FMCSA’s Licensing and Insurance public site carries this notice on its home page: “All current registration functionality-including new applications in URS, changes and filings via L&I (Public), and registration options in the FMCSA Portal-will be permanently retired on Thursday, May 14, at 8:00 PM ET.” It continues: “Users who have not completed updates must wait for Motus launch the following week.”
FMCSA announced Motus, its new registration system, in a Federal Register notice published April 29, 2026 (91 FR 23144, Doc. 2026-08334). The notice says “Phase I was released on December 8, 2025” and “In Phase II, planned for the second quarter of 2026, Motus will become available to all regulated entities.” It says FMCSA “will sunset the current URS used for new applications for USDOT Numbers and Operating Authority, registration components of the Motor Carrier Management Information System (MCMIS) and the former Interstate Commerce Commission Licensing and Insurance system, established in 1994.”
The home-page notice names what was retired: applications, changes, filings and registration options. It does not say carrier records were retired, and neither does the Federal Register notice. The Federal Register notice asked registrants, before Phase II, to “save a copy of their records to match against the data in Motus for safety and security purposes.”
The Licensing and Insurance home page still offers a Carrier Search option, and describes it this way: “The Carrier Search option provides access to information about interstate for hire carriers who have been granted authority or who have applications pending.”
FMCSA publishes carrier files on the Department of Transportation’s open-data portal. Two groups of “All With History” files sit there now: the older files, each with the note quoted below, and the Motus files, which the catalog shows as created on June 3, 2026. The counts are from reading the portal on October 30, 2026. A later read can return different counts.
| File | What the catalog says | What the file held |
|---|---|---|
| Carrier - All With History | “This dataset was last refreshed on 05/14/2026 and will no longer be updated.” | 1,860,604 rows. |
| AuthHist - All With History | “This dataset was last refreshed on 05/14/2026 and will no longer be updated.” | 4,941,925 rows. |
| Revocation - All With History | “This dataset was last refreshed on 05/14/2026 and will no longer be updated.” | 1,529,083 rows. |
| Motus Carrier - All With History | “Records for all carriers/ | 174,712 rows. |
| Motus RevokeSuspend – All With History | “Information on carrier/ | 36,028 rows. The earliest service date is May 18, 2026. |
Row counts in the two groups do not compare one to one. The Motus Carrier catalog entry says “the legacy registration system allowed multiple OAs per docket number, while Motus will assign a unique docket number to each OA.”
A file read today shows what is on file today about an earlier date, not what anyone could see on that date. A copy of the public record made on or before the date, and kept unchanged since, shows what the record said then. Where no copy was made at the time, a later copy can only show what the record says now about that date. A copy that was not made at the time cannot be made later. Why public carrier lookups cannot tell you a carrier’s status on a past date explains this with a worked example.