FMCSA transition

FMCSA L&I Public shut down. Here's where carrier insurance data lives now.

FMCSA permanently retired its legacy registration systems — URS, Licensing & Insurance (L&I) Public, and the FMCSA Portal's registration options — at 8:00 PM ET on May 14, 2026, replacing them with a new system called MOTUS. L&I Public still shows historical records, but new insurance and cancellation filings now live in the MOTUS datasets, not L&I.

What changed on May 14, 2026

Three things happened at once, which is why the transition feels confusing. First, L&I Public — the searchable licensing-and-insurance screen agents used daily — stopped accepting filings and became a historical-records archive. Second, URS (the Unified Registration System) was retired. Third, the registration options inside the FMCSA Portal were removed. Federal filing submission was dark from 8:00 PM ET on May 14 through May 18, 2026 during the cutover.

The practical consequence for insurance work: the legacy insurance feeds that powered most third-party tools stopped receiving new filings at the cutover. The datasets still exist and their timestamps still update, but the newest insurance transaction in the legacy feed is dated on or before May 14, 2026. A tool that didn’t switch sources is showing you month-old data with a fresh timestamp on it.

Where the data lives now: MOTUS

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

There are real schema changes if you work with the data directly: USDOT moved to a plain number field under a new column name, the insurer-name column was renamed, and dates switched format. None of it is documented loudly — you find it by reading the column metadata.

What this means for insurance agents

If you used L&I Public to find X-dates — the dates a 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 the day they are filed. They simply live in a different dataset with a different schema than before.

You have three options: pull the MOTUS datasets yourself (free, public, but undocumented and easy to get wrong); check carriers one at a time on SAFER (works but doesn’t scale); or have the pending cancellations delivered. Check a single carrier with our free DOT lookup, or get every pending cancellation in your state, daily.