The statistics released by the Commercial Vehicle Safety Association (CVSA) on May's International Roadcheck Week — the annual 72-hour high-visibility enforcement blitz in which inspectors conduct thousands of roadside commercial vehicle and driver inspections across North America — largely mirror those of Roadcheck Week 2025, with one notable exception: English language proficiency (ELP).

Last year, that category of driver violation did not appear among the top five reasons a driver received an Out of Service (OOS) order (as opposed to an OOS order for a vehicle violation). In 2025, the top five violations for combined U.S. and Canada inspections for driver-related OOS orders accounted for 86.8% of the total. English proficiency was not among them, and CVSA did not disclose where it fell within the remaining 13.2%. The smallest-percentage violation in last year's top five was driving with a suspended license, at 5.1% of all driver-related OOS orders — meaning English language proficiency, wherever it ranked, accounted for less than that share in 2025.

In the results of the 2026 International Roadcheck, released Tuesday by CVSA, 361 drivers were taken out of service for failing to demonstrate English proficiency. That represented 9.1% of all driver-related OOS orders. The requirement itself is not new: U.S. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration regulations have long required commercial drivers to be able to read and speak English sufficiently to converse with the public, understand highway traffic signs and signals, respond to official inquiries, and keep records and reports.

That was not the only change in driver-related violations between 2025 and 2026. In 2025, the largest category was Hours of Service violations, with 1,076 cases accounting for 32.4% of all violations, while "no medical card" stood at 493 violations, or 14.9% of all OOS orders. This year, "no medical card" rose sharply to 1,072 violations, or 27% of all driver-related OOS infractions, while HOS violations dropped to 929, or 23.4% of all OOS orders.

The remaining top driver OOS violations this year were:

• No CDL: 620 violations, 15.6% of the total, compared with 810 violations and 24.4% last year
• False logs: 266 violations, 6.7% of the total, compared with 332 violations and 10% last year
• Suspended license: 170 violations and 5.1% last year — this year pushed out of the top five by the inclusion of English language proficiency

Changes since last year

Between last year and this year, English language proficiency — already a regulation on the books — received heightened attention following an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in April 2025 affirming the existing regulation, along with a federal effort to further codify it. The shift in the Roadcheck data comes as enforcement agencies and carriers alike adapt to that heightened scrutiny, and drivers placed out of service for ELP face the same operational consequence as other OOS violations: they cannot operate until the deficiency is addressed. How the category trends in future enforcement periods is likely to be watched closely by carriers that recruit internationally, though the current data covers only this single Roadcheck window.

Other data in the International Roadcheck report showed differences from 2025, but nothing on the scale of the ELP surge in the rankings.

CVSA inspection data for vehicle violations is combined for the U.S., Canada and Mexico; for driver violations, the data covers only the U.S. and Canada.

Total "decals" handed out by inspectors — which signal to other officials that a truck has received a clean bill of health — rose to 11,880 power units from 11,441 last year, with total decals (including trailers and buses) rising to 17,680 from 16,521.

Although cargo securement was an announced priority this year, that emphasis barely moved the numbers: there were 1,737 OOS violations in that category last year and 1,724 this year.

Brakes at the top

The leading category of vehicle violations resulting in an OOS order in 2026 was brake systems, with 3,379 violations, or 24.3% of the total, versus 3,304 and 24.4% last year. The top five vehicle-related OOS categories were unchanged in order between the two years: brake systems, tires, 20% defective brakes, cargo securement and lights. Together they accounted for 84.4% of all vehicle-related OOS orders last year and 86.7% this year. The persistence of brakes at the top of the vehicle-side rankings reflects a long-running pattern in roadside inspection data, one reason brake-related systems have repeatedly been the focus of targeted enforcement campaigns such as CVSA's Brake Safety Week.

Roadcheck's focus for driver violations — "electronic logging device (ELD) tampering, falsification or manipulation," as CVSA described it — did not make the top five. There were 146 OOS orders issued for that violation, 3.7% of the total, making it the seventh-largest category.

Source: FreightWaves