How to check your CSA score (and what's actually public)

First, the part nobody says plainly

Drivers don't have CSA scores. CSA (Compliance, Safety, Accountability) scores belong to the motor carrier — the USDOT number. A driver's individual roadside history lives in the Pre-Employment Screening Program (PSP) report, which you can order for yourself for $10. If you're an owner-operator with your own authority, you are the carrier, so both apply to you.

What's public vs. what needs a PIN

Since the FAST Act of 2015, FMCSA hides percentile scores and alert symbols for property carriers from the public SMS site. What anyone can still see:

• Every roadside inspection in the last 24 months and its violations
• Driver and vehicle out-of-service (OOS) counts and rates
• Crash records (with severity, not fault)
• Whether each BASIC has enough data to be measured
• Operating authority status and insurance filings (BMC-91/91X, BMC-34, BMC-84/85)

That public slice is exactly what this site grades. It's also what a broker's compliance tool or an insurance underwriter looks at first, which is why the OOS rate against the national average matters more day-to-day than the hidden percentile.

How to see your own percentiles

1. Go to the SMS website and search your USDOT number.
2. Click Log in. You need your FMCSA Portal account (login.gov) or a USDOT PIN.
3. No PIN? Request one at the FMCSA Portal. Instant if you can verify by login.gov; otherwise it's mailed to the address on your MCS-150, which takes about a week.
4. Once in, each BASIC shows a percentile (0–100, lower is better) and whether it's over the intervention threshold — 65% for Unsafe Driving, HOS and Crash Indicator, 80% for the rest, 5 points lower for hazmat carriers.

Reading the public numbers

Two rules of thumb from FMCSA's own methodology: percentiles are only computed when a BASIC has enough inspections with violations (typically 3–5 depending on the BASIC), and violations are time-weighted: the last 6 months count ×3, months 7–12 count ×2, months 13–24 count ×1. So a bad quarter loses most of its weight after a year and leaves the record entirely after two — if you stop adding to it.

If a violation on your record is wrong, it can be removed through DataQs, and the recomputed numbers show up in the next monthly SMS snapshot.