Reference

FMCSA SMS

Safety Measurement System. The federal scoring system the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration uses to rank motor carriers against their peers on roadside safety performance.

What it is

SMS takes public roadside inspection, violation, and crash data and assigns each motor carrier a percentile rank in seven categories called BASICs. The seven categories are Unsafe Driving, Hours-of-Service Compliance, Driver Fitness, Controlled Substances/Alcohol, Vehicle Maintenance, Hazardous Materials Compliance, and Crash Indicator.

Scores are weighted by recency (more recent events count more), severity (out-of-service events count more than written warnings), and exposure (mileage and inspection volume). Carriers are placed against a peer group built from federal data, and the carrier's percentile rank in each BASIC is what FMCSA enforcement, shippers, brokers, and insurers read.

Why it matters

SMS percentile rank is the federal signal that determines whether a carrier is in the FMCSA intervention range. It also drives broker risk-screening, insurance underwriting, large-shipper procurement qualification, and federal contracting eligibility under SAM.gov.

A carrier reading high in any BASIC sees the effects across all of those surfaces at once. A carrier reading low (good) across the BASICs has unlocked access to freight that high-percentile carriers are structurally locked out of.

Where it appears in a Hoffman Report

The Hoffman Report's Safety record — peer-cohort analysis section is derived from SMS BASIC measures. The carrier's three-year weighted score, the peer cohort average, and the ratio between them all come from SMS data.

ProHRHQ layers a peer-cohort grading on top of the federal SMS numbers. The federal SMS percentile is national; the ProHRHQ peer cohort is a tighter band of similarly sized carriers. The grade is ProHRHQ analysis. The underlying SMS numbers are federal.

How SMS handles corrections

A carrier that believes an SMS entry is incorrect can pursue correction through the federal DataQs process. DataQs is the only way to alter the underlying federal record. ProHRHQ updates a Hoffman Report when the federal data updates, and accepts carrier-submitted clarifications for the carrier-controlled portion of the page.

Related terms

SMS scores are public, refreshed monthly, and visible to anyone. The authoritative federal source is FMCSA SAFER and the FMCSA SMS website. ProHRHQ analysis is layered on those records and is identified as such on every Hoffman Report.