First year

The New Entrant Safety Audit

Updated September 2026

For your first 18 months you are a 'new entrant' and FMCSA is watching. A safety audit comes within your first 12 months - it can come after as little as three months of operation - and it is almost entirely a paperwork test.

The automatic failures

The regulation lists 16 violations that fail the audit on the spot. The ones that catch one-truck carriers are all things you control from day one:

• No alcohol and/or drug testing program.
• No random alcohol and/or drug testing program - meaning you are not in a consortium pool.
• Using a driver without a valid CDL.
• Operating without the required level of insurance in effect.
• Failing to keep hours-of-service records.
• Operating a vehicle that was placed out of service before it was repaired.

What the auditor asks for

• Your consortium enrollment certificate and your own negative pre-employment test result.
• Your Clearinghouse registration and query record.
• Your driver qualification file: CDL, medical certificate, driving record pulled and reviewed within the last 12 months.
• Six months of logs (ELD data or paper if you are exempt).
• Maintenance records, the annual inspection reports for the tractor and the trailer, and any driver vehicle inspection reports.
• Proof of insurance in force.

If you fail

You get 60 days to submit evidence that you corrected the problems. Miss that and the registration is revoked. The fix is simple and boring: do everything in the 'Legal on the road' phase in month one, not month eleven.

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