Live measurement

FMCSA insurance feed status

FMCSA is currently publishing 1,774 forward-dated insurance cancellation filings, against a pre-rebuild baseline of about 1,292 per day. We have measured this number every day since 2026-06-11, which is why the 2026-08-04 break below is a record rather than a reconstruction.

What the numbers say today

Observation record — discontinuity of 2026-08-04

Record v1.0, published 2026-08-09. The figures in this section are frozen: they are what we observed, and they do not change when the page regenerates. The live series above does.

We observed a discontinuity in the published MOTUS insurance data. We are not in a position to say what caused it, and this record makes no claim about intent, fault or whether the change was a defect or a deliberate correction. What follows is what we measured.

A large block of filings carried a single cancellation date, 20260805, and grew over the following days: 14,134 rows on 2026-08-06, 14,325 rows on 2026-08-07, 14,441 rows on 2026-08-08. Policy effective_date values inside that block span 2017–2026.

Reconciliation of stored records against the live source

Method: draw a random sample of our stored leads that were still active with a cancellation date in the future; for each, query the source for max(cancl_effective_date) for that USDOT number; classify as matched, absent (no filings returned for the USDOT), or a different date. Two independent samples were drawn on the same day.

The sampled USDOT numbers are not published here. We publish aggregate counts only. A researcher, journalist or the agency who wants the record-level sample in order to check this independently can have it — write to us and say who you are and what you intend to test.

Why this is easy to miss downstream

Nothing errored. Stored records kept carrying cancellation dates the source no longer held, and a pipeline that checks only whether its daily run succeeded would have reported healthy throughout. The failure is silent by construction: a filing whose date changes upstream does not overwrite the old row, it arrives as a different one.

Reproduce it

The forward-dated count on any given day is a single query against the public dataset — no account, no key:

https://data.transportation.gov/resource/3uet-3z4i.json
  ?$select=count(1)
  &$where=cancl_effective_date >= 'YYYYMMDD'

Our full daily series is available as CSV (aggregates only, CC BY 4.0).

Limitations

• Single observer, one reading per day, taken shortly after 18:00 UTC. A different sampling time could produce different figures around a refresh.
• We observed the published dataset, not FMCSA’s internal system. A filing missing from the export may still exist upstream.
• We do not know whether the change was a defect, a partial reload, a deliberate correction, or a change in publication semantics. We have asked; we have no answer to report.
• Whether the pre-rebuild dates or the post-rebuild dates are the correct ones is not something we can determine from the outside.
• The reconciliation samples are small (40 each) and were drawn from our own stored inventory, which is filtered — four states are excluded at ingest — so it is not a random sample of the whole dataset.

Corrections

If any figure here is wrong we will correct it on this page and note what changed and when. Nothing has been corrected since publication on 2026-08-09.

Daily readings

Method

Once a day we query the FMCSA/MOTUS insurance dataset on the U.S. DOT open-data portal for filings whose cancellation date is today or later, and record the count. The figure is the raw source count before any filtering of our own, so it measures the source rather than our product.

“Confirmed” means the most recent ingest saw the filing again. Because our unique key includes the cancellation date, a date that changes upstream produces a new row and leaves the old one untouched — so a filing the source has dropped is visible as one that stopped being re-confirmed. Anything unconfirmed is withheld from customers.

We publish aggregate counts only. No individual carrier records appear on this page.

Frequently asked

Citing this

XDate Alert. FMCSA insurance feed status: daily observations of forward-dated cancellation filings, 2026-06-11 onward. Observation record v1.0, 2026-08-09. Licensed CC BY 4.0.
Available at: https://xdatealert.com/data/fmcsa-insurance-feed-status

The measurements are ours; the underlying filings are public U.S. government record. Reuse them, with attribution. Corrections and independent replications are welcome — we would rather be corrected than uncorroborated.

Related: cancellation trends by state and insurer · what happened to the FMCSA L&I system