DOT Compliance Checklist

A compliance review works through six record groups in a predictable order. This checklist is those six groups with the section and the clock on every line, so you can find your own gaps in half an hour rather than in an investigator's conference room.

Audit readiness

0 / 23

Tick what you actually hold. Nothing is stored — this is a worksheet you print, not a record we keep.

Readiness

0%

Not ready

General registration

Driver qualification

Drug and alcohol programme

Hours of service

Vehicle maintenance

Accidents and insurance

Your own lines

    Low-poly render of a blank clipboard on a truck fender
    Half an hour with a clipboard, or an afternoon with an investigator.

    What it checks

    Twenty-three lines across six groups, each carrying the section it comes from and how often it has to be redone. The readiness percentage is arithmetic, not a verdict — a carrier at 95% with a missing random-testing pool is in worse shape than one at 80% with three stale review notes.

    Worked example

    The three lines that most often come back unticked on a small carrier are the annual review note, the supervisor reasonable-suspicion training certificate, and the trailer's annual inspection. None of them costs much. All three are scheduled work that slipped, and all three are visible in the first hour of a review.

    An unticked line is not automatically a violation — some do not apply to every operation. Work out which apply to you first, then treat the remainder as a to-do list with dates.

    Where the lines come from

    Every line names its own section, and the sources below link the ones that carry figures this site uses in more than one place — hours, testing rates, the qualification file, the annual inspection, UCR and the registration rules. Where a line has no figure, it is a presence-or-absence question and the section is the whole answer.

    Sources

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