The regulation at the center of this fight is not new. It has been sitting in the Code of Federal Regulations since 1980.
49 CFR 371.3 requires property brokers to keep a record of each transaction, and it gives each party to that transaction the right to review the record. On paper, an owner-operator who hauls a load for a broker already has a federal right to see what the broker billed the shipper. That right has existed for the entire working lives of most people reading this.
In practice, it has gone largely unenforced for four decades. Carriers say brokers evade it in two ways: by writing a waiver of 371.3 rights into the carrier agreement as a condition of doing business, or by simply declining to produce the records and daring the carrier to do something about it. The result is a right that exists in law and mostly does not exist on the ground.
That is the gap FMCSA has been trying to close since 2020, and according to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s 2026 regulatory agenda, the agency is targeting this month for a supplemental notice of proposed rule-making on “Transparency in Property Broker Transactions.” The previous agenda said May.
For owner-operators who have spent years waiting on this, the temptation is to treat the coming proposal as the moment the balance of power shifts. It might be. It also might not be, and understanding why requires taking both sides of this argument seriously.
How the Fight Got Here
The current push started in May 2020, when the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association petitioned FMCSA to amend 371.3. Rates had collapsed in the early pandemic, and carriers accused brokers of widening margins while paying less.
OOIDA asked FMCSA to require brokers to provide an electronic copy of each transaction record automatically within 48 hours of the load being completed. SBTC asked the agency to prohibit brokers from coercing carriers into waiving their review rights as a condition of doing business, and to bar contract clauses that exempt brokers from compliance.
The Transportation Intermediaries Association, which represents brokers and third-party logistics companies, responded with a counter-petition asking FMCSA to eliminate 371.3(c) entirely, arguing the market conditions that justified the rule in 1980 no longer exist.
FMCSA granted the carrier petitions in March 2023 and rejected TIA’s. In November 2024 the agency published a notice of proposed rulemaking that drew close to 7,000 public comments. Then the administration changed, and rather than finalize that version, DOT chose to start over and write a new proposal. That new proposal is what is now expected.
The November 2024 version proposed four changes: requiring brokers to keep transaction records electronically, modernizing what those records must contain, reframing transparency as an affirmative regulatory duty on the broker rather than a passive right the carrier must invoke, and requiring the broker to provide the records within 48 hours of a request. Nobody knows yet how much of that survives into the new draft.
The Case That This Matters Enormously
The carrier argument rests on a point that is difficult to dismiss: this is not a request for a new right. It is a request that an existing one be made real.
OOIDA has been consistent on this. In comments responding to TIA, the association wrote that truckers “want brokers to reasonably comply with existing federal regulations” and are “not asking for anything more than their right to transparency, which is used to help them differentiate good brokers from unscrupulous ones.” OOIDA explicitly rejected the characterization that its recommendations are an attempt to control rates.
The practical arguments carriers make fall into a few buckets.
The first is the waiver problem. A right that a broker can require you to sign away before you get access to their freight is not much of a right. OOIDA Executive Vice President Lewie Pugh, urging members to file comments during the 2024 docket, framed it in those terms: tell the agency “how brokers are making you exempt your rights from 371.3, or not showing you or threatening to blacklist you.” If the new rule prohibits waivers, that changes the contract every small carrier signs.
The second is claims defense. When a broker deducts money from a settlement for an alleged shortage, damage, or service failure, the carrier is often arguing against a number they cannot see the basis for. Access to the transaction record, including charges, payments, dates, and claims documentation, changes what a carrier can dispute and what they simply have to eat.
The third is fraud and double brokering. In an environment where stolen authority and double brokering have become genuine operational risks, a documented, electronic record of who brokered what to whom has value beyond rate visibility.
The fourth is negotiation. Carriers argue that a party negotiating without knowing what the freight actually pays is negotiating at a structural disadvantage, and that transparency is what makes an arms-length negotiation possible.
If the supplemental proposal keeps the 48-hour clock, kills the waivers, and makes production an affirmative duty rather than something a carrier has to ask for and then fight over, that is a meaningful change to how brokered freight works for the smallest operators in the market. That is the case for calling this the most consequential rulemaking for owner-operators in years.
The Case That This Changes Less Than Advertised
The broker industry’s position is not simply that transparency is inconvenient. TIA has made several distinct arguments, and they deserve to be stated accurately rather than caricatured.
TIA’s core structural argument is that the rule is a relic. When 371.3 was written in 1980, brokers commonly acted as commissioned sales agents for motor carriers, and the commission structure made the record relevant to the carrier’s own compensation. TIA argues that model largely no longer exists, that brokers today are principals buying and reselling transportation at risk, and that a rule built for the earlier arrangement does not map onto the current one. In its comments on the 2024 proposal, TIA called the rule “outdated, unnecessary, and burdensome” and described the proposal as “a solution in search of a problem.”
The confidentiality argument is the one with the most operational force. TIA has pointed out that shippers do not want their transportation costs visible to competitors, that shippers therefore write confidentiality provisions into their broker contracts, and that brokers consequently need carriers to waive 371.3 rights in order to serve those accounts at all. If that is accurate, a waiver ban does not simply redistribute leverage. It creates a conflict between a federal disclosure duty and a private confidentiality obligation, and somebody has to lose that fight.
TIA also argues the disclosure would expose proprietary business data and pricing strategy, that gross margin on an individual load is not the same thing as profit after the broker’s operating costs, and that FMCSA should be spending its finite attention on safety and on freight fraud, which TIA has estimated costs the U.S. economy over $1 billion annually. The association has separately questioned whether FMCSA has the statutory authority to promulgate the rule at all.
Set the philosophical arguments aside, though, and there is a more deflating practical question that neither side spends much time on: what would actually change?
Consider the mechanics. A carrier books a load at an agreed rate, hauls it, delivers it, and then, 48 hours after requesting it, receives a record showing the broker billed the shipper considerably more. The rate was already agreed. The load is already delivered. The record is retrospective. It informs the next negotiation with that broker, assuming there is one.
And that assumption is where the enforcement question lives. Nothing in a transparency rule requires a broker to tender freight to a particular carrier. A carrier who systematically demands records on every load has no guarantee the phone keeps ringing. Carriers have told FMCSA they have been threatened with blacklisting for asserting this right already. A rule that makes the right cleaner does not automatically make the retaliation harder.
There is also the matter of whether visibility moves rates. One industry analysis noted that while 79% of carriers surveyed believed transparency could boost their ratessome generally expect the effect on rates to be minimal, because rates are set by capacity and demand rather than by what either party knows about the other’s margin.
And then there is the timeline. What is expected this month is a supplemental proposal, not a final rule. Publication opens a comment period. Comments get reviewed. A final rule follows, then a compliance date. The May target already slipped to July. The 2024 proposal was scrapped entirely after drawing 7,000 comments. Anyone treating this month as the finish line is reading a checkpoint as a conclusion.
What Is Actually Worth Doing Right Now
Whatever a carrier believes about which side has the better argument, a few things are true regardless of how the rule lands.
Read the carrier agreements you have already signed and find the transparency waiver language. It is in most of them. Knowing which of your broker contracts contain a 371.3 waiver tells you exactly which relationships would be affected if a waiver ban survives into the final rule, and it is useful information even if nothing changes.
Make records requests in writing and keep the date. Any version of this rule that includes a 48-hour clock only helps a carrier who can document when the clock started. That habit costs nothing to build now.
File a comment when the proposal publishes. The 2024 docket drew close to 7,000 comments and the agency restarted the process anyway, which cuts both ways: it shows comments do not guarantee an outcome, and it shows the record is what the next round of decisions gets built on. Both OOIDA and TIA will be filing. The docket number will publish with the proposal in the Federal Register.
And keep the rule in proportion. Transparency, if it arrives with teeth, is a tool for evaluating which brokers to work with and for defending against claims. It is not a rate floor, it is not a substitute for knowing your cost per mile, and it will not make a bad lane profitable. The carriers positioned to benefit most from seeing a broker’s numbers are the ones who already know their own.
