It’s one thing to know that small fleets get cited for more mechanical problems than large ones. It’s another to watch how each group is trending over time. Using FMCSA roadside-inspection data from May 2024 through February 2026, we indexed every fleet size to its own starting point — so growth can be compared apples-to-apples, regardless of how many trucks each group runs.

The verdict: large fleets are holding the line, while small and midsize carriers are drifting upward. By February 2026, mechanical (Vehicle Maintenance) violations were up 16.9% for small fleets (1–10 trucks) and 18.3% for midsize fleets (11–100 trucks) versus their May 2024 baseline, but only 4.6% for large carriers (100+ trucks).

The same rhythm, different altitude

Monthly mechanical violations indexed to May 2024 = 100, by fleet size. Source: FMCSA, May 2024 – Feb 2026.

All three fleet sizes move to the same seasonal beat. Violations climb into late summer, peak around August, and fall off through November and December before rebuilding in spring. That’s enforcement seasonality — the August roadside blitz lifts every line at once.

But notice the spread. The large-fleet line (blue) swings the least and finishes barely above where it started. The small and midsize lines (red and orange) run consistently higher and end the period 12 to 14 points above the large-fleet line. The seasonal peaks are sharper for smaller carriers, and more importantly their off-season troughs keep rising. Even in the quietest enforcement months, small and midsize fleets are now getting written up at a higher baseline than they were two years ago.

Large fleets aren’t lucky, they’re systematized

The reason large carriers dampen the swings comes down to process. A 200-truck operation runs scheduled preventive maintenance, keeps an in-house or contracted shop on a fixed cycle, and uses telematics to flag a fault before it becomes a roadside citation. When freight season ramps up, that system absorbs the extra miles without a proportional spike in defects.

Smaller fleets are more exposed to the season. Maintenance is more reactive, equipment is older, and there’s less slack to pull a truck for repair during the busy months — so summer mileage turns into summer violations. The data shows midsize fleets (11–100 trucks) are actually growing fastest of all, a sign that maintenance practices built for an owner-operator haven’t fully scaled to a 50-truck operation.

The share gap is widening too

Indexing shows the growth rate; the raw share shows the burden. Mechanical issues now make up about 61% of all violations for small fleets in recent months, versus roughly 55% for large carriers  and that gap has held or widened through late 2025 and into 2026. For perspective, in February 2026 inspectors recorded 104,702 mechanical violations against small fleets, 38,791 against midsize, and 18,295 against large carriers.

The takeaway isn’t that small fleets are careless. It’s that maintenance is the part of the safety profile most sensitive to scale — and the carriers without a system are the ones the trend is leaving behind.

What smaller carriers should take from this

The good news: this is the most controllable trend in the data. Three moves close the gap fastest:

1. Adopt a scheduled PM cycle — the single biggest difference between large and small fleets. Even a simple recurring calendar for brakes, lights, and tires shifts you from reactive to preventive and flattens your seasonal spikes.
2. Pre-position maintenance ahead of freight season. If your violations climb every August, do your heavy inspection work in spring. Don’t let peak mileage and peak enforcement arrive on worn equipment at the same time.
3. Benchmark your trend, not just your snapshot. A single good month means little. Pull your CSA Vehicle Maintenance percentile each quarter — if it has risen two quarters running, you’re inside the upward drift this data describes.

Large fleets have shown it’s possible to keep mechanical violations essentially flat through two years of seasonal pressure. The tools that make that happen, schedules, pre-trip discipline, and trend tracking, don’t require an enterprise budget. They require treating maintenance as a system rather than a series of surprises.

Want to see which side of this trend your fleet is on? Fleet-Connection helps small and mid-sized carriers benchmark their mechanical violations against the wider data and get ahead of CSA score creep before it costs a contract or a renewal. Reach out and we’ll walk through your numbers together.