The 2026 International Roadcheck wrapped up yesterday after a 72-hour enforcement blitz across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. CVSA won’t publish official final numbers until later this year, but the inspection records flowing into FMCSA during the event tell a story no carrier can afford to ignore: out-of-service rates are running nearly double the 2025 benchmark.

The headline number

Through the first two days of the May 12–14 event, FMCSA inspection records aggregated via the searchcarriers.com blitz dashboard logged 6,406 inspections, 11,010 violations, and 2,055 out-of-service orders affecting 5,217 distinct carriers. That puts the running vehicle OOS rate above 32%.

Compare that to last year. CVSA reported a vehicle OOS rate of 18.1% across all 56,178 inspections conducted during the full 2025 Roadcheck. Day 1 of 2026 came in at 31.4%. Day 2 ticked up to 32.3%.

That gap isn’t enforcement variance. It’s the condition of the trucks rolling under the scales this week.

Where it’s happening

Pennsylvania ran nearly 20% of the entire Day 2 national inspection volume on its own, with a cumulative count of 1,156 inspections through two days — more than double the next state. The rest of the top ten through Day 2: Oklahoma (533), Kentucky (399), New Jersey (359), Alabama (327), Michigan (294), New Mexico (184), Nebraska (179), South Dakota (178), Louisiana (174).

Two states produced the worst single-inspection results captured. A Pennsylvania stop generated 27 vehicle violations. A Kansas stop produced 26. On the driver side, an Alabama inspection logged 17 driver violations in a single stop and a Pennsylvania inspection logged 16.

A 27-violation vehicle inspection isn’t a truck that failed one check. It’s a truck that should not have been on the road.

Where the violations are clustering

CVSA’s 2026 focus areas — ELD tampering, falsification, or manipulation on the driver side, and cargo securement on the vehicle side — are surfacing exactly where the agency told fleets to expect heightened scrutiny.

The ELD focus has teeth. In 2025, falsification of records of duty status was the second most-cited driver violation across all FMCSA inspections, with 58,382 total citations. During the 2025 Roadcheck specifically, 332 driver out-of-service violations — 10% of all driver OOS findings — were for false logs or falsified records of duty status. Inspectors in 2026 are working through ELD records line by line.

The cargo securement focus is similarly grounded in last year’s data: 18,108 violations issued in 2025 for cargo not secured to prevent leaking, spilling, blowing, or falling, plus 16,054 violations for unsecured vehicle components or dunnage.

And brakes — not even a named focus area for 2026 — are continuing to drive the OOS numbers. CVSA recorded 3,304 brake system violations in 2025 (24.4% of all vehicle OOS findings). Add 2,257 violations for 20% defective brakes and brake-related issues alone accounted for 41.1% of all vehicle OOS orders. The Pennsylvania and Kansas mega-violation inspections this week were almost entirely mechanical: brakes, tires, lighting, coupling devices.

Who’s actually getting cited

This is where the structural picture comes into focus. Fleet-Connection’s real-time FMCSA citation database recently published an analysis of roughly 6.2 million violations across 61 categories pulled from May 2024 through February 2026, and the distribution by fleet size is striking.

Small carriers running 1 to 10 trucks accounted for:

• 74% of Inspection Report problems
• 73% of False Logs
• 71% of Windshield and glass violations
• 69% of Emergency Equipment citations

Mid-size fleets (11–100 trucks) generally landed in the 20–30% range. Large fleets with 100 or more trucks came in last in nearly every category, dropping to about 7% on False Logs and Inspection Reports.

Fleet-Connection’s read on that distribution is direct: large fleets aren’t winning because they’re better operators. They have compliance staff, training programs, telematics, dash cams, and lawyers on retainer. Small and mid-size operators are running without that infrastructure, and the citation data reflects it.

The same dataset shows brake violations trending upward in recent months — which lines up with what’s surfacing at the scales right now.

What this means for the rest of 2026

Every one of those 2,055 OOS orders is already in FMCSA’s Safety Measurement System. The violations generated during the blitz are feeding directly into CSA BASIC scores. A carrier whose Vehicle Maintenance or HOS Compliance score crosses 65% as a result of this week will see that reflected in broker load board visibility and shipper tender acceptance within the next reporting cycle.

The Roadcheck OOS spike isn’t a one-week problem. It’s the first datapoint in a 12-month consequence cycle.

If your fleet rolled through this week clean, the operational discipline showed up where it counted. If you ran into trouble, the next 60 days are about damage control — DataQs challenges where appropriate, immediate corrective action on flagged equipment, and a hard look at whether your maintenance and ELD programs are actually catching problems before inspectors do.

CVSA’s full official report will land later this year. The preliminary picture is already clear: the gap between fleets that run clean every day and fleets that scramble for blitz week is widening, and it’s showing up in the inspection data within hours of the violations being written.

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Sources: CVSA 2025 International Roadcheck Results; FMCSA inspection records aggregated via searchcarriers.com/blitz; Fleet-Connection real-time FMCSA citation database, May 2024 – February 2026.