ELD tampering by state, 2026: three states write 56% of all citations

On April 1, 2026 FMCSA activated the violation codes for ELD tampering — §395.8(e)(2) and §395.8(e)(3), recorded in inspection data as 8E-HOSPDELDT and 8E-HOSPVELDT. Six months later the dataset behind our ELD Tampering report holds 7,117 inspections that cited one of them, on 5,024 carriers. Seven of those inspections were filed federally; the other 7,110 were filed by 43 states, and that is the table this article is about.

A "tampering inspection" here is one inspection record with at least one tampering violation on it; a truck cited twice in the same stop counts once. "Out of service" means at least one of those tampering rows carried the OOS flag; a truck can be placed out of service for another violation in the same stop, which this dataset does not show, so a cited inspection without the flag is not a truck known to have been released. The denominator in every rate is cited inspections — the dataset has no row for a truck an inspector checked and released, so none of these percentages is a hit rate over all stops.

Three states, 56% of the citations

Arizona wrote 1,895 tampering inspections, Oregon 1,222, Alabama 902. Together that is 4,019 of 7,110 — 56.5%. Add Nebraska (308) and Missouri (296) and the top five hold 65.0%. The remaining 38 states share 2,487 inspections, and 20 of them wrote fewer than 50.

State-filed tampering inspections, April 1 → October 11, 2026, ranked by inspections. Share of US is the state's share of the 7,110. Out of service is the share of the state's cited inspections with the OOS flag on a tampering row. Carriers is the number of distinct USDOT numbers cited. Federal rows are excluded. Source: Carrierintel §395.8(e) ELD tampering dataset (FMCSA open data via Socrata), 2026-04-01 → 2026-10-11, cache refreshed 2026-10-14, computed 2026-10-14.

The out-of-state column is the share of cited inspections in which the carrier's registered state (its phy_state on the FMCSA Census row) differs from the inspecting state. In Arizona it is 96.9%, in Oregon 98.0%, in Alabama 98.8%, in Nebraska 99.4%. California (27.8%) and Texas (47.6%) are the exceptions: in both, most cited inspections are on carriers registered in the state.

Out of service is the rule, not the exception

6,888 of the 7,110 cited inspections ended with the truck placed out of service — 96.9%. Twelve states placed every cited truck out of service: Nebraska (308 of 308), Maine (95), Minnesota (84), Michigan (18), Rhode Island (14), Massachusetts, North Dakota and Oklahoma (7 each), Mississippi (4), Connecticut, New Jersey and West Virginia (2 each). Alabama is one short of the list at 901 of 902 (99.9%); Oregon is at 99.7%, Arizona at 98.6%.

Eleven states are below 90%: Louisiana 37.3% (28 of 75), North Carolina 72.7% (8 of 11), Utah 81.4% (35 of 43), Nevada 82.4% (56 of 68), Vermont 83.3% (5 of 6), California 85.1% (211 of 248), Georgia 86.2%, New York 87.0% (20 of 23), Tennessee 87.5%, Montana 87.8% and Texas 89.3% (92 of 103). Louisiana is the one real outlier: in 47 of its 75 cited inspections the tampering row carried no out-of-service flag.

Month by month: the map filled in, the total did not keep climbing

Distinct state-filed inspections with at least one tampering violation, by inspection month. October covers October 1–11 only and is shown so the window is honest. Source: Carrierintel §395.8(e) ELD tampering dataset (FMCSA open data via Socrata), 2026-04-01 → 2026-10-11, cache refreshed 2026-10-14, computed 2026-10-14.

The national count stepped up once, from about 870 a month in April–May to 1,280 in June, and has stayed between 1,168 and 1,308 a month since. September (1,168) is the last complete month; the October row covers eleven days. The number of states filing rose from 33 in April to 39 by June and has not grown since.

The state series are not synchronized. Arizona peaked in June (367) and has eased every month since, to 249 in September. Oregon alternates — 244, 106, 272, 102, 250, 115 — and its 133 in the first eleven days of October is already more than its whole September; nothing in the record says why. Alabama went from 4 in April to 258 in July and was still at 224 in September. In the last 30 days of the window (September 12 → October 11) the three are nearly level: Arizona 212, Oregon 211, Alabama 197, and then a long gap to Texas at 49. We wrote up Alabama's climb separately: Alabama became the second Arizona for one month.

Where the stops happen

The 15 busiest recorded inspection locations, state-filed tampering inspections. "Carriers" is the number of distinct USDOT numbers cited at that location. Source: Carrierintel §395.8(e) ELD tampering dataset (FMCSA open data via Socrata), 2026-04-01 → 2026-10-11, cache refreshed 2026-10-14, computed 2026-10-14.

The inspection record carries a town name, not a facility or a route; the corridor reading below is our annotation of the map, not a field in the data. The towns are the ones with fixed scales on the interstates: Kingman on I-40, Benson and Casa Grande on I-10, Ashland, Woodburn and Ridgefield on I-5, Cascade Locks, Wyeth and Emigrant Hill on I-84, Heflin on I-20, Gadsden on I-59, Monument on I-25, Tilford on I-90. Kingman alone — 395 inspections on 371 different carriers — wrote more tampering inspections than any state except Arizona, Oregon and Alabama. Six of the fifteen busiest locations are in Oregon.

Whose trucks get cited: the home states

Inspections by the carrier's registered state (its Census phy_state) in the three busiest states; only pairs with 60 or more inspections are listed. Source: Carrierintel §395.8(e) ELD tampering dataset (FMCSA open data via Socrata), 2026-04-01 → 2026-10-11, cache refreshed 2026-10-14, computed 2026-10-14.

Illinois has not filed a single tampering inspection of its own — it is one of the eight states with no rows — yet Illinois-registered carriers are the most-cited group in Oregon (370) and Alabama (275) and the second in Arizona (331). California carriers lead in Arizona (585) and are second in Oregon (217). Ohio is third in Arizona (218) and Oregon (141) and second in Alabama (145). Who the cited carriers are is the subject of Who gets cited for ELD tampering.

Eight states with no citations

Alaska, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, New Hampshire and New Mexico have not filed a tampering inspection in the six months. Illinois, Kentucky and New Mexico sit on interstate corridors (I-80, I-55, I-65, I-75, I-40, I-10 — our annotation of the map). The data does not say why they write no tampering citations, and this article does not guess.

What this table is not

Methodology

Source: FMCSA roadside inspection and violation data via Socrata, imported into the Carrierintel database; the ELD tampering cache (tampering_violations) holds every violation row whose section is 8E-HOSPDELDT or 8E-HOSPVELDT, joined to the FMCSA Census row of the carrier for its registered state. Window: inspection dates 2026-04-01 through 2026-10-11 (the last date in the cache on the refresh of 2026-10-14). Computed 2026-10-14 on the production database. The SQL is published beside this article in the repository as eld-tampering-by-state-2026.sql. Filterable version, updated daily: ELD Tampering report.