Roadcheck week has a way of making otherwise calm fleet managers tense up. Inspectors at every major corridor. Fifteen commercial vehicles checked every minute for 72 hours straight. The largest targeted enforcement event in North America, and your trucks are on the road.
The stress is understandable. We're here to help you spend less time white-knuckling week of May 12, and try to look at the bright side.
The fleets that get the most out of blitz week aren't the ones that just survive it. They're the ones that treat it as a systems audit, a forced, third-party review of whether what they think is happening in their maintenance operation is actually happening. The findings, good or bad, are some of the most useful data a fleet manager will collect all year.
CVSA International Roadcheck 2026 runs May 12–14. Inspectors will primarily conduct North American Standard Level I Inspections — a 37-step process covering both driver compliance and vehicle mechanical fitness.1
Every year, CVSA designates one driver focus area and one vehicle focus area. For 2026:1
Driver focus: ELD tampering, falsification, or manipulation. Inspectors will review records of duty status for inaccurate entries, manipulated logs, and concealed driving time. This isn't a minor technical concern. In 2025, falsification of record of duty status was the second most-cited driver violation in FMCSA data with, 58,382 violations, and five of the top ten driver violations were HOS or ELD-related.1 Inspectors know what to look for. If your drivers don't fully understand the federal regulations around ELD edits and exemptions, this week is the moment that gap becomes visible.
Vehicle focus: cargo securement. Inspectors will evaluate whether loads are secured against shifting, falling, leaking, or spilling. In 2025, more than 34,000 cargo securement violations were issued, 18,108 for unsecured cargo and 16,054 for unsecured vehicle components or dunnage.2 If your pre-trip inspection process doesn't explicitly cover securement, you'll find out during Roadcheck.
Beyond the focus areas, the standard Level I inspection covers everything else: brakes, tires, lighting, coupling devices, fuel systems, and frames. Last year, 18.1% of trucks inspected during Roadcheck were placed out of service. That's 10,148 vehicles grounded in 72 hours.3 Brake violations drove 41% of those OOS findings. Tires caused 23%. Lighting defects added another 14%.3
Those aren't exotic failures. They're maintenance items, which brings us to the more useful question.
An OOS violation during Roadcheck is not primarily a legal problem. It's a signal that something in your maintenance process didn't catch what it was supposed to catch.
If a brake issue gets flagged during a Level I inspection, the question isn't just "how do we fix this brake?" It's: when was this vehicle last inspected internally? Was a pre-trip submitted? Did anyone flag a concern? If the answer is that the inspection happened and nothing was noted, you have a documentation problem. If the inspection didn't happen, you have a compliance process problem. If it was noted and nothing was done, you have a work order prioritization problem. Three different root causes with three different fixes.
The same logic applies to ELD findings. If a driver's logs are inaccurate, the question is whether that's a training gap, a process gap, or something more serious. Either way, it's information you need, and Roadcheck forces it into the open.
Here's a different way to look at it before May 12: an inspection that finds something isn't a failure. It's a data point. The fleets that use Roadcheck as a diagnostic tool leave blitz week with a cleaner picture of where their systems are working and where they aren't. If you know what's broken, you have a much better chance of being able to fix it.
The good news is that 81.6% of vehicles inspected during 2025 Roadcheck passed without any out-of-service violations.3 The difference between that group and the 18.1% that didn't isn't luck; it's whether the maintenance process is running consistently in the months before the event.
Specific preparation for 2026 given the focus areas:
On ELDs: Walk through your HOS documentation process with your drivers before May 12. Make sure they understand when edits are permissible and how to annotate them correctly. Review any patterns in your logs such as consistent rounding, missing annotations, or unusual gaps, before an inspector does. If you're using a manual fallback process for any drivers, make sure it's documented and defensible.
On cargo securement: Audit your pre-trip inspection forms. Do they specifically prompt drivers to check tie-downs, straps, chains, and blocking? Are your drivers trained on the FMCSA cargo securement rules for the specific commodity types they're hauling? A generic "cargo secured" checkbox on a pre-trip form is not sufficient, and inspectors know the difference.
On the standard inspection items: Brakes, tires, and lighting account for nearly 80% of vehicle OOS violations. If your PM program is current and your inspection records are clean, you're in good shape. If you're not sure, if you'd have to dig through paperwork or call someone to confirm when truck 14 last had its brakes checked, that's the gap to close before next Tuesday.
Whether your fleet sails through or takes some hits, the data from Roadcheck week is worth capturing systematically. Not just the violations but the near-misses too. If an inspector flagged something as a warning rather than a violation, that's a maintenance item that was close to the line.
Categorize what you find. Was it a mechanical issue that your PM program should have caught? A documentation gap? A driver training issue? A process breakdown between inspection and work order? Each category has a different fix, and treating them all as "compliance problems" misses the point.
The fleets that improve year over year aren't the ones that panic before Roadcheck Week and go back to old processes after it's over. They're the ones that treat blitz week as an honest look at the operation and actually do something with what they learn.
Try to look at Roadcheck as an opportunity to improve your fleet's processes, and keep your team safer on the road and in the bay.
Squarerigger connects inspection findings directly to work orders, so nothing that gets flagged during Roadcheck or any other day falls through the cracks. If your current process relies on someone remembering to follow up, see how the inspection-to-work-order workflow works.