Between August 2023 and October 2026, inspectors in Mississippi logged 104,376 roadside inspections and wrote 79,093 violations. Of those violations, 17,363 were out-of-service. That puts the state's out-of-service rate at 22 percent, compared with 17.6 percent nationally over the same 39-month window. You can see the state's own numbers on the Mississippi state page.
Before reading anything into the 22, define it. In this dataset the rate is out-of-service violations as a share of all violations written, not out-of-service inspections as a share of inspections. Measured per inspection, Mississippi produced about 16.6 out-of-service violations for every 100 inspections. It also wrote 0.76 violations per inspection on average. So the state is not writing a lot of findings per stop. The findings it does write are more often the kind that take a vehicle or driver off the road. That pattern is what needs explaining.
Two sides, two different stories
The aggregate hides the split. Break the same window into driver and vehicle violations and the picture changes.
Driver side: 30,705 driver violations, 8,334 of them out-of-service, for a rate of 27.1 percent. The national driver-side figure is 565,351 out of 2,344,141, or 24.1 percent. Mississippi runs above the national number here.
Vehicle side: 48,150 vehicle violations, 9,029 of them out-of-service, for a rate of 18.8 percent. The national vehicle-side figure is 1,703,633 out of 7,100,282, or 24.0 percent. Mississippi runs below the national number here.
So the vehicle side is pulling the other way. Mississippi's vehicle findings are less likely than the national average to end in an out-of-service order, and its driver findings are more likely. Because the driver and vehicle out-of-service counts add up exactly to the overall totals in both datasets, the gap between Mississippi and the nation sits on the driver side.
Hazardous materials is a small base. Mississippi recorded 306 hazmat violations, with 69 out-of-service, a rate of 22.5 percent, against a national hazmat rate of 26.6 percent. Those counts are too small to draw conclusions from, so I would treat them as context only.
What the split does and does not tell you
The mechanics matter. A driver out-of-service order stops the person from operating until the problem is cleared, and the load often sits until a qualified driver is available. A vehicle out-of-service order parks the equipment until the defect is repaired. Those consequences create different costs and different delays, so a fleet running in Mississippi needs to know which side is generating its exposure.
Some limits on what I can say from aggregate counts:
- These are statewide totals. They do not tell you anything about a specific carrier's record.
- The dataset does not break out individual violation codes here, so I am not claiming which driver-side findings are driving the rate.
- The category totals do not reconcile cleanly to the overall violation count in this dataset. For that reason I am comparing out-of-service rates within each category rather than shares of total violations.
- The coverage window is August 2023 through October 2026. Trends in a different period could look different.
The primary source for the regulations behind these categories is Title 49 of the Code of Federal Regulations, and FMCSA publishes the underlying inspection data through its data and statistics page.
Where I would look first
If you run in Mississippi, do not ignore the vehicle side just because its rate is lower than national. Nearly 9,000 vehicle violations in this window still ended out-of-service. But the gap that makes Mississippi stand out is on the driver side. Walk through your driver file the way a roadside officer would: credentials, current status, and the records an officer can pull up in a few minutes. Check that the paperwork is accurate before the truck is on the shoulder, not after.
If you want to compare this against your own lanes or other states, start with the state insights index and use the map view to see how neighboring states differ.
Key takeaways
- Mississippi's out-of-service rate is 22 percent (17,363 out-of-service out of 79,093 violations), against 17.6 percent nationally over the same window.
- Driver-side out-of-service runs 27.1 percent in Mississippi versus 24.1 percent nationally. Vehicle-side runs 18.8 percent versus 24.0 percent.
- The overall gap comes from the driver side. Vehicle findings in Mississippi end out-of-service less often than the national average.