The fight that owner-operators and small fleets have been waiting two decades to win is finally getting another swing this month. FMCSA is on the brink of publishing a second Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on broker transparency, after the first 2024 proposal collected nearly 7,000 public comments and then stalled when the agency declined to issue a final rule. The second NPRM is targeted for May 2026, and based on the agency’s published priority list and OOIDA’s most recent filings, it is going to look very different from the first attempt. If you run between one and ten trucks, your margin on every brokered load is on the table.

Broker transparency, in plain English, is the rule that says when a property broker books a load and hands it to a motor carrier, the carrier has the legal right to see what the broker charged the shipper, what the broker paid the carrier, and the margin in between. The regulation has been on the books since 1980 inside 49 CFR 371.3, but the way brokers have used contractual waivers, slow-walked record requests, and routed shippers through opaque tender systems has made the right effectively unenforceable for the average small carrier. The Trucking Info coverage of the 2024 proposal lays out the history and the carrier complaints that drove FMCSA to revisit the rule.

The Core Of The Proposed Rule

The structural ask that OOIDA and the small carrier coalition have been pushing in advance of the second NPRM is the 48-hour electronic records mandate. Under that approach, brokers would be required to push an electronic copy of every transaction record to the motor carrier within 48 hours after the contractual service is completed, automatically, with no formal request necessary. Brokers would be barred from including any contract language that requires the carrier to waive its right to access. They would also be barred from retaliating against carriers who exercise the right by removing them from load boards or future tender offers. Those three pieces together are what the small-carrier side calls hard transparency, and they are the difference between a rule that gets followed and one that lives only on paper.

The broker side is pushing back hard, primarily through the Transportation Intermediaries Association, which has argued that pricing transparency interferes with the competitive negotiation that brokers depend on for margin and that automatic transmission of pricing data exposes broker proprietary information to competitors. Both sides have a point. The agency will have to weigh how much friction the disclosure adds against the documented carrier-side abuses that grew through the 2020 to 2023 freight cycle.

Why The First Rule Stalled

The 2024 NPRM ran into three problems that the agency is now trying to fix. The first was scope creep. The original proposal tried to do too many things at once, including expanded recordkeeping, expanded electronic disclosure, and a parallel attempt to reach broker financial responsibility. The bond piece was eventually carved out and finalized separately as the Broker and Freight Forwarder Financial Responsibility rule, which is now in full effect as of January 16, 2026. The remaining transparency piece sat in limbo. The second problem was enforcement. The 2024 proposal did not include a private right of action, which meant carriers who got stiffed had nowhere to take a complaint except back to FMCSA, which is not designed as a small-claims forum. The third problem was technical: how exactly does an electronic record get delivered, in what format, and through which channel. The CDLLife coverage of the delay walked through the agency’s reasoning for going back to the drawing board.

What The Second NPRM Is Expected To Include

Based on agency communications and the regulatory record so far, expect the second NPRM to keep the 48-hour electronic delivery concept but allow brokers more flexibility in format. Expect the waiver-prohibition piece to stay, because the agency has signaled in writing that contractual waivers are inconsistent with the underlying statutory right. Expect retaliation protections to be strengthened, because OOIDA’s comment record on the first NPRM detailed pattern-and-practice retaliation by some larger brokers. Expect a private right of action to remain off the table, because the statutory authority for that lives in Congress and not at FMCSA. Expect the comment window to be 60 days, with a likely close in late July if the May publication target holds.

There is a real question whether the second NPRM will define how transmission has to happen. The TIA is pushing for an API standard, the small-carrier coalition is pushing for plain PDF or email-attached delivery so that owner-operators without TMS subscriptions can use the right. The compromise the agency seems to be tracking toward is broker’s choice of format, with a fallback to PDF on request, which works for small carriers but does not require everyone to be on a single platform.

What Transparency Actually Does To Your Margin Math

The honest version of the margin story is that transparency does not guarantee you a higher rate. What it guarantees is information. If you book a load at $2.10 per mile and the broker’s transaction record shows the shipper paid $3.40 per mile, you now know that the broker held 38 percent of the gross. That is not automatically a problem. Brokers add value through sales, accessorial management, and credit risk. But knowing the number changes the negotiation. The next time you bid a similar lane, you can ask for a rate closer to the shipper’s actual cost, or you can decide to chase a direct shipper relationship.

For carriers who are already paying margin to a factor in addition to a broker, the stacking math is brutal. We laid out the working numbers and the negotiation framework in the recent freight factoring playbook. If a broker is holding 25 percent and a factor is holding another 3 percent on a $2.10-per-mile load, you are actually netting a hair over $1.50 per mile on the truck. Transparency tells you which of those numbers is movable. The factor side is contractually fixed. The broker side, once you have the data, is not.

The Practical Risk: Retaliation

Every small carrier we have talked to about transparency raises the same fear: the moment I ask for the records, the broker will mark my MC as no-load and the work dries up. That fear is rational. The current 371.3 records request process is technically protected, but enforcement of that protection is anemic. Carriers who pull records repeatedly have, in practice, been quietly dropped by certain brokers. The second NPRM is expected to address this through more explicit retaliation language and through a complaint mechanism that does not require a federal lawsuit. The Land Line magazine archive and the OOIDA legal team have been particularly aggressive on documenting retaliation cases as comment evidence, so expect the agency’s retaliation provisions to be sharper than they were in 2024.

The practical move for small carriers in the meantime is to keep the books that prove retaliation if it happens. Save every email, every load tender, every offer-and-acceptance string, and every rejection that follows a records request. If the second NPRM gives a real complaint pathway, you want to walk in with documentation, not a complaint based on feel.

Joint Liability And The California Parallel

The transparency rule is happening at the same moment that California’s AB5 enforcement is reshaping joint liability between shippers, brokers, and motor carriers. We covered the $900,000 enforcement action that put California’s joint-liability framework on the map in the AB5 trucking enforcement piece. Transparency does not change AB5, but it does change the negotiation between carrier and broker because once a carrier can see what the broker collected, the carrier is in a stronger position when an audit comes in and the parties have to allocate costs and risk.

What To Do Before The Rule Drops

First, audit your existing broker contracts and pull out any clauses that purport to waive records access. Some will be explicit and call out 371.3 by name. Others will be camouflaged as confidentiality clauses or pricing-information non-disclosures. Mark them and prepare to renegotiate when the rule lands. Second, build the data muscle now. Even before a rule, you have the right under existing 371.3 to request transaction records. Pick five recent loads from each of your top brokers and submit a records request. The brokers that respond inside 30 days are the ones you want to scale with. The brokers that stall or refuse are the ones you should be planning to wind down with.

Third, plan to comment. The first NPRM drew nearly 7,000 comments, and the agency reads them. Your individual experience as a small carrier is the most persuasive evidence the rulemaking record can hold. Write 500 words. Tell a specific story about a specific load. Identify the broker only if you are comfortable. Send it in through regulations.gov when the comment window opens. The TIA will mobilize hundreds of broker comments. If the carrier side does not match that effort, the final rule will lean toward the broker preferences.

Bottom Line

FMCSA’s second broker transparency NPRM is expected to publish this month and will likely lock in a 48-hour electronic records mandate, a contractual waiver prohibition, and sharper retaliation protections. The rule will not raise your rates on its own. What it will do is hand you the information needed to negotiate a fairer split with the brokers you stay with, and to walk away from the ones who keep too much. The first comment window drew 7,000 comments. The second one will close the loop. Small carriers who file thoughtful, specific comments will move the regulatory needle. The cost is 30 minutes and a clear story. The payoff is a rule that finally puts the small fleet on the same side of the information line as the broker.

Questions Carriers Ask

What is actually in the second broker transparency proposal?

The core is a requirement that brokers provide electronic transaction records, showing what the shipper paid, within a defined window after the load. It follows an enormous volume of industry comments, most pushing for enforceable access. The details that matter are the deadline, the format, and how waivers get handled.

Why did the first broker transparency rule fail to help carriers?

The right existed on paper, but brokers routinely required carriers to waive it in their contracts, and there was no practical enforcement. A right you must sign away to get freight isn’t a right. That history is why the second attempt focuses on making access automatic and harder to contract around.

How would rate transparency actually help my negotiations?

Knowing the spread on loads you’ve hauled tells you which brokers price fairly and which take outsized margins on your work. Over time that data shapes which relationships you invest in and how hard you push on rate. Negotiating blind is exactly what the current system produces, and transparency ends the blindness.

Keep learning: How to Calculate Your Cost Per Mile: The Three-Line Cost Book Small Carriers Use to Set a Rate Floor They Can Defend and How to Extend Credit to Direct Shippers Without Becoming Their Bank: The Four-C Credit System Small Carriers Use to Get Paid on Every Invoice.

Innovative Logistics Group