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Roadside Inspections in Numbers: How Often Trucks Get Parked, and for What

Updated September 2026

Every figure here comes from two places: the FMCSA’s own inspection database (every federal and state roadside inspection in the country) and the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, which publishes the results of its annual three-day Roadcheck. We read each at the source in September 2026. These are national numbers for all commercial trucks; nobody publishes them for junk, roll-off or moving trucks separately.

How often a truck is put out of service

In calendar 2025, FMCSA recorded 2,039,624 vehicle inspections. In 479,588 of them — 23.5% — the truck had at least one out-of-service violation, meaning it could not move until it was fixed. The rate has barely shifted in years: 22.6% in 2022, 22.6% in 2023, 23.0% in 2024.

Drivers fare better: of 3,073,289 driver inspections in 2025, 7.25% found an out-of-service driver violation.

The annual Roadcheck tells the same story. In 2026 (54,575 inspections across the US, Canada and Mexico), inspectors put 10,350 vehicles out of service — 23.5% of the 44,047 inspections that actually looked at the truck.

A number you will see misquoted. The 2025 Roadcheck release gives two vehicle rates, 18.1% and 22.6%, and articles quote one or the other as if they disagreed. They don’t. 18.1% divides by all 56,178 inspections, including 11,743 that only checked the driver and the paperwork. 22.6% divides by the 44,435 inspections that looked at the vehicle. Like for like, the rate was 23.0% in 2024, 22.6% in 2025 and 23.5% in 2026 — flat, not falling.

What they are parked for

The 2026 Roadcheck’s vehicle out-of-service violations, by category:

  • Brake systems — 24.3%
  • Tires — 20.9%
  • 20% or more of the brakes defective — 14.9%
  • Cargo securement — 12.4%
  • Lights — 11.9%

The two brake lines are reported separately; together they are about four in ten. These are shares of violations, not of trucks — one truck can carry several. The 2025 list was the same five in nearly the same order.

Brake Safety Week 2025 (15,175 inspections) put 15.1% of the vehicles it inspected out of service for brakes alone.

The everyday violations

Out-of-service violations are the serious end. Across all 3.38 million vehicle violations written in the US in 2025, the most common were:

  1. No proof of the annual inspection — 171,610
  2. Brake out of adjustment — 133,058
  3. A required lamp not working — 127,859
  4. Tire leaking or badly under-inflated — 104,089 (nearly all of these were out-of-service)
  5. Identification lamps not working — 71,260

The first one is paperwork: the truck may well have been inspected, but nobody in the cab could show it. Three of the other four are things a driver can see or hear walking around the truck before it leaves the yard.

By FMCSA’s counts, about six in ten roadside violations of all kinds in 2025 were vehicle violations rather than driver, hazmat or other ones (3.38 million of 5.65 million — our arithmetic from their totals).

Small fleets are not under the radar

FMCSA breaks inspections down by fleet size. In 2025, carriers with 1–6 trucks received 32.4% of all roadside inspections (1,028,124 of 3,172,189), and carriers with 7–20 trucks another 15.9%. Together, fleets of 20 trucks or fewer took nearly half of every inspection done in the country. (Percentages are our arithmetic from FMCSA’s counts; FMCSA does not publish out-of-service rates by fleet size.)

Do defects actually cause crashes?

Two studies are quoted on this constantly, usually wrongly.

The federal Large Truck Crash Causation Study examined 963 serious crashes from 2001–2003. Brake problems were recorded for 29% of the trucks involved, tire problems for 6%. That is not "brakes caused 29% of crashes": the study is explicit that an associated factor only means the condition was present, with no judgment that it caused anything. Where a single critical reason was assigned to the truck, a vehicle failure was that reason 10% of the time and the driver 87%. The data is now more than twenty years old.

An Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study compared 197 crash-involved trucks in North Carolina (2010–12) with similar trucks that hadn’t crashed. Trucks with any out-of-service defect were more than four times as likely to have been in the crash group; out-of-service brake defects tripled the risk. It is one state, interstate carriers only and a small sample, and IIHS itself notes that some defects found after a crash may have been caused by it. The same study found trucks running under the short-haul exemption had markedly higher crash risk — worth knowing if that is how you run.

Honest summary: the evidence that defective trucks crash more is real but thinner than the confident numbers online suggest. The evidence that defective trucks get parked is two million inspections a year.

What an out-of-service order costs

We could not find a government figure for the average cost or length of an out-of-service order, and the dollar amounts in circulation trace back to companies selling something, so we leave them out. What is certain: the truck does not move until the defect is repaired, wherever it happens to be — with the load on it, the crew standing by, and the day’s remaining jobs waiting.

Moving it anyway is a separate matter. Under Appendix A to 49 CFR Part 386 (as published in September 2026), a driver who operates an out-of-service vehicle before repair faces a penalty of $2,364, and a carrier that requires or permits it, up to $23,647 each time. These amounts are adjusted for inflation most years; many pages still show older ones.

What the numbers suggest doing

  • Keep proof of the annual inspection in the truck. It is the single most-written vehicle violation in the country, and it is a piece of paper.
  • Make the walk-around about brakes, tires and lights, because that is what the out-of-service list is made of. A pre-trip that checks those three honestly covers most of what gets trucks parked.
  • Write defects down and close them out. A defect a driver reported and nobody fixed is worse on paper than one nobody noticed.
  • Secure the load every time, including the short hop to the transfer station. Securement is more than one in ten out-of-service violations. See our guide to securing debris loads.
  • Assume you will be inspected. Nearly half of all inspections land on fleets your size.

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Sources

  1. FMCSA A&I Online — Roadside Inspection OOS Rates — MCMIS snapshot of 8/28/2026
  2. FMCSA A&I Online — Roadside Inspection Violations (vehicle), calendar 2025
  3. FMCSA A&I Online — Roadside Inspections by Fleet Size
  4. CVSA — 2026 International Roadcheck Results
  5. CVSA — 2025 International Roadcheck Results
  6. CVSA — 2024 International Roadcheck Results
  7. CVSA — 2025 Brake Safety Week Results
  8. FMCSA / NHTSA — The Large Truck Crash Causation Study: Analysis Brief (FMCSA-RRA-07-017) — crashes from 2001–2003
  9. IIHS — Safety defects and long hours contribute to large truck crashes — Teoh et al., Journal of Safety Research, 2017
  10. eCFR — Appendix A to 49 CFR Part 386 (penalty schedule)

This is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice, and RelayPoint is not a law firm, an accountant or a compliance consultant. The figures are other organisations’ published findings, read in September 2026 at the addresses listed under Sources; they describe the businesses those organisations studied, not yours, and none of them is a result of using RelayPoint.