DOT Compliance Checklist for Haulers

Compliance for a hauler is a records problem before it is anything else. An inspector at a roadside stop or an auditor in your office does not ask whether you follow the rules. They ask you to produce the weight ticket, the time record, the inspection report, the medical certification. If the record exists and you can find it, the item is closed. The rules below are the federal ones; if your trucks never leave the state, your state’s version applies and can differ on the details.

Registration and insurance

An auditor opens with the paperwork that put you on the road. The USDOT number has to be active, with the biennial update filed every 24 months, and the legal name and USDOT number have to be on both doors. Proof of insurance lives at the principal place of business as the MCS-90 endorsement; the federal minimum for a for-hire interstate property carrier is $750,000. If you cross state lines you also pay the UCR fee every year, in a bracket set by fleet size. Keep an accident register for 3 years after each recordable crash, with the date, place, driver, injuries, fatalities, and copies of every police and insurer report.

Record: the registration confirmation with the biennial update date, the MCS-90, the UCR receipt, and the accident register.

Weight

Federal limits on the Interstate are 80,000 pounds gross, 20,000 on a single axle, and 34,000 on a tandem, with the bridge formula deciding what a given axle spacing can carry. Off the Interstate, state and county limits vary by road, and northern states post spring load restrictions when the frost comes out. Many states fine by the pound over the limit, which is why weight is the oldest item on this list and still the most expensive one to get wrong.

Record: a scale ticket for every load showing gross, tare, and net. The question you have to be able to answer is what this truck scaled for this load on this day. If you haul for hire across state lines, federal records rules put weight tickets at 3 years and shipping tickets at 1 year. If you haul your own material or stay inside one state, the federal rules say nothing about scale tickets, so your customer contracts set the period, and tonnage disputes tend to arrive a year after the job. A ticket with a time on it also serves as an hours-of-service supporting document for any driver on logs, which means 6 months at minimum.

Hours of service and ELDs

Most local hauling can run under the short-haul exception: the driver stays within 150 air-miles of the yard, comes back to it, and is released within 14 hours, with 10 hours off before the next shift. Under the exception there is no log and no ELD, but the carrier still keeps a time record for each day showing when the driver started, when they finished, and total hours. A driver who exceeds the exception on more than 8 days in any 30-day period needs an ELD. The operations that get caught are the ones that send a short-haul driver on a long run a few times a month and never count the days. When an ELD malfunctions, the driver switches to paper logs for that day and the previous 7, tells you in writing within 24 hours, and you have 8 days to fix the unit.

Record: for short-haul drivers, the daily time record, kept 6 months. For drivers on an ELD or paper logs, the logs plus up to 8 supporting documents a day, kept 6 months: dispatch records, fuel and expense receipts, and tickets or bills of lading that show where the trip started and ended, each carrying the driver or truck number, the date, the place, and the time.

Vehicle inspections

The driver has to be satisfied the truck is safe before it runs each day, but the written no-defect report went away for property carriers in December 2014. A driver vehicle inspection report is only required when a defect is found, and the defect has to be repaired, or certified as not affecting safety, before the truck goes out again. The report can be on paper or in an app; FMCSA spelled that out in a rule that took effect March 23, 2026. Every truck also needs a periodic inspection at least once every 12 months.

Record: DVIRs with defects and the repair certification, kept 3 months. The periodic inspection report, kept 14 months where the truck is housed or maintained, with the sticker or a copy of the report on the truck. Maintenance records for each truck you control for 30 days or more, kept 1 year and for 6 months after the truck leaves your control. A brokered truck on a shorter lease stays in its owner’s maintenance file.

Driver qualification

Each driver of a truck over 10,001 pounds needs a qualification file: the application, the driving record you pulled from each state at hire, the annual driving record and a note that someone reviewed it, the road test certificate or the license you accepted in its place, and proof of medical certification. For CDL drivers that proof changed on June 23, 2025. The medical examiner sends the result to FMCSA, the state posts it to the driver’s record, and you file the motor vehicle record showing certified status after each exam. The paper card counts on its own only for non-CDL drivers, and as a 60-day stopgap for CDL drivers under an FMCSA exemption that runs to October 11, 2026. Certification is good for at most 24 months, and 12 months for drivers with certain conditions.

You also need a full Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse query before a driver does any safety-sensitive work for you, driving included, and a limited query on every driver at least once a year, on top of the random testing program. A driver with a prohibited status in the Clearinghouse cannot operate, and since November 2024 the state licensing agency downgrades their CDL for it.

Record: the qualification file for the length of employment plus 3 years. Clearinghouse query results for 3 years. Testing records for 5 years on positives and refusals, 1 year on negatives.

IFTA

IFTA applies if you run qualified vehicles, meaning over 26,000 pounds actual or registered, or 3 or more axles, in more than one member state or province. You file one quarterly return with your base jurisdiction showing miles and gallons by state, and the same distance records back your IRP apportioned plates. If every truck stays inside one state all year, IFTA does not apply, though 5 states tax miles by truck weight on their own roads whether or not IFTA applies: Connecticut (26,000 pounds and up, since January 2023), Kentucky (over 59,999), New Mexico (over 26,000), New York (over 18,000), and Oregon (26,001 and up), as of September 2026.

Record: distance by jurisdiction for each truck, with fuel receipts, kept 4 years. GPS records satisfy IFTA if the system logs a reading at least every 10 minutes with the engine on, each with date and time, latitude and longitude to 4 decimal places, the engine odometer, and the unit number, and if you can export them as a spreadsheet. A PDF map or trip image does not qualify. Those rules took effect January 1, 2024. Tread reports mileage by jurisdiction from the GPS history on each load, so the quarterly return starts from records the operation already has instead of a separate tracking exercise.

E-ticketing on public work

FHWA made e-ticketing an Every Day Counts priority for 2021 and 2022. By FHWA’s last count, in December 2022, 43 state DOTs were piloting, assessing, or had standardized electronic tickets on agency work, 15 of them as standard practice, and states such as Illinois, Delaware, California, and North Carolina have since written e-ticket clauses into specifications or made e-tickets an option on every contract. The requirement arrives job by job, in the spec book, before it arrives as a statewide rule. Check the specs on every public bid and ask the agency which e-ticket formats its inspectors accept.

Record: an electronic ticket for every load showing time, material, quantity, source, and destination, delivered to the inspector in the format the spec calls for, and kept for the contract’s retention period.

Working the list

Put an hour on the calendar each quarter and pull one example of each record for one truck and one driver. Anything that takes more than a few minutes to find is the item to fix before the audit.

• Registration: USDOT biennial update date, MCS-90, UCR receipt, accident register
• Weight: one scale ticket per load with gross, tare, and net
• Hours: time records or ELD data for 6 months, and a count of days over the short-haul exception
• Inspections: defect DVIRs with repair certification for 3 months; the periodic inspection report for 14 months
• Drivers: qualification file, medical certification status and expiry, annual Clearinghouse query, current MVR
• IFTA: distance and fuel by jurisdiction for 4 years, in a format that exports to a spreadsheet
• E-ticketing: the ticket requirements on every open public bid

Nearly every record here is something the operation already produces on a normal day. What separates a one-hour review from a one-week one is whether the records were filed as they happened or reconstructed afterward. Tread keeps the scale ticket image, the weights, and the GPS history on each load, so the weight and trip questions come out of the same record you dispatched from, and IFTA mileage and prevailing-wage reporting on public jobs come from it as well. The driver, inspection, and testing files stay wherever you keep them now. No dispatch platform replaces a compliance program.