Carrier revocations and broker revocations peaked together in 2023, which is what a freight downturn looks like in a licensing database.
FMCSA's revocation register holds 1,529,083 orders going back decades. Split into the two halves of a booked load, it shows 1,418,255 against carrier authority and 110,130 against brokers, and both series turn at the same moment.
The short version. Involuntary revocations of carrier authority ran near 430,000 a year for most of the last decade, then went to 92,898 in 2023, 1.9 times the 48,559 of 2021. Broker revocations peaked in 2023, the same year.
A revocation is an authority action rather than a business failure, most often a lapsed insurance filing. What the pairing shows is not how many companies died; it is that the pressure arrived on the carrier side and the brokerage side together.
Common and contract authority combined, 1,418,255 orders in the register, of which 1,188,935 carry an effective date and are charted here.
revocation orders against common and contract authority in the register
across 94,250 distinct broker dockets
92,898 carrier authorities involuntarily revoked, 1.9x the 2021 figure
FMCSA Revocation, All With History, updated 2026-08-30
The step is between 2021 and 2022, not gradually across the decade. That is the shape of a correction rather than a decline: authority was granted in unusual volume through the freight boom, and the register records the unwinding about a year after spot rates turned.
110,130 orders across 94,250 distinct dockets. Two orders of magnitude smaller than the carrier series, because there are far fewer brokers, and moving the same way.
This chart counts involuntary revocations only, and that is a property of the source rather than a choice. FMCSA populates the effective-date field for 96.6% of involuntary revocations and for 92 of 200,017 voluntary ones, so any series grouped by year excludes voluntary surrenders almost entirely. Do not read their absence here as evidence they are rare: across all licence types voluntary surrenders are 12.3% of every revocation order on file. The 2013 peak is a regulatory event rather than a trend, when MAP-21 raised the broker surety bond from $10,000 to $75,000 on 1 October 2013. The final points are the current and previous year, which understate because orders are entered with a lag.
Set the two charts side by side and the useful point is not the size difference, it is the timing. A carrier watching its own segment consolidate was, in the same months, facing a brokerage population under the same pressure. That is the practical case for checking a docket on the day you book rather than the day you onboarded: the counterparty risk rose at exactly the moment margins made it least affordable.
Trade coverage of this data reports net revocations: revocations minus reinstatements over a month or a quarter, which is the right measure for asking whether the carrier population is shrinking right now. Reported that way, mid-2023 months ran in the several thousands.
This page reports gross revocation orders for a whole year, which is the right measure for asking how often authority stops being valid. A carrier whose authority is revoked in March and reinstated in May appears here and nets out there. Neither figure is wrong and they are not comparable. We are stating it plainly because two correct numbers measuring different things look exactly like a contradiction, and the reader is the one who pays for that confusion.
Every bar above counts involuntary revocations only, and that is a property of the source rather than an editorial choice. FMCSA populates the effective-date field for 96.6% of involuntary revocations and for 92 of 200,017 voluntary ones. A voluntary surrender is recorded, but almost never dated, so it cannot appear in any series grouped by year.
This matters more than a footnote suggests. Grouping the carrier rows by year shows voluntary surrenders at between zero and twenty-six a year, which invites an obvious and completely false conclusion: that operators do not hand back authority, they simply lapse. The totals say the reverse. Common carriers surrender voluntarily 14.7% of the time, a higher rate than brokers at 10.7%. The zero was a missing field, not a behaviour.
We mail when a device leaves the FMCSA ELD registry, with the company and the date.
Get the alertIf your authority appears in this register and the record is wrong, FMCSA is the place to correct it, and we will re-read on our next pull.
Claim or correct your entryComputed from the FMCSA FMCSA, Revocation - All With History dataset, 1,529,083 rows. Carrier figures are type_license of COMMON or CONTRACT, broker figures are BROKER. Source last updated 2026-08-30; retrieved 2026-08-31. Aggregations are computed server-side through the dataset's own API and recomputed on every rebuild.
The two most recent years are hatched. Orders are entered with a lag and the current year is partial, so those bars understate and must not be read as a decline. 2013 on the broker chart is a regulatory event, not a trend.
What this page does not claim. It does not say how many businesses failed, does not name any company, and treats no revocation as evidence of wrongdoing. It counts orders in a public register and states what that count can and cannot support.
FreightProbe. "Both Sides Of The Load Lost Authority In The Same Year." Computed from FMCSA, Revocation - All With History, retrieved 2026-08-31. https://freightprobe.com/authority-revocations
Quote the retrieval date with any figure. Vendor pricing changes without notice and we re-read it rather than carrying it forward.