How to check a drayage carrier before you hand over a container

The Port's cartage permit, and what it does not prove

PortMiami permits the trucking companies that work its terminals, and it keeps a register of them: company, trading name, permit number, status, effective and expiry dates. That register is published in full on this site, searchable, at /portmiami-permits. The snapshot there came from a Florida public records request and holds 228 permits, 179 of them active, as the Port held them on 17 September 2026.

What a permit tells you is narrow and worth stating exactly: the Port has permitted that motor carrier to work its terminals, and the permit was in the state shown on the day the record was pulled. It is not insurance. It is not federal operating authority. It is not a safety rating. And it is not an endorsement of the company by the Port or by anybody else.

It is also a dated photograph. Permits expire on a rolling calendar, and 49 of the rows in that snapshot sit in renewal rather than active, which is neither current nor lapsed. If the date matters to your decision, the Port is the authority and the page is a starting point.

Why a missing name proves less than it looks like it does

The strongest temptation on a page like that is to search a name, find nothing, and conclude something. It is the wrong conclusion, for three ordinary reasons.

First, the permit belongs to the motor carrier whose driver goes through the gate. A broker, a freight forwarder or a logistics company arranging your move is often not that carrier, so it has no reason to appear in a cartage register at all. Second, a permit can be mid-application, and a register is pulled on one day rather than continuously. Third, the legal name on a permit regularly differs from the name on the invoice, which is why the register carries trading names in a separate column and why a search for the brand you know can miss the entity that holds the permit.

So the useful question is not whether the company you are emailing is in the table. It is who is actually pulling the box, and whether that name checks out. Any company worth hiring will answer that without a fuss.

Federal operating authority, which is the check nobody should skip

This is the one that is free, fast, and genuinely decisive. Interstate motor carriers are registered with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, and FMCSA publishes the record. Ask for the USDOT number and put it into the SAFER company snapshot.

What comes back is the legal name and any trading name, the physical address, the operating status, whether the authority is active and for what, the insurance filed on record, the fleet size, and the crash and inspection history. Read the operating status line first: a carrier can be registered and still not be authorised to operate today, and that distinction has ended more loads than any rate dispute.

A lot of this industry still says MC number out of habit, and SAFER will find a company by either number, but the USDOT number is what to ask for. Two small habits make the lookup worth something: check that the legal name on the snapshot matches the name on the contract and the insurance certificate, and check that the address is not a different company in a different state. A number that belongs to somebody else passes every test you run on it.

Ask for the certificate, not the sentence

Everybody is insured. The question is for how much, against what, and until when, and the only version of that answer worth having is a certificate of insurance.

Ask for it to come from the carrier's agent or broker rather than retyped by the carrier, and read four things on it: the named insured, which should match the carrier on your contract and on SAFER; the auto liability limit; the cargo limit, in figures; and the policy period, because a certificate issued in March describes March.

Then do the arithmetic nobody does. A cargo limit of 100,000 dollars is normal and it is not enough for a container worth half a million, and the gap is not the insurer's problem or the carrier's, it is yours. High value freight is a conversation before the booking, not a claim afterwards. If the number is short, the fixes exist: a higher limit for the move, or cargo cover you buy yourself.

While you have the certificate open, note that FMCSA also shows insurance on file. The two should not contradict each other, and if they do, that is worth asking about rather than guessing at.

For container work, the UIIA

This one is specific to intermodal, and it is invisible to most shippers until it stops a move. Ocean carriers, chassis providers and terminals do not simply let a trucking company take their equipment. The Uniform Intermodal Interchange and Facilities Access Agreement, the UIIA, is the standard contract that governs that handover, and it is administered by the Intermodal Association of North America.

A carrier that is a UIIA participant has agreed to the terms, filed the insurance those terms require, and is set up with the individual equipment providers it interchanges with. Participation is not blanket: a carrier can be in good standing with one ocean line and not approved with another, which is a real and routine reason a particular box cannot be collected by a particular truck.

So for container drayage the question has two halves. Is the carrier a UIIA participant, and is it in good standing with the line whose box you are moving? Ask both. A company that works containers every day will know the answer for your line without looking it up.

The driver's credential

The last link is a person. Secure areas of a port require a Transportation Worker Identification Credential, issued by the TSA, and a driver without a valid one cannot enter the terminal at all. No permit, no authority and no insurance certificate substitutes for it.

You do not need to inspect anybody's card. What is worth asking is the depth question: how many of the drivers who could be assigned to your box hold a current TWIC. A carrier whose credentialed drivers are a handful of people is a carrier whose bad week becomes your bad week, and renewal is the quiet version of the same risk, because a card that lapses takes a driver off the port until it is replaced.

There is a fuller account of what the credential does and does not do in our post on TWIC and the terminal gate.

And then the unglamorous habit: get it in writing

Every check above is about who the carrier is. This last one is about what you agreed, and it prevents more arguments than all of them combined.

Before the move, get the rate and the accessorials in writing. Not just the line haul: the fuel surcharge and how it is calculated, the chassis charge and whose chassis it is, pre-pull, chassis split, storage, detention after the free hours and what those hours are, per diem, overweight, and the wait time at your dock. A drayage invoice is mostly accessorials, and almost every billing dispute in this business is a conversation that happened out loud and then happened differently on paper.

The same applies to the three facts that decide whether the move is even possible: the last free day, whether the box is clear of holds, and when your dock can receive. Send those with the request rather than after it.

None of this is a guarantee. It is a floor, and it is a floor you can build in about twenty minutes: the register for the permit, SAFER for the authority, the certificate for the insurance, the UIIA question for the equipment, the TWIC question for the depth, and a written rate for the invoice. A carrier that answers all six plainly has told you most of what you needed to know about working with them.