FMCSA's revised DataQs rules for states are now in effect

DataQs is the federal system carriers and drivers use to challenge what sits on their safety record — a violation written up wrong at the scale, a crash recorded against the wrong carrier, a citation later dismissed in court. Requests go to the state agency that produced the record, not to FMCSA itself.

FMCSA published revised requirements for how states handle those requests in a Federal Register notice on April 16, 2026, "Revisions to DataQs Requirements for MCSAP Grant Funding." It is a final notice, not a proposal, and it applies to states receiving Motor Carrier Safety Assistance Program grant money — in practice, the states running roadside inspections. The notice gave states 60 days to submit draft implementation plans, 120 days to finalize them, and 150 days before the requirements took effect, which puts the effective date in mid-September 2026; trade coverage on September 21 reported the requirements are now in force.

The substance of the change is a staged review on a clock. A request gets an initial review and decision; a carrier that disagrees can ask for reconsideration by a separate, independent reviewer — per published summaries of the notice, not the officer who issued the record and not that officer's immediate supervisor; and a final review stage sits above that. Those same summaries put the deadlines at 21 days for the initial decision, 21 days for reconsideration, and 45 days for a final review. FMCSA's stated aim in the notice is to "improve the impartiality, timeliness and fairness in the data review process."

Nothing changes about how a carrier files. You still submit through the DataQs site with the same evidence. What changes is what the state owes you back: a decision inside a defined window, and a path past the person who wrote the record in the first place.