Supply Chain Action Points
Read this first — the conclusion, and the moves to make:
- By 12 June 2026, quantify your exposure: count the carriers you tendered to in the last 30 days that have no FMCSA safety rating or a conditional rating, and put a dollar figure on the freight they moved. Owner is your transportation lead, target is a named list plus a monthly dollar figure, and the benchmark from the release is that unrated and conditionally rated vehicles total about 1.5 million units.
- By 15 June 2026, build a dated compliance review per carrier: authority status, safety rating and insurance verified at the time of hire, stored where it can be produced on request. Owner is compliance with operations support, and the target is a review on file for 100 percent of active carriers before the next tender cycle.
- By 19 June 2026, push the vetting burden into every broker contract in writing. Confirm that the broker runs and retains the compliance review, and that indemnity covers a failure to do so. No new broker lane goes live until that clause is signed.
- By 26 June 2026, budget the surcharge. Ask each broker and carrier for the expected compliance or vetting surcharge per load, and put the number into your cost model. Target is a per-load figure on at least your top ten lanes, so the second line on the invoice does not arrive as a surprise.
- By 3 July 2026, write the refusal rule and name the owner. Define what a load does when no fully rated carrier is available, including the review threshold and who can approve an exception, and set the rule so an exception requires a written sign-off rather than a verbal okay.
The U.S. Supreme Court's unanimous ruling in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II has eliminated federal preemption protection for freight brokers that hire unsafe carriers, and legal experts confirm the logic extends directly to shippers who fail to conduct documented carrier compliance reviews. An estimated 1.2 million trucks — roughly 36% of the U.S. fleet — have no FMCSA safety rating, while another 300,000 operate under 'conditional' ratings, the highest-risk designation recognized by regulators and courts. Responsible freight forwarders and shippers are now excluding these 1.5 million unrated and conditionally-rated vehicles from their supply chains, equivalent to a structural capacity reduction larger than any single market event in industry history. Insurance costs for freight brokers are projected to rise 5x, with costs ultimately flowing through to shippers via higher freight rates and surcharges. Legal experts describe the ruling as fundamentally ending the era of selecting carriers based on lowest price alone.
The Analysis
One unanimous ruling, and the way you buy truck capacity changed. The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II removed the federal preemption shield that protected freight brokers when a carrier they hired caused an accident, and legal experts say the same reasoning reaches a shipper that fails to run a documented carrier compliance review. The numbers underneath it are the part that should stop you: an estimated 1.2 million trucks, roughly 36 percent of the U.S. fleet, carry no FMCSA safety rating at all, and another 300,000 run under a conditional rating. Responsible freight forwarders and shippers are now excluding those 1.5 million vehicles, a structural capacity cut larger than any single market event in the industry's history. Insurance costs for freight brokers are projected to rise fivefold, and that cost flows to shippers as freight rates and surcharges. The era of selecting a carrier on lowest price alone is over.
I have tendered a lot of loads to a lot of carriers whose paperwork I never actually read. That is the habit this ruling is aimed at, and it is going to cost somebody a great deal of money. Let me walk through what it actually requires of a shipper.
What follows is not a legal opinion. It is what the change does to your carrier file, your lane plan, and your invoice.
Start with what the ruling did, because the whole exposure hangs on it. Federal preemption used to mean that if a broker hired a carrier that looked compliant on the surface, the broker was largely shielded from a negligence claim when that carrier caused a crash. The Court closed that shield. Legal experts say the logic extends to shippers, which means the question is no longer only what the carrier did, it is what you did before you hired them. The operative phrase is documented review. Not a phone call, not a recollection, not a rate confirmation with an insurance certificate stapled to it. A dated record showing you checked the carrier's standing at the time you gave them the load.
Then look at the fleet, because this is where the ruling stops being abstract. If 1.2 million trucks with no rating are 36 percent of the fleet, the full fleet is somewhere near 3.3 million, and the 1.5 million unrated and conditionally rated vehicles are a little under half of it. That last figure is my arithmetic off the release's own 1.2 million and 36 percent, so label it as arithmetic when you circulate it. The point holds either way: excluding those vehicles is not a rounding adjustment, it is the removal of a capacity block bigger than anything a single market event has ever taken out. Note too what the ruling does not do. It does not make conditional-rated carriers illegal to hire. Nothing bans them today. What changed is that hiring one no longer has a shield behind it.
Run the layers. A large shipper with a compliance team and a documented vetting process is largely protected, because the ruling rewards exactly the paperwork they already keep, and their exposure is bounded by the file. A small shipper that has been buying capacity by lowest price and has never checked a rating is the one in the crosshairs, and the exposure is not just a crash, it is the inability to produce a review at all. Modes split too. Anyone moving on spot freight with a rotating cast of carriers is exposed every week, because each new carrier is a new chance to skip the check. Anyone on a dedicated contract with named, rated carriers is barely touched. The category that hurts first is high-value or hazmat freight, where a claim is large enough that a plaintiff's lawyer will go looking for the paperwork.
Here is what the headlines leave out, and there are two of them. The first is that the exposure is documentary before it is physical. Almost nobody is going to get sued over the crash alone; they get sued because they cannot show what they knew about the carrier when they hired it. Most shippers keep rate confirmations and insurance certificates, and neither of those is a compliance review. If you cannot produce a dated check of the carrier's authority and safety rating from the day you tendered, the crash is not the only thing that happened, the gap in your file is a second event and it is the one that matters.
The second thing the headlines leave out is the surcharge. Broker insurance going up fivefold does not stay with the broker. It comes to you as a higher rate and a new line item, often a compliance or carrier-vetting surcharge, and it arrives on lanes where you thought the price was settled. A cheap lane is about to become two lines on the invoice, and the second line is the one nobody budgeted for.
Ask what would make this a smaller problem than it looks. If the carrier you hire is fully rated and you documented the review, your exposure is genuinely bounded, and the ruling is not a threat to you at all. If your lanes run through a broker who accepts the vetting burden and puts it in the contract, you have transferred the risk, and that is a legitimate answer as long as the contract actually says so. The condition that flips the whole thing is where the check sits. If a documented review is stored the day the carrier is hired and refreshed on a schedule, this ruling is a process upgrade you should have done anyway. If the check is a phone call and a memory, this ruling is a liability you already carry and simply have not been handed yet.
Put a number on it so the scale is visible. Assume you tender 400 loads a month to carriers, and assume that today you run a proper documented check on none of them because it was never required. Assume a documented review costs 15 minutes of a 45-dollar-an-hour clerk's time, about 11 dollars a load. Doing all 400 is roughly 4,400 dollars a month, or about 53,000 dollars a year. I picked the load count, the hourly cost and the 15 minutes; the 400 loads are yours to replace with your real number.
Now put that against one claim. A single accident with a large claim, plus the discovery that you have no review on file, is a number with at least six figures in front of it, and the 53,000 looks like the cheapest insurance you will ever buy. If brokers instead add a vetting surcharge of even 20 dollars a load, that is 8,000 dollars a month across 400 loads, which is why building the check internally is usually the cheaper of the two once volume is real.
The mistake that will get someone is treating this as a legal department problem and letting operations keep tendering the same way until a memo arrives. The ruling did not change what a compliant carrier is, it changed who pays when you use one that is not and cannot prove you checked. So the file is the product. Build the habit of a dated check per carrier per hire, keep it where it can be produced on request, and write down now what you will do the day a load has no compliant carrier available. Refusing a lane on price is a business decision. Refusing it because the only trucks that would take it have no rating is now a risk decision, and only one of those two you get to make after the fact. This is a gate problem, and the gate is your carrier file.
↑ Back to the key points