How the Freight Broker Health Index is built

Sources

Flows (entries, exits, net change) come from the FMCSA authority-history record published on the U.S. DOT open data portal (dataset 9mw4-x3tu). It carries dated grant, revocation and reinstatement events for broker and freight-forwarder authorities.

The active brokerage count comes from SureLoadr’s own broker registry, synced daily from FMCSA licensing and insurance records. It is deliberately not reconstructed from the event history — see “Known limitations” below.

Definitions

Entry

A company being granted broker operating authority. Counted once per company per day: a brokerage granted both property-broker and household-goods-broker authority on the same date is one entrant, not two.

Exit

A broker authority being revoked, where no reinstatement follows within 90 days. The window matters: FMCSA opens a revocation whenever an authority falls out of compliance, and the overwhelming majority are lapsed insurance filings that get cured within days. Counting those as business failures overstates exits by more than two orders of magnitude.

Re-entry (“returning”)

A brokerage reinstated more than 90 days after a revocation. Inside 90 days the revocation is treated as cancelled and no exit is recorded at all. Beyond it, the company genuinely left the market and genuinely came back — so the exit stands and the return is counted alongside it. Reported as its own column rather than folded into new grants, because a market taking companies back is a different story from one attracting new ones.

Net change

Entries plus re-entries, minus exits, over the period.

Revocation notice

A revocation proceeding that was opened and then discontinued. Tracked separately in the CSV because a pattern of them signals financial stress, but never counted as an exit and never treated as a change of status.

What is excluded

• Dismissed and withdrawn applications. Companies that applied for authority and never received it never operated, so they are neither entries nor exits.
• Transfers and renumberings. When an authority moves to a different docket number the company continues trading; counting it as an exit would be double-counting a business that never left.
• Discontinued revocations. See above.

Known limitations

1. The source runs behind. FMCSA’s authority feed publishes roughly 4 months in arrears, and its most recent month is always partial. Incomplete trailing months are detected and excluded rather than averaged in, which is why the headline covers the 12 months through April 2026 rather than to today. Months excluded from the current release: May 2026.
2. Revocations lag the failure. A brokerage that stops operating is usually revoked some months later, when its insurance filing lapses. The series is a trailing indicator of market health, not a real-time one.
3. The event history does not cover every active brokerage. Roughly 5% of currently active brokers have no grant record in the FMCSA authority file at all. This is why the active population is taken from the licensing registry rather than reconstructed by summing events — a reconstructed figure would be understated by about 4%. Event coverage of currently active brokers is 94.89%.
4. Status at the margin carries about 2–3% noise in both directions, from the gap between an event occurring and appearing in the feed.
5. Freight forwarders are tracked separately and are not included in the broker figures.
6. 2013 is a regulatory discontinuity, not a market event. The series records 10,595 broker revocations in 2013 against a surrounding baseline near 2,000. MAP-21 raised the required broker surety bond from $10,000 to $75,000 effective 1 October 2013; FMCSA notified brokers that had not met the new minimum from 1 November and revoked authority after 30 days. The spike is that enforcement action. It is left in the data because it genuinely happened, but it should not be read as a demand-driven shakeout, and trend lines drawn across it will mislead.

Why this is worth watching now

A new FMCSA financial-responsibility rule took effect on 16 January 2026. Where a broker’s available security falls below $75,000 and is not replenished within seven days, FMCSA suspends the operating authority — a materially faster mechanism than the process that produced the 2013 figures. Whether that shows up in the exit counts is exactly the sort of question this series exists to answer, and we will report it either way.

Revisions

The series is rebuilt from source on each release, so previously published months can move as FMCSA back-fills records. The definitions above — in particular the 90-day window — are fixed. If one ever changes, the series will be versioned and the prior definition kept available, because a quietly redefined statistic is worse than no statistic.

Correction — 23 August 2026

The first release of this index counted exits but not re-entries. A brokerage revoked and then reinstated more than 90 days later had its departure recorded and its return ignored, which understated net change in every year — by roughly 400 to 630 companies annually, and 9,351 across the full series. It was found by hand-checking published rows against FMCSA’s own records before the index was promoted anywhere.

Corrected figures are higher (less negative) throughout. The 2023–2025 contraction is unchanged in direction and remains the first such run since 2013, but its scale was overstated: 2025, for example, moved from −1,208 to −636. The published series now carries the corrected numbers, and re_entries is a column in the CSV so the composition of net change can be checked directly.

Get the data

The full monthly series from 2000 is available as a free CSV download. Current release: 316 months, updated 2026-08-23.

← Back to the index