If you tried to file anything with the FMCSA this spring, you ran into the biggest registration change the agency has made in decades. The Unified Registration System (URS) — the site carriers had used since 2015 to apply for USDOT numbers and operating authority — is gone. So are the registration functions in the FMCSA Portal and the filing functions in the Licensing & Insurance (L&I) system. Those legacy tools stopped accepting registration work on May 14, 2026, at 8:00 PM ET. The FMCSA officially launched their replacement, MOTUS, on Tuesday, May 19.

A change this big creates two problems at once: honest confusion about what you’re actually supposed to do, and a wave of “act now or lose your authority” solicitations from outfits hoping you won’t know the difference. This post handles both.

What MOTUS is

MOTUS is the FMCSA’s new registration system. It consolidates registration functions that used to be spread across three legacy systems:

  • URS — where new USDOT and operating authority applications were filed since 2015.
  • The registration components of MCMIS — the FMCSA’s internal carrier database.
  • The legacy Licensing & Insurance (L&I) system — the filing platform dating back to the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1994, where insurance filings, BOC-3 designations, and authority history lived.

One account, one system, for applying for registration, maintaining it, and controlling who in your company can touch it. The FMCSA also built MOTUS as a fraud-prevention measure: identity verification through Login.gov and business verification are now part of the process, a direct response to the registration fraud that plagued URS.

The timeline, verified

  • December 8, 2025 — Phase I. MOTUS opened to “supporting companies”: BOC-3 blanket filers (process agents), insurance and surety providers, and transportation service providers.
  • April 29, 2026. The FMCSA published the Federal Register notice announcing MOTUS’s planned availability to everyone else (docket FMCSA-2026-1255, assigned in a May 6 correction notice).
  • May 14, 2026, 8:00 PM ET. New applications in URS, changes and filings in L&I (Public), and the registration options in the FMCSA Portal were permanently retired.
  • Tuesday, May 19, 2026 — Phase II. The FMCSA launched MOTUS for all regulated entities, including motor carriers, brokers, and freight forwarders.

MOTUS is now the only online system for FMCSA registration filings. There is no fallback to URS or the old registration options in the FMCSA Portal.

The old Portal may still load, which has caused some understandable confusion. Some carriers have even been told that it is still active. But the FMCSA removed its registration options on May 14, and the Portal is no longer integrated into the registration workflow. Do not use it to judge whether a registration update was filed or processed.

What changed for carriers applying for new authority

New USDOT number and operating authority applications now go through MOTUS, full stop. The substance of the process — the application, the insurance filings, the BOC-3, the protest period — is the same. What’s new is the front door: you’ll need a Login.gov account with identity verification before you can file anything.

If you’re starting from zero, that’s mostly a one-time setup cost. If you’d rather hand the whole thing off, we file authority applications through MOTUS and follow them until the authority is active — same as we did through URS, and through paper before that.

What changed for existing carriers

Here’s the part the solicitation letters won’t tell you: your USDOT number and MC number did not change, and nothing about your authority expired because of MOTUS. Active authority stayed active. Docket numbers (MC, FF, MX) still exist — the FMCSA has floated eliminating them eventually, but that requires a separate rulemaking that hasn’t happened.

What did change is how you touch your record. The next time you need to file anything — a biennial update, a reinstatement, a name change — it goes through MOTUS. To act on your own company’s record, someone has to claim the company’s MOTUS account, and the FMCSA restricts that first claim to the company official it already has on file, using a Login.gov account tied to that same email address. Individual users verify their identity with a government-issued ID, and the FMCSA runs business verification on the company itself.

If the person the FMCSA has on file left the company years ago, or nobody remembers which email that was, sort it out before you’re up against a deadline — we help with MOTUS account claims and filings for exactly this situation. Untangling account access with the FMCSA is much less fun when your authority is revoked and every day parked costs you money.

What changed for the people who look carriers up

This is the piece that hits brokers, insurance agents, and factoring companies — everyone who used the free L&I site daily to check a carrier’s authority status and insurance filings.

  • The L&I public site is frozen. Filings made in MOTUS do not flow back into L&I. The old site may show a carrier’s history through mid-May 2026, but it accepts no new filings, the FMCSA has been stripping pages out of it, and it is not a current record.
  • MOTUS has a public search that does not require an account. Anyone can use the MOTUS company search by USDOT number, legal name, or DBA name.
  • SAFER is still available, but its registration data cannot be treated as definitive. Information may be delayed, missing, or inconsistent with what appears in MOTUS.

As of September 2026, there is no single complete and dependable public source for confirming whether a carrier has operating authority, whether insurance is on file, or whether a recent change has fully processed. That is what we are seeing in day-to-day work with carrier records: data that has not migrated completely, updates that do not reach every system, and official FMCSA screens that can disagree with one another.

That means a public search result should be treated as one piece of evidence, not the final word. A carrier’s paper trail may include legacy history in L&I, newer registration information in MOTUS, and conflicting or incomplete data in SAFER. If a load, policy, acquisition, or legal matter depends on the answer, cross-check the record and confirm discrepancies with the FMCSA. If you need a carrier’s authority history or a copy of an authority letter, that is exactly the kind of record work we have done since 1966 — out of our own archive, including the decades of documents that predate every one of these systems. And if your company worked out of L&I every day and is still finding its footing, that is what our MOTUS consulting work is for.

Report and track MOTUS bugs

The launch problems are not isolated to one carrier or one kind of filing. We built the independent MOTUS Bug Board so carriers and other users can:

  • Report a problem they are experiencing in MOTUS.
  • Find similar reports and upvote them instead of starting from zero.
  • Track which issues are reported, confirmed, being worked on, or fixed.

The board is operated by Don Norman Associates, not the FMCSA, so we cannot repair an FMCSA account or change a federal record ourselves. What we can do is show where the same problem is affecting multiple carriers and give the industry a clearer picture of what is happening.

What you actually need to do

For most carriers, the honest answer is: less than the letters in your mailbox claim.

  1. Nothing is due just because MOTUS launched. No re-registration, no “migration fee,” no new number.
  2. Claim your MOTUS account before you need it. Confirm who the FMCSA has on file as your company official and make sure that person can complete Login.gov verification.
  3. Handle your normal obligations on their normal schedule — biennial updates, insurance on file, UCR. Those didn’t change; only the filing system did.
  4. Watch for official FMCSA notices on remaining questions — docket-number elimination, the proposed Safety Registration, and BOC-3 process changes are all not part of this launch and would require public rulemaking first.

The scam wave — how to tell official from fake

Every FMCSA system change spawns a round of official-looking letters, emails, and robocalls, and MOTUS is no exception. We are now seeing websites that closely copy the real MOTUS design and use MOTUS-like names while operating on commercial domains. The FMCSA has specifically warned about bogus MOTUS apps and links. The tells are consistent:

  • The FMCSA does not robocall or telemarket, and it never charges a fee to “keep your account active” or to avoid deactivation.
  • There is only one official MOTUS site: motus.dot.gov. A domain containing “motus” is not enough. The FMCSA has identified dot.motusdatasboard.com and dot.motusdatadesk.com as bogus examples; do not visit or enter information into them.
  • No legitimate notice demands your USDOT PIN, SSN, or a credit card to “keep your account active.” That’s an account-takeover attempt.
  • Urgency is the giveaway. “Your authority will be deactivated in 48 hours unless you pay” is not how the agency communicates.

When in doubt, do not click the link or call the number on the letter. Type motus.dot.gov into your browser yourself, or ask someone who works these systems every day.

Not sure where you stand?

We’ve filed with the FMCSA through paper, through L&I, through URS, and now through MOTUS — the systems change, the work doesn’t. Contact us with your USDOT or docket number and we’ll pull your record, tell you whether anything actually needs attention, and handle the filing if it does.