What the May data shows
FMCSA recorded 15,357 new USDOT registrations in May 2026 across all entity types, down roughly 7.1% from April. Interstate-only registrations fell harder - from 9,587 in April to 8,060 in May, a 15.9% month-over-month drop.
The state leaderboard held its usual order: Texas led with 1,918 new registrations, followed by California at 1,706 and Florida at 1,298. Fleet composition also stayed on trend - roughly 49% of May's new entrants registered with a single power unit, the owner-operator profile that has anchored the new-entrant pool all year.
The Motus cutover
May was not a routine month administratively. FMCSA retired its legacy registration system and began cutting USDOT registration over to Motus, its replacement platform, on May 14, 2026. Anyone registering in the back half of the month did so through a brand-new system.
A word of caution on reading the dip: an April-to-May pullback is consistent with normal seasonality - registrations typically peak in early spring and soften into summer. The Motus cutover is correlated with the steeper-than-usual interstate decline, but the census data alone cannot establish causation. Application backlogs during the transition, processing lag, or ordinary freight-market softness could each account for part of the move. June's file will show whether registrations rebound once the new system settles in.
Why this matters
For carriers who applied during the cutover window, the practical advice is to verify the registration actually landed: confirm your USDOT record displays correctly at safer.fmcsa.dot.gov and that downstream filings (BOC-3 designation, BMC-91 insurance) attached to the right record. System migrations are exactly when records fall through cracks.
For brokers, factoring companies, and compliance vendors that prospect from the new-entrant pool, May delivered a thinner pipeline than either March or April - and the single-truck share near 49% means the typical May entrant is still an owner-operator, not a fleet.
Track the data monthly
The full series - national totals, all 50 states plus DC, top registration cities, fleet-size mix, and interstate-only counts - is published free at /data/new-trucking-companies. Each state gets its own breakdown page; the Texas page at /data/new-trucking-companies/texas covers the largest new-entrant market in the country.
The dataset refreshes monthly when FMCSA publishes the updated Company Census File, and every table is available as a CSV download. The primary source is the FMCSA Company Census File on data.transportation.gov (dataset az4n-8mr2).