FMCSA L&I Public is gone. Here's where carrier insurance data lives now (2026)

If you bookmarked li-public.fmcsa.dot.gov sometime in the last twenty years, you have probably discovered that the bookmark is dead. On May 14, 2026, FMCSA retired its legacy registration systems — the Unified Registration System (URS) and the public Licensing & Insurance search (L&I Public) — as part of its migration to a new registration platform called MOTUS. Thousands of insurance agents, factoring companies, brokers, and compliance staff lost the page they used every day to check whether a motor carrier's insurance filing was active, who wrote it, and whether a cancellation was pending.

This article is a practical map of what replaced it, what still works, and what quietly broke — based on live testing of every public endpoint in June 2026, not on press releases.

What exactly shut down

Three things disappeared or changed at once, which is why the transition feels so confusing. First, L&I Public — the searchable web interface for licensing and insurance records — was taken offline. Second, URS, the system carriers used to register and update their authority, was replaced by MOTUS. Third, and least visibly, the data feeds behind FMCSA's Open Data Program changed: the agency warned that datasets and schemas published on data.transportation.gov would change during the transition, and they did.

The practical consequence: the old insurance datasets that powered most third-party tools stopped receiving new filings at the cutover. The datasets still exist, their metadata still says 'updated daily' — but the newest transaction in the legacy insurance feed is dated May 14, 2026. Any tool that didn't notice the switch is now showing you month-old data with a fresh timestamp on it.

Where the data actually lives now

FMCSA publishes new MOTUS-era datasets on the same open data portal, data.transportation.gov. They carry a 'Motus' prefix: Motus Insur (active insurance policies), Motus InsHist (insurance filing history, including cancellation notices with their effective dates), Motus Carrier (authority and contact records), Motus BOC3, Motus AuthHist, and Motus RevokeSuspend. These update daily and contain the same core facts the L&I screens used to show — insurer name, policy number, coverage amounts, effective dates, and crucially the cancellation effective date for pending cancellations.

There are real schema changes to be aware of if you work with the data directly. USDOT numbers moved from a zero-padded text field to a plain number string under a new column name. The insurer name column was renamed. Dates switched from MM/DD/YYYY to YYYYMMDD format. None of this is documented loudly; you find it by reading the column metadata.

SAFER — the Company Snapshot page — remains online for one-at-a-time manual lookups, and the QCMobile API still exists for developers with a registered WebKey. Note that FMCSA's web properties block traffic from outside the United States, which matters if your tooling runs on overseas servers.

What this means for insurance agents specifically

If you used L&I Public to find X-dates — the dates a carrier's policy expires or a cancellation takes effect — the loss is real but the underlying federal machinery is untouched. Insurers are still required by 49 CFR 387.313 to notify FMCSA at least 30 days before cancelling a carrier's required coverage. Those notices are still public records. They are simply published in a different dataset with a different schema than they were before May 2026.

Practically, you have three options. You can pull the Motus datasets yourself from data.transportation.gov — they are free, public, and queryable, if you are comfortable with an API and the undocumented format changes. You can check carriers one at a time on SAFER, which works but does not scale past a handful of lookups. Or you can use a service that has already done the plumbing: XDate Alert ingests every new MOTUS-era cancellation filing daily, joins it with the carrier census for phone numbers, and emails agents the pending cancellations in their states every afternoon — with a freshness gate that refuses to send stale data, because we have seen exactly how quietly a federal feed can freeze while its timestamp keeps ticking.

A checklist for the post-L&I world

One: audit any tool or report you rely on for insurance status. Ask the vendor directly whether they are reading the Motus datasets or the frozen legacy ones. If they cannot answer, assume frozen.

Two: if you check carriers manually, bookmark SAFER's Company Snapshot and accept that pending-cancellation visibility there is limited compared to the old L&I screens.

Three: if X-dates are part of how you prospect, get them delivered rather than hunted. The 30-day notice window is the entire value — a lead found on day 25 is worth a fraction of a lead found on day 1. The filings appear in the public data the day they land; the only question is whether you see them that day.

The L&I shutdown took away a tool, not the data. The agencies that adapt their data sources fastest will spend this transition calling carriers their competitors don't know about yet.