Scale ClearHow scores work

How scores work

What the scale sees

FMCSA gives every carrier a pull-in score from its inspection history. Under 50 and most scales wave you through. 50 to 74, it's up to the officer. 75 and up, they're told to inspect you. That's the gauge on your home screen.

Seven categories, one line each

You're ranked against carriers with a similar number of inspections. Cross the line in truck maintenance, hours of service, unsafe driving, driver paperwork, drugs & alcohol, hazmat or crashes and it counts against you. Two-thirds of the way across is the line for most categories.

The only four things that move a score

1
Time

A write-up counts 3× for six months, 2× for the next six, 1× for the next year, then it's gone. Your Violations screen shows the exact dates.

2
Clean inspections

Truck maintenance, hours, paperwork and drugs & alcohol are divided by the checks you've had. A clean check lowers them. Unsafe driving is different — it's divided by your trucks and miles, so clean checks don't touch it. Only time does.

3
Fewer write-ups

Nothing new, and the old ones fade on schedule. Pre-trip, tight logs, paperwork in the cab.

4
Corrected records

A stop written under another company's name, a crash that wasn't your fault, the same defect listed twice — you can ask FMCSA to review it through DataQs. It's a request. It can come off; nobody can promise it will.

That's the whole list. No lawyer, consultant or service can move a score any other way. Anyone who says otherwise is selling one of these four with a markup.

Words you'll see

  • Write-up — a violation an officer recorded at a roadside inspection.
  • The line — FMCSA's intervention threshold for a category (65th or 80th percentile depending on the category).
  • Points — severity weight (1–10, +2 if put out of service) × time weight. A single stop is capped at 30 per category.
  • Not allowed to drive on — an out-of-service order: the truck or driver had to stop until it was fixed.
  • Not ranked — too few inspections for FMCSA to place you. That's not a pass: scales are told to look closer at carriers they can't rank.

Heads-up: FMCSA is changing the math

The revised method flattens severity to 1 or 2, folds drugs & alcohol into unsafe driving and raises the paperwork line to 90. We show today's method first because that's what the scale runs today; the new-method preview lands here when it's official.

Everything here is an estimate from FMCSA's public data — not an FMCSA safety rating, not legal advice.