The numbers from this year’s International Roadcheck are a compliance wake-up call for every fleet running North American roads. During the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance’s three-day enforcement blitz, May 12–14, 2026, inspectors pulled trucks off the road at a rate that should make any safety director sit up. On day one alone, the FMCSA logged 1,580 inspections, 2,637 violations, and 496 out-of-service orders, an average of 1.67 violations per inspection and an out-of-service rate of roughly 31.4% against total inspection volume. CVSA says full-week results are still being finalized, but the early picture is clear: a sharp jump from prior years.

Brakes lead, cargo securement follows

This year’s campaign carried two announced focus areas. On the driver side it was electronic logging device (ELD) tampering, and on the vehicle side it was cargo securement. But the violation that keeps topping the charts is the same one fleets have wrestled with for a decade: brakes.

“Cargo securement, in most of the provinces, seems to be… No. 2 after brakes” among vehicle violations, CVSA roadside inspection specialist Jeremy Disbrow noted as early results rolled in. On the driver side, false records of duty status sat at the top of the list. In other words, the two oldest problems in trucking, brake maintenance and honest logs, are still the fastest ways to get parked.

A month earlier, CVSA ran an unannounced Brake Safety Day on April 14. Inspectors conducted 4,021 inspections in a single day and restricted 14.3% of those vehicles from travel for brake-related out-of-service violations. One in seven trucks, off the road, over brakes alone.

The ripple hit freight rates

Enforcement weeks don’t just generate citations. They tighten capacity. DAT Freight & Analytics data showed spot linehaul rates climbing during Roadcheck week as some carriers simply parked: dry van rose 10.5% to $2.22/mile, reefer surged 33.3% to $2.68/mile, and flatbed edged up 3.7% to $2.80/mile. Analyst Dean Croke noted the rate spike was driven almost entirely by supply exiting the market, not new demand, and that the 2026 pattern “looks eerily like 2021,” when rates stayed elevated for the rest of the year.

What our own data says about who gets caught

Roadcheck is a snapshot. The year-round picture, drawn from Fleet Connection’s real-time FMCSA citation database of roughly 6.2 million violations across 61 categories logged from May 2024 through February 2026, tells you exactly where the risk concentrates.

The headline finding: small fleets absorb a wildly disproportionate share of citations. Operations running 1 to 10 trucks account for 74% of inspection-report problems, 73% of false-log violations, and 71% of windshield and glass issues in our data set. These aren’t the carriers with full-time compliance departments. They’re the ones who can least afford a truck sitting out of service.

And the single most-cited category isn’t brakes. It’s lights. Inoperable required-lamp violations totaled 344,225 in a single year, nearly 12% of all truck inspection violations, the top category overall. A five-dollar bulb is still putting trucks at the roadside.

The takeaway

Roadcheck week ends, but the inspections don’t. With brakes leading out-of-service totals, cargo securement climbing, and lamps quietly topping the all-violations list, the playbook hasn’t changed. It’s just gotten more expensive to ignore. Tighten your pre-trip brake checks, verify ELD configurations before an inspector does, and don’t let a burned-out lamp be the reason your truck, and your freight revenue, sits at a weigh station.