The score is the diagnosis. The plan is what you claim.
Anyone can run a score on any USDOT, including yours, and that stays true. No account, no cost, no end date. Claiming is a different thing: it makes you the carrier of record for your own number, and it is what opens the rest.
- The fix list. What is blocking you, ranked by how fast each one clears, with the steps for each. Starting with getting you back into your own federal account.
- The watch. We read your federal record and tell you the day something moves, at an address you give us, never the one FMCSA has on file. That is deliberate: the industry notifies through the address of record, and carriers demonstrably do not read that inbox.
- The link. A record a broker opens himself, at our address, showing what changed on your file and when. It never passes through your hands, which is the only reason a broker has to believe it.
One carrier of record per USDOT.
Anyone may say a USDOT is theirs, and more than one person can. To become the one carrier of record, we send a code to the contact address FMCSA publishes for that USDOT and you enter it. Receiving mail at that address is real evidence of control, which is what makes being the one carrier of record mean something.
It proves control of that address. It does not prove corporate authority, and it is not your Login.gov identity inside the federal system. Those are different things and we won't say otherwise. If someone else holds the record for your number and that is wrong, tell us and there is a path; it is not a dead end.
What you agree to, and when.
Nothing about you exists here until you claim. When you do, we record your agreement to the terms and the privacy notice, with the version you read and the time you read it, in the same write that creates the claim. Not afterwards, and not in a separate place.
You can withdraw the link whenever you want. Withdrawing is something we record rather than something we delete, so the record of what you shared and when stays straight, and the link stops resolving for anyone who has it.
Claiming opens when the score does. Same reason as the score page: the part that says “we could not see this” has to be right first. There is nothing to join and nothing to leave with us in the meantime.