleet size, cargo, hazmat or operation type, or look up a list of USDOT numbers. Official open data from data.transportation.gov: no key, no login, no proxy.

What it is for

• Lead lists of new trucking companies — insurance, factoring, ELDs, fuel cards, dispatch and compliance services all sell to carriers in their first months.
• Carrier vetting — look up USDOT numbers and see status, authority, fleet and safety rating.
• Market sizing — how many active interstate carriers with 10+ trucks haul refrigerated food in Texas.

Input

field	what it does
states	Physical-address states, 2-letter codes.
addedFrom / addedTo	When the USDOT number was registered (YYYY-MM-DD).
status	active (default for searches), inactive, pending, any (default for lookups).
carrierOperation	interstate, intrastate_hazmat, intrastate_non_hazmat.
minPowerUnits / maxPowerUnits	Fleet size (maxPowerUnits: 1 = owner-operators).
minDrivers / maxDrivers	Driver count.
cargoTypes	e.g. general_freight, refrigerated_food, building_materials — all must match.
hazmatOnly, requireEmail, requirePhone, requireMcNumber	Yes/no filters.
nameContains	Part of the legal or DBA name.
dotNumbers	Look up specific carriers (combines with the filters).
sortBy	Newest or oldest registration, largest fleet, most drivers.
maxItems	Default 200; 0 = every match.

Things about this data worth knowing

1. New carriers almost never have an MC number

Of carriers registered in the last month, next to none have an MC docket: operating authority is a separate application that comes weeks later (10 of 476 new Texas carriers with 2+ trucks had one). requireMcNumber therefore removes nearly every new carrier — leave it off for new-carrier leads.

2. Fleet sizes are compared as numbers

The census stores every number as text, so a naive "more than 5 trucks" query compares strings and returns 50, 500 and 5,000 while skipping 6 to 49. This Actor converts before comparing.

3. "Added" is the registration date, not the first day of trading

addedDate is when the USDOT number was issued. mcs150Date is the carrier's latest MCS-150 filing (the biennial update), when there is one.

4. Contact details are as filed

Phone, email and officer names are what the carrier filed with FMCSA. Many carriers are owner-operators, so the company name, phone and email can be a person's own. Use them the way you would any public business registration, within the laws that apply to your outreach (TCPA, CAN-SPAM).

Output

One CARRIER row per USDOT number, and one SEARCH_SUMMARY with the matching total and the exact query sent. Every row also carries census: the original record, all fields as FMCSA publishes them.

{
  "recordType": "CARRIER",
  "dotNumber": "294808",
  "legalName": "G M M INC",
  "status": "INACTIVE",
  "carrierOperation": "INTERSTATE",
  "entityTypes": ["CARRIER"],
  "classifications": ["PRIVATE PASSENGER, BUSINESS", "PRIVATE PASSENGER, NON-BUSINESS"],
  "addedDate": "1987-06-08",
  "phone": "4072396966",
  "physicalStreet": "9388 SIDNEY HAYES RD",
  "physicalCity": "ORLANDO",
  "physicalState": "FL",
  "physicalZip": "32824-8105",
  "powerUnits": 6,
  "busUnits": 6,
  "totalDrivers": 7,
  "cargoTypes": ["passengers"],
  "mcNumber": "MC-246361",
  "safetyRating": "SATISFACTORY",
  "safetyRatingDate": "1992-01-10",
  "saferSnapshotUrl": "https://safer.fmcsa.dot.gov/query.asp?searchtype=ANY&query_type=queryCarrierSnapshot&query_param=USDOT&query_string=294808"
}

Speed

1,000 carriers per request, one request per second (the site's robots.txt crawl delay). 2,300 carriers took 7 seconds. A query the data portal hasn't seen recently can take up to a minute to answer the first time.

Limits

• Census data only: inspections, crashes and insurance filings are separate FMCSA datasets and are not included.
• The fleet-size letter code is passed through as fleetSizeCode; use powerUnits for the number.