July 4, 2026 · 2 min read
"Out-of-Service Rates Explained: What's Normal, What's a Red Flag"
The short answer
An out-of-service (OOS) rate is the percentage of a carrier's roadside inspections that ended with a driver or vehicle ordered off the road for a serious violation. National averages run roughly 5.9% for drivers and 20.9% for vehicles. Vetting standards treat a carrier at 2x the national average or worse as a red flag requiring documented justification. The inverse matters too: a carrier with many inspections and low OOS rates has affirmative evidence of a functioning safety program, while a carrier with zero inspections in 24 months has no data at all — which modern checklists treat as its own gap to document.
Every roadside inspection ends one of two ways: the truck rolls on, or something was bad enough that the driver or vehicle is ordered off the road right there. The percentage of inspections that end the second way is the out-of-service rate — and it's one of the most honest numbers in a carrier's file, because it can't be edited, aged off, or spun.
The baselines
- Driver OOS national average: ~5.9%.
- Vehicle OOS national average: ~20.9%.
Yes, roughly one in five trucks inspected in America has a violation serious enough to park it. That's the bar. A carrier at 10% vehicle OOS is running a genuinely tight shop; a carrier at 40% has a maintenance program in name only.
How vetting standards actually use it
Post-Montgomery broker checklists converge on the same rule: flag anything at 2x the national average or worse, and document the justification if you book anyway. OOS rates also feed the SMS BASIC percentiles brokers watch, but the raw rate is easier to read and harder to game.
Three patterns worth knowing:
- High vehicle OOS + small fleet usually means deferred maintenance economics — worth a conversation, not automatically fraud.
- High driver OOS is the scarier one: hours-of-service and log falsification correlate with crash risk far more directly than a brake defect.
- Zero inspections in 24 months isn't a clean record — it's no record. Modern checklists treat it as a data gap to document, because ghost carriers and freshly reincarnated chameleons also show pristine, empty histories.
Reading it in one glance
Every carrier page on TenFour computes both rates from the federal inspection file and scores them against the national baselines — green when at-or-under, red when over — alongside the 24-month crash record and inspection volume, so the "is this normal?" question answers itself. Look up any carrier.
Frequently asked questions
What puts a driver out of service?
Hours-of-service violations, license issues, drugs/alcohol, and falsified logs are the big categories — violations serious enough that the driver cannot legally continue the trip.
What puts a vehicle out of service?
Brake defects, tire violations, load securement failures, and lighting/steering defects that make the vehicle unsafe to operate until repaired.
Is a high OOS rate disqualifying?
Most broker policies treat sustained rates at double the national average as escalation-or-reject, and any pattern combined with crashes or SMS alerts as disqualifying. A single bad inspection on a small carrier is statistical noise — look at the rate across all inspections and the trend.
Where can I check a carrier's OOS rate for free?
TenFour computes driver and vehicle OOS rates against national baselines on every carrier's compliance page, from the same federal inspection file FMCSA publishes — no login required.
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