Roadside inspection totals get quoted as if they were a grade. They are not. They count what inspectors found on the days they inspected, filtered by which trucks got pulled over and where. Still, when a state's numbers sit far from the national baseline, the gap tells you where to look. North Carolina is useful to read closely because the gap is large in one category and nearly flat in another. The full state breakdown is on the North Carolina state page.
The dataset covers August 2023 through October 2026, 39 months. Everything below comes from that window.
The headline totals
Inspectors in North Carolina recorded 304,892 inspections and wrote 157,424 violations, about 0.52 violations per inspection. Of those violations, 53,986 were out-of-service. The state's out-of-service rate is 34.3, against 17.7 nationally on the same measure. That is nearly double the national figure.
Read that carefully. A higher OOS share does not by itself mean North Carolina trucks are worse. It means that when inspectors find a violation in this state, a larger share of those violations are serious enough to stop the vehicle. The question is which side of the vehicle is generating them.
Vehicles carry most of the gap
Split the totals by inspection side and the picture sharpens.
- Vehicle violations: 98,382 in North Carolina, roughly 62 percent of all violations. Of those, 39,651 were out-of-service. That puts the vehicle OOS share at about 40.3 percent, against about 23.9 percent nationally (1,701,265 out of 7,122,488).
- Driver violations: 57,620 in North Carolina, with 14,335 out-of-service. That is about 24.9 percent, against about 24.0 percent nationally (563,982 out of 2,345,126).
The driver side is close to the national baseline. The vehicle side is not. About 73 percent of North Carolina's out-of-service violations are vehicle-side, and the vehicle OOS share is roughly 16 points above the national rate.
What does that mean in practice? A vehicle out-of-service violation is a defect that keeps the truck from moving until it is corrected. Those are the items a driver can often catch on a walk-around and a fleet can catch through preventive maintenance and repair records. If the gap were on the driver side, the fix would look like hours-of-service training and log audits. Because the gap is on the vehicle side, the fix looks like tighter pre-trip inspection and clearer repair closeout.
Hazmat is small but worth a look
Hazmat-related figures in the dataset show 331 violations, 103 of them out-of-service, which is about 31.1 percent. The national figure on the same basis is about 26.6 percent (14,992 out of 56,463). The sample is small enough that one or two inspections could shift it noticeably, so I would not build policy on it. I would watch it in later data.
How to read this without fooling yourself
A few limits matter here.
- Enforcement choices shape the numbers. Where inspectors work, which corridors they cover, and which carriers they select all affect the totals. A state with more targeted enforcement will show different rates from one with random sampling.
- Equipment age and mix matter. A state with older vehicle fleets or heavier local traffic may produce more vehicle out-of-service findings for reasons unrelated to any single carrier. The dataset cannot separate these factors.
- Denominators are everything. Violations per inspection (0.52 here) only means something compared with another state or the national figure, and only if the inspection mix is similar.
- Averages hide carrier-level variation. A state rate says nothing about your own company. The carrier-level view lives in FMCSA's Safety Measurement System, and the federal inspection rules that define these categories are published in 49 CFR, Chapter III, Subchapter B.
What I would do with this
If you run trucks in North Carolina, I would stop reading the state average as a verdict and start asking three questions about your own inspection history. What share of your violations are vehicle-side? What share of those are out-of-service? And how long does a vehicle-side defect sit between the first write-up and the repair close-out?
Those three numbers will tell you more than the state total does. The state total tells you where the pressure is. Your records tell you whether you are feeling it.
Key takeaways
- North Carolina logged 304,892 inspections and 157,424 violations over 39 months, with an out-of-service rate of 34.3 against 17.7 nationally.
- Vehicle-side violations drive the gap: 40.3 percent of vehicle violations were out-of-service, against 23.9 percent nationally.
- Driver-side out-of-service rates (24.9 percent) are close to the national figure (24.0 percent).
- State totals reflect enforcement and equipment mix as much as carrier behavior. Use them to set priorities, then check your own records.
For a closer look at how these categories break down across the state, start with the North Carolina page on VioCodes, and compare other states on the map or in the broader insights section.