Who gets cited for ELD tampering: 5,024 carriers, one in five of them more than once

Data report · Carrierintel data desk · Six months of §395.8(e) citations

The ELD Tampering report lists every carrier with a §395.8(e)(2) or (e)(3) citation since the codes went live on April 1, 2026 — 5,024 carriers on the refresh of October 14. This article is about the shape of that list: how many are repeat carriers, how big they are, where they are registered, and how the odds of a citation change with fleet size.

A carrier is one USDOT number. An inspection is one inspection record with at least one tampering violation. Fleet size, home state and operating status come from the carrier's FMCSA Census row (the latest MCS-150), so they describe the carrier as registered, not the truck that was stopped.

One in five carriers is a repeat carrier

3,935 of the 5,024 carriers were cited once. 1,089 (21.7%) were cited two or more times, 415 three or more, 121 five or more, and 21 ten or more. The repeat carriers account for 3,182 of the 7,117 inspections — 44.7% of all tampering inspections sit on a fifth of the carriers.

The repeats are not clustered in a single stop. Of the 1,089 repeat carriers, the median gap between the first and the last tampering inspection is 58 days; 100 had all their citations within a week, 319 within 30 days, and 321 were still being cited 90 days or more after the first one. 820 carriers were cited in two or more states and 226 in three or more: 594 carriers in exactly two states, 139 in three, 44 in four, and 43 carriers in five states or more.

The twelve most-cited carriers

Ranked by tampering inspections. "Trucks" is the power-unit count on the carrier's latest MCS-150. All twelve were registered Active as of October 14, 2026. All dates are 2026.

Two kinds of carrier share this table. ARAVAN CARGO (271 trucks), EDER EXPRESS (136), ROGUE CARRIER (350), SABR CARGO (255), SULTAN TRANS (533), PHOENIX CARGO (395) and CARAVAN LOGISTICS (258) are mid-size fleets cited across the whole six months in five to nine states — a steady rate rather than one bad week. The other kind declares one or two trucks: QDPT CARGO LLC lists one power unit and was cited 21 times in 11 states between May 27 and July 19; CARBON MOTORS LLC, one truck, 15 times in seven states; UNITRANSPORT LLC and GOLLA GROUP LLC, two trucks each, 12 and 11 times. GOLLA GROUP is the carrier our phantom fleets investigation named for the gap between its declared fleet and the tractors seen at roadside. The data here does not say how many trucks these carriers actually run; it says how many they declared, and how often their DOT number was cited.

Small carriers by count, large carriers by rate

The median cited carrier declares 7 trucks. 996 carriers (19.8%) declare one, 1,300 declare two to five, and 2,992 — 59.6% — declare ten or fewer. 321 carriers (6.4%) declare more than 100. By headcount, ELD tampering is a small-fleet citation.

Against the market it is the opposite. We counted active Census rows in each fleet-size band and the cited carriers in the same band:

Cited carriers per 10,000 active carriers, by declared fleet size. 239,623 active carriers report no fleet size; 2 of them were cited. As of October 14, 2026, 5,017 of the 5,024 cited carriers matched an active Census row; the other 7 were registered Inactive.

The rate climbs through every band up to 101–500 trucks — 8.3 per 10,000 one-truck carriers, 66.4 at 6–10 trucks, 226.8 at 21–50, 475.9 at 101–500 — and then drops to 77.0 for fleets over 500. Part of the climb is exposure: a 200-truck fleet has 200 trucks that can be stopped, a one-truck carrier has one. But the rate per carrier rises 57-fold between the first and the seventh band while the declared fleet rises from one truck to hundreds, and the over-500 fleets — the carriers with the most trucks on the road — are cited at a sixth of the rate of the band below them. Fleet size explains some of the odds, not all of them.

Where the cited carriers are registered

Home state of cited carriers vs. citations written in that state. The twelve largest home states.

California (1,128 carriers, 22.5%) and Illinois (924, 18.4%) together are 40.8% of the list; Ohio (485), Texas (449), Pennsylvania (281) and Florida (256) follow. The right-hand column is where the citations are written, and it is a different map: Illinois has written none, Ohio 39, California 232. The 924 Illinois carriers were cited in Arizona, Oregon, Alabama and elsewhere — where, exactly, is in ELD tampering by state. Indiana, Washington and Minnesota show nearly equal counts in both columns; that says the two totals are similar, not that those states cite their own carriers — the two columns count different populations.

Active, and placed out of service

As of October 14, 2026, 5,017 of the 5,024 cited carriers were registered Active on their Census row; 7 were Inactive. A tampering citation is not, by itself, an authority action. What it is, almost always, is an out-of-service order for that truck on that day: 96.7% of inspections on carriers with 1–10 trucks (3,461 of 3,580), 97.0% at 11–50 trucks (1,794 of 1,850), 97.5% at 51–100 (766 of 786), 97.1% at 101–500 (817 of 841) and 94.2% at over 500 trucks (49 of 52). Fleet size changes the odds of being cited; it barely changes what happens once you are.

What the numbers are not

Methodology

Source: FMCSA roadside inspection and violation data and the FMCSA Census file via Socrata, in the Carrierintel database. Cited carriers and inspections come from the ELD tampering cache (tampering_violations, tampering_carriers: sections 8E-HOSPDELDT and 8E-HOSPVELDT), window 2026-04-01 → 2026-10-11 on the refresh of 2026-10-14. Market denominators are Census rows with operating status Active on 2026-10-14 (2,271,425 carriers), banded by power_units. Computed 2026-10-14 on the production database; SQL published beside the article as who-gets-cited-for-eld-tampering-2026.sql. Each carrier named above links to its public Carrierintel profile, which shows every inspection on the record.