BMC-84: what a broker’s bond is, and what “not on file” actually means

Most of what is written about the broker bond is either a bond seller’s sales page or a paraphrase of the regulation. This page is about the part that matters when you are looking at a posting: what FMCSA actually publishes, what you can read out of it, and the one question the public data genuinely cannot answer.

What it is

A licensed property broker has to keep financial security on file with FMCSA. It exists for one purpose: to give the carriers and shippers a broker owes something to claim against, if the broker doesn’t pay.

Two filings satisfy the requirement, and you will see both:

The required amount is $75,000. That figure is the statutory security a broker must maintain — it is not a rate, a price, or anything to do with a load.

What it isn’t

• It is not insurance on your freight. Cargo coverage is a different filing entirely and it belongs to the carrier, not the broker.
• It is not a promise you will be made whole. The bond is one pot per broker, not one per claim. If a broker fails owing many carriers, valid claims are paid out of that single amount — so treat it as a floor, and as a reason the industry argues about whether the number is big enough, not as a guarantee.
• It is not a character reference. Having a bond on file means a surety company or a bank was willing to stand behind the filing. It is a fact about paperwork, not about conduct.

Where FMCSA publishes it

Two different public datasets carry broker bond information, and they answer two different questions. Confusing them is where most of the bad information online comes from.

Dataset identifiers are the public ones on the federal open-data portal. Both layouts described here were read against the live datasets in June 2026; FMCSA can change a published layout at any time, so check before you build anything on one.

What “no bond on file” actually means

Stated exactly: this broker has no BMC-84 or BMC-85 row on FMCSA’s current active and pending insurance roster. That is the whole claim. It is a fact about a federal file on a given date.

Here is what it does not mean, and each of these gets asserted somewhere online:

• It does not mean a bond was canceled. Absence and cancellation are different observations, and only one of them is visible (see the next section).
• It does not mean FMCSA revoked anything. Authority status is a separate record.
• It does not mean the company doesn’t exist, or isn’t operating.

And the ordinary explanations, which are common enough that this should never be read as a verdict on its own:

• A filing in transit — the broker changed sureties and the new filing hasn’t landed on the roster yet.
• A brand-new authority whose paperwork is still working through the system.
• A lag between the roster and the docket, or between the file and the day you looked.
• An entity that holds a docket but isn’t brokering freight, so nobody has filed anything.

What it can also mean is the reason it is worth checking at all: a broker whose security has lapsed is not supposed to be brokering freight, and a broker operating without one is precisely the counterparty you would have nothing to claim against. So the honest reading is “FMCSA’s own roster shows nothing behind this one right now — ask why”, and then you ask.

Why nobody can tell you a bond was “canceled”

This is the useful thing on this page, and it is the opposite of what most tools imply.

The natural follow-up to “no bond on file” is “was it canceled, or was it never there?” As far as FMCSA’s published data goes, that question has no answer. We went looking, because we wanted to build the signal, and here is what the two files actually contain:

• The insurance history file has no status column. It records that a filing was made — form, insurer, effective date — and nothing about whether it is still in force. You cannot tell an active bond from a long-dead one by reading it.
• The active-and-pending roster has no status column either. It does carry a cancellation-effective date field, which looks like the answer and is not: on live filings that field is routinely populated with a scheduled or far-future placeholder, frequently the same far-future date as the effective date on the same row. Reading it as “this bond was canceled” would flag active, ordinary brokers.

So there is no honest way to publish “canceled bond” as a status from this data. There is exactly one bond event that can be observed honestly, and it is a disappearance: a broker that had a BMC-84 or BMC-85 on the roster on one day and does not on the next. That is dated, it is checkable against FMCSA’s own file, and it is what a lapse looks like from the outside.

How to check it yourself, in about a minute

• Pull the MC on the SAFER company snapshot — safer.fmcsa.dot.gov — and follow through to the Licensing & Insurance records for that docket.
• Look for an active BMC-84 or BMC-85 filing, and read the insurer name and the effective date. Carrier liability and cargo forms will be listed too; those are not the broker bond.
• If there is no BMC-84 or BMC-85 there, you have the fact. Ask the broker about it directly — a broker who just switched sureties will tell you so immediately, and that answer is checkable.
• While you are on that page, note the authority grant date and the contact on file. The rest of the sequence is here.

Those addresses are written out rather than linked on purpose: on a page about verification, the habit worth building is typing the address in yourself rather than following a link somebody handed you. FMCSA does not email you a sign-in link.

What LaneScout does with it

LaneScout is a Chrome extension that checks the broker on every DAT One load row against our copy of the public FMCSA record and badges the row while you scroll. The bond is one of the things it reads. Being precise about it:

• One bond line is visible, and it is worded exactly as narrowly as the data supports: “No active BMC-84/85 surety bond on the current FMCSA insurance roster.” Not “canceled,” not “no bond,” not a conclusion about the company.
• It fires only on an explicit no. If we have no roster answer for a broker, nothing is said at all. Missing data never becomes an accusation — that rule is why the obvious “this MC isn’t in the broker census” flag was built and then turned off.
• It is one of the few lines that reaches our top tier on its own, which is exactly why the two rules above are strict.
• Stale data gets held back. If the record the line came from was last refreshed more than two weeks ago, the signal is capped at Caution and says so on the panel, with the refresh date. A serious claim about a named company computed from data we know is old is both more likely to be wrong and harder to defend.
• The date travels with the fact. Open the badge and you see the line, the FMCSA source it came from, and when the record was pulled. Our copy of the broker file is rebuilt every morning.
• If we get one wrong, a company can say so. There is a public dispute form, no account needed, and a person reads it.