Truck Out-of-Service Rates by State

What an Out-of-Service Order Actually Is

An out-of-service order is an inspector's finding that a driver or a vehicle is unsafe to operate, issued on the spot under the North American Standard Out-of-Service Criteria maintained by the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance. It is not a ticket. It is a prohibition: the truck does not move, or the driver does not drive it, until the defect is corrected and the order is cleared.

• Driver out of service — the driver may not operate any commercial vehicle. Hours-of-service violations, a missing or expired CDL, and no valid medical certificate are the usual causes. Depending on the finding, the clock can run 10 hours or until the paperwork is fixed.
• Vehicle out of service — the truck or trailer stays where it is until repaired. Brakes at or beyond the 20% defective threshold, flat or badly underinflated tires, and inoperative required lamps account for most of them.
• Both — an inspection can produce a driver order and a vehicle order at the same stop, and frequently does.
• It follows the carrier — every violation is reported to FMCSA and feeds the carrier's Safety Measurement System percentiles for 24 months, which is why a defect that would be a five-minute fix in the yard costs far more when it is found at a scale.

Nothing here is legal advice, and the criteria are revised annually. Check the current CVSA out-of-service criteria before relying on any specific threshold.

Strictest and Most Lenient States

Ranked among states running at least 5,000 inspections in 2025, so that a handful of stops cannot produce a headline rate.

Highest out-of-service rate

• 33.2% — Wyoming (14,228 inspections)
• 30.4% — Oregon (19,227 inspections)
• 28.0% — Arizona (51,483 inspections)
• 26.7% — Texas (312,378 inspections)
• 26.5% — Connecticut (20,588 inspections)
• 25.7% — Missouri (54,818 inspections)
• 24.9% — Wisconsin (33,968 inspections)
• 23.1% — Tennessee (85,425 inspections)

Lowest out-of-service rate

• 7.6% — Illinois (62,200 inspections)
• 10.8% — Kansas (34,126 inspections)
• 11.3% — Mississippi (42,985 inspections)
• 11.6% — New Mexico (91,742 inspections)
• 11.7% — North Carolina (109,093 inspections)
• 12.5% — Nebraska (24,613 inspections)
• 12.9% — South Dakota (29,374 inspections)
• 13.8% — North Dakota (10,938 inspections)

A high rate is mostly not about harsher inspectors. States differ in what they inspect: a full Level I looks under the truck, while a driver-only Level III never opens the hood and so can hardly ever produce a vehicle order. Wyoming runs 45% Level I and Illinois runs 8%, which is most of the distance between them. The inspection level mix is the other half of this picture.

The Same Comparison, Level I Only

Level I is the one inspection every state performs the same way — driver, paperwork and a complete vehicle examination underneath. Ranking on it alone takes the level mix out of the comparison. It does not make the states look more alike: the gap between the extremes is 4.8×, against 4.4× on all inspections. What it changes is who is standing where. Louisiana is the clearest case: 14.7% across all its inspections, 36th of 48 states, but 37.2% and 6th of 45 once only full inspections are counted.

Highest Level I out-of-service rate

• 53.8% — Michigan (7,077 Level I inspections)
• 45.6% — Minnesota (8,252 Level I inspections)
• 43.7% — Connecticut (4,429 Level I inspections)
• 40.5% — Wyoming (6,313 Level I inspections)
• 37.7% — Missouri (13,307 Level I inspections)
• 37.2% — Louisiana (5,673 Level I inspections)
• 36.8% — Wisconsin (8,350 Level I inspections)
• 36.7% — New York (17,385 Level I inspections)

Lowest Level I out-of-service rate

• 11.2% — West Virginia (1,965 Level I inspections)
• 13.6% — North Carolina (16,198 Level I inspections)
• 15.8% — Mississippi (8,457 Level I inspections)
• 18.2% — Nevada (2,929 Level I inspections)
• 18.7% — Maine (4,043 Level I inspections)
• 20.1% — New Mexico (16,575 Level I inspections)
• 20.4% — California (171,567 Level I inspections)
• 23.0% — Florida (12,343 Level I inspections)

States running fewer than 1,500 Level I inspections in 2025 are left out — below that the rate moves too much on a handful of trucks. A state can sit low on both measures and simply be lenient; it is the states that move between them that the headline rate misreads.

Out-of-Service Rates, All States (2025)

"OOS rate" is the share of that state's inspections that produced at least one order. Driver and vehicle columns are shares of all inspections, not of each other — one stop can land in both. Driver-only inspections never examine the vehicle, so a state that runs many of them will show a lower vehicle rate without being any more lenient.

Which Regulations Trigger the Orders

Every out-of-service violation in FMCSA's current file, grouped by the part of 49 CFR cited. One inspection can produce several — nationally the ratio is about 1.5 violations per inspection that ends out of service — so these counts run well above the inspection counts in the table above. The file is a rolling snapshot of roughly the last three years, so these are recent totals rather than a single calendar year.

The 25 Violations Written Out of Service Most Often

"OOS share" is how often that citation escalates to an order rather than being noted and waved on. A flat tire is close to automatic; an inoperative turn signal depends on which lamp and which vehicle in the combination.

Avoid the Order in the First Place