A carrier packet is the set of documents a broker or shipper needs on file before they will put freight on your truck. It answers three questions: are you legally allowed to haul this, are you insured for it, and who gets paid. Every broker wants substantially the same things, each in a slightly different format, and getting it wrong is the most common reason a new authority sits for a week.
You will hear it called a carrier setup packet, a new carrier packet, a broker-carrier packet, or just a carrier package. These are the same document set. Brokers say “setup” because on their side the process is called carrier setup; carriers say “packet” because that is what arrives in the inbox. Nothing turns on the name.
The documents
Operating authority letter. Issued by FMCSA, showing your legal name, address, MC number, and USDOT number. This is proof you are permitted to operate for hire. Download it and keep a clean PDF — brokers will not accept a phone photograph of a screen.
W-9. Your EIN and legal business name, so the broker can report what they pay you. The single most common error in a carrier packet is a W-9 whose legal name does not exactly match the name on the authority. It will bounce, and the bounce will happen on the day you needed the load.
Certificate of insurance. Proof of coverage, typically at least $1,000,000 auto liability and $100,000 cargo, though some shippers and commodities require more. The federal floor for general freight is lower — $750,000 under 49 CFR 387.9, a figure set in 1985 and never adjusted — but almost no broker will load a truck at it, so treat $1,000,000 as the real minimum. The broker generally needs to be named as certificate holder, and that means requesting it from your agent for each broker rather than reusing one PDF. Your agent will do this routinely; ask them to send it directly.
Equipment list. Your tractor and trailer with VINs, years, and unit numbers. Straightforward, and easy to keep current.
Broker-carrier agreement. Their contract. Read it — particularly the payment terms, the double-brokering clause, and anything about claims liability. This is the document people sign fastest and should read slowest.
Notice of assignment. Only if you factor. It tells the broker to pay your factoring company instead of you. Leave it out and the broker pays you directly, which puts you in breach of your factoring agreement and creates a genuine mess with your factor.
BOC-3 filing. Not always requested, but worth having to hand. It is your designation of process agents under 49 CFR 366, and FMCSA will not activate operating authority without one on record. If a broker asks and you do not know whether you have it, you almost certainly do — it was filed as part of getting your authority.
A cover page. Company name, MC and DOT numbers, phone, email, and equipment. Not required by anyone. It makes you look like a business that has done this before, and that is worth something with a broker deciding whether to call you back.
How to put one together
The assembly is not complicated. Doing it once, properly, is what separates a carrier who gets set up in an hour from one who spends a week trading emails.
- Pull your authority letter from FMCSA and save it as a PDF. Not a screenshot.
- Fill out a blank W-9 with the exact legal name on your authority — not your DBA, not the name on your truck door, unless those genuinely match. Sign and date it.
- Ask your insurance agent for a certificate and tell them to leave the certificate holder blank for your file copy. You will request named certificates per broker from the same agent later.
- Write the equipment list once, in a document you can edit. VIN, year, make, unit number, for every tractor and trailer.
- If you factor, get the notice of assignment from your factoring company. They issue it; you do not write it.
- Put all of it in one folder, named clearly, with a cover page in front. Keep the master copy somewhere you can reach from the cab.
What a finished packet looks like is unremarkable: one PDF, six to eight pages, named something like ACME Trucking LLC — Carrier Packet.pdf. The broker-carrier agreement is the only piece you cannot pre-fill, because it is theirs and it changes with each one.
What brokers check that is not in the packet
Your FMCSA authority status and your safety record are public, and broker vetting systems pull them automatically. So is your insurance filing. If your authority shows as anything other than active, or your filings are not current, you will be declined before a human sees your packet — and usually nobody will tell you why.
The insurance filing is worth understanding separately from the certificate. Your insurer files a BMC-91 with FMCSA when the policy binds, and that filing is what FMCSA looks at. A lapse in coverage suspends your authority quickly and without a grace period, and no certificate of insurance in anyone’s folder will override what the federal record says.
Check your own record the way a broker sees it before you start calling. Surprises there are expensive.
Digital onboarding changed the shape of this
A growing share of brokers no longer accept a packet by email at all. They send a link to an onboarding platform — Highway, RMIS, MyCarrierPortal and several others — and you complete setup inside it. The platform pulls your authority, safety and insurance data directly from the federal record, verifies the identity of whoever is filling the form in, and flags mismatches automatically.
This is mostly good for honest carriers, because it is fast and it removes the human who used to lose your email. Two things change, though. The first is that discrepancies you could previously explain on a phone call now fail silently against a rule. The second is that these systems exist largely because of identity theft and double-brokering, so they are deliberately suspicious of anything inconsistent — a phone number that does not match your FMCSA record, an email on a free domain, a recently changed address.
The practical consequence is that your public FMCSA record is now part of your carrier packet whether you treat it that way or not. Keep the contact details on it current.
Shipper packets are a different animal
When a direct shipper asks for a packet, expect the broker list plus more. Higher insurance limits are common, sometimes $2,000,000 or more on auto liability. Many shippers add their own vendor forms, a safety questionnaire, a W-9 on their template rather than the IRS one, and occasionally a certificate naming them as additional insured rather than only certificate holder — which is a materially different request, and one your agent needs to be told about explicitly.
If you are working toward direct freight, the packet is the part of it you can prepare before you have the relationship. More on the rest of that in load boards or direct shippers.
The mistakes that actually cost loads
- A W-9 legal name that does not match the authority, character for character.
- Reusing one insurance certificate for every broker when they need to be named on it.
- An expired certificate still sitting in a broker’s system from last year.
- Signing the broker-carrier agreement without reading the payment terms or the double-brokering clause.
- Omitting the notice of assignment when you factor, then being paid directly.
- A phone number or address on your FMCSA record that no longer matches the one you are giving the broker.
The part nobody warns you about
Insurance certificates expire annually. When yours renews, every broker you are set up with needs the new one. Miss that and your first indication will be a load falling through on a Monday morning, on a system rule, with nobody to argue with.
The same goes for your MCS-150. FMCSA requires a biennial update of your carrier identification report whether or not anything has changed, and missing it deactivates your USDOT number. A deactivated number fails broker vetting instantly, and the carrier is usually the last to find out.
Keeping that current across twenty broker relationships is exactly the kind of administrative work that gets skipped when you are driving. It is part of what we do under carrier packet setup, and it is unglamorous enough that it is worth saying out loud. The wider version of the same problem — paperwork and compliance — is where most of the deadlines live.