How many Clearinghouse queries do you need?
Buy too few and you miss an annual query — a violation an investigator can prove from FMCSA's own records. Buy blind and you overpay. Enter your driver count and expected hires to get an exact 12-month plan: limited queries, full queries, and what it costs.
14-day free trial · No card required · Cancel anytime
Tell us about your operation
Everything stays in your browser — nothing is sent or stored.
CDL drivers you employ right now who are subject to DOT drug & alcohol testing.
Each one needs a pre-employment full query before they drive.
Anyone you already know has a Clearinghouse record. Their limited query will come back “match found”.
Your own assumption — not required by rule. Covers unplanned hires and surprise “match found” results.
Queries you need over the next 12 months
8 limited · 3 full| Requirement | Type | Queries |
|---|---|---|
Annual limited queries — current CDL drivers One per driver, at least once every 12 months (rolling). 49 CFR 382.701(b)(1)–(b)(2) | limited | 8 |
Pre-employment full queries — new hires Every new CDL driver needs a full query before performing safety-sensitive functions. 49 CFR 382.701(a) | full | 3 |
Spare queries — 10% buffer Your assumption, not a rule. Covers unplanned hires and any limited query that unexpectedly returns “match found”. Not a regulatory requirement | Spare | 2 |
| Required by rule | 11 | |
| Total queries to purchase | 13 | |
13 queries × $1.25, the flat rate FMCSA publishes for both limited and full queries. FMCSA sells queries in bundles; it doesn’t publish the individual bundle sizes, so buy the smallest bundle that covers 13.
FMCSA also sells a $24,500 unlimited annual plan — at $1.25 a query that only pays off past roughly 19,600 queries a year, so it isn’t for you.
What you must do, and when
- Before every new hire drives. Run a full query. The driver must be registered in the Clearinghouse and give specific electronic consent first — you cannot do this one with a paper form, and you cannot let them perform a safety-sensitive function until it comes back clean.
- At least once every 12 months, per driver. Run a limited query on each of your 8 drivers. The clock is a rolling 365 days from that driver’s last query — not January to December. This is the requirement carriers miss most often.
- Within 24 hours of any “match found”. If a limited query says information exists, you must run a full query within 24 hours. Miss that window and the driver must stop performing safety-sensitive functions until the full query is done and comes back with no prohibitions.
- Keep the receipts. Query results belong in each driver’s qualification file. An auditor reads the file — if the query result isn’t in it, you didn’t run it.
General information, not legal advice. Query requirements and prices are set by FMCSA and can change — confirm the current rules and your query balance at clearinghouse.fmcsa.dot.gov.
You need one limited query per current CDL driver, per rolling 12 months, plus one full query per new hire before that driver performs any safety-sensitive function. If a limited query comes back “match found,” you owe a full query within 24 hours or the driver has to stop driving. So a carrier with 20 drivers hiring 6 people next year should plan on at least 26 queries — 20 limited, 6 full — plus a few spares. At FMCSA’s published $1.25 flat rate, that’s about $32.50. Owner-operators under their own authority cannot query themselves and must designate a C/TPA to do it for them.
Limited vs. full query — they are not interchangeable
Almost every Clearinghouse mistake traces back to one confusion: treating the two query types as the same purchase. They cost the same, but they do completely different things and they need completely different consent.
A limited query answers exactly one question — is there anything in this driver’s Clearinghouse record? It returns yes or no. It does not show you what the record says. In exchange for telling you so little, it needs only a general consent from the driver, which you can collect on paper or electronically outside the Clearinghouse and keep on file. That general consent can cover multiple limited queries over a period you specify, which is why most carriers collect it once at hire.
A full query releases the actual record — verified positive tests, refusals, actual-knowledge violations, and where the driver stands in the return-to-duty process. Because it releases real information, 49 CFR 382.701(a)(2) requires the driver to give specific consent electronically, inside the Clearinghouse, on their own account. You cannot substitute a signed paper form. This is the step that stalls hiring: if your new driver has never registered with the Clearinghouse, they have to do that before you can complete the query, and you cannot put them to work until it clears.
| Limited query | Full query | |
|---|---|---|
| What it shows you | Only whether information exists in the driver’s record. The information itself is not released. | The full record — verified positive tests, refusals, actual-knowledge violations, and return-to-duty status. |
| When it’s required | Optional — it may be used in lieu of a full query to satisfy the annual query for a current driver. | Always for pre-employment. Also within 24 hours of any limited query that returns “match found.” |
| Consent it needs | General consent from the driver, collected and retained outside the Clearinghouse. Can cover a defined period. | Specific consent, given electronically by the driver inside their own Clearinghouse account, per query. |
| Driver must be registered? | No. | Yes — they cannot give electronic consent without a Clearinghouse account. |
| Regulation | 49 CFR 382.701(b)(2) | 49 CFR 382.701(a)(2), 382.701(b)(3) |
| Price | $1.25, per FMCSA’s published rate. | $1.25 — the same. There is no premium for a full query. |
The annual query runs on a rolling 12 months, not a calendar year
49 CFR 382.701(b)(1) says employers must query the Clearinghouse “at least once per year” for every employee subject to Part 382 drug and alcohol testing. FMCSA reads “once per year” as once within any 365-day period, measured from the date you last queried that specific driver. Query a driver on December 1 of one year and their next query is due by December 1 of the next. Nothing resets in January.
That is why this requirement gets missed so reliably. A carrier with 30 drivers does not have one annual deadline — it has thirty separate deadlines scattered across the year, each anchored to a different hire date or a different past query. Nobody misses it out of ignorance. They miss it because the deadline for one driver landed in a week when nobody was looking at that driver. The Clearinghouse will not email you.
A driver’s pre-employment full query starts their clock. From then on it is your job to run something — limited or full — inside every rolling 365 days. Note that a full query also satisfies the annual requirement; the limited query is simply the cheaper-in-effort option that most carriers default to because it does not require the driver to log in and consent each time.
What happens when you miss it
A missed annual query is a violation of 382.701(b), and it is one of the easiest violations in all of the FMCSA regulations for an investigator to prove. Most compliance findings require reading a file and forming a judgment. This one does not: the Clearinghouse itself is the system of record, and it holds a timestamped log of every query you have ever run. An investigator pulls your query history and compares it to your driver roster. There is no reconstructing it after the fact, no “we did it but the paperwork is missing,” and no way to backdate a query. Either the query is in FMCSA’s log on time, or it is not.
The related failure is worse. If a limited query returns “match found” and you do not run the full query within 24 hours, the rule is not merely that you owe a query — it is that you must not allow that driver to continue performing safety-sensitive functions until the full query is done and confirms there are no prohibitions. Every dispatch after that window is a driver operating while you were required to have them parked. That is a far more serious finding than a late query, and it is why the calculator above budgets a second query for drivers you already know have a record: you know their limited query is going to come back “match found,” so buy the follow-up now rather than discovering you are out of queries with a 24-hour clock running.
Query results are also part of the record an auditor expects to see in the driver’s qualification file alongside the MVR, medical certificate and testing history. Our DQF checklist generator builds the full document list for a given driver, and the DOT audit readiness quiz walks the wider set of things an investigator will ask for. For the testing procedures themselves — collection, MRO review, return-to-duty — see Part 40.
Owner-operators: you cannot query yourself
If you run under your own authority and you drive, you are simultaneously the employer and the driver — and FMCSA does not let you be both for query purposes. 49 CFR 382.705(b)(6) is explicit: an employer who employs himself or herself as a driver must designate a Consortium/Third-Party Administrator to comply with the employer requirements. You designate the C/TPA in your Clearinghouse account, and they run the pre-employment and annual queries on you.
This surprises a lot of new authorities, because the rest of the obligation feels like it should shrink with the fleet. It does not. A one-truck carrier owes the same annual query on its one driver that a 300-truck carrier owes on each of its 300. The only thing that changes is who is allowed to press the button. If you are already in a random testing consortium — and you should be — that same C/TPA can usually handle your queries. Other requirements that scale down but never disappear are covered in our DOT compliance guide, and the practical questions drivers themselves ask are answered in the driver answers library.
How FMCSA sells queries
Queries are prepaid. You buy a query plan from the Clearinghouse before you can run anything, and the balance draws down as you query. FMCSA publishes a flat rate of $1.25 per query — the same price whether the query is limited or full — and a $24,500 annual unlimited plan for employers expecting very high volume. Simple arithmetic puts the break-even around 19,600 queries a year, so the unlimited plan is not a consideration for any normal carrier.
Plans are sold in bundles sized for different fleets, and FMCSA’s guidance is to pick a bundle large enough to cover the drivers you currently employ. FMCSA does not publish the specific bundle increments on its plan page, so rather than guess at them, the calculator gives you a defensible 12-month total and leaves you to buy the smallest bundle that covers it. You can always buy another plan mid-year — but you cannot run a query on an empty balance, which is exactly the wrong thing to discover at hour 23 of a 24-hour full-query window.
Knowing the number is the easy half
The hard half is remembering thirty rolling deadlines that never land on the same day twice. Fleetive tracks each driver’s query date alongside their CDL, medical card and testing records, and flags the annual query before the 365 days run out — so the one requirement that is trivially provable from FMCSA’s own logs never becomes your finding.
Track query deadlines free →14-day free trial · No card required · Cancel anytime
Clearinghouse query questions
How many Clearinghouse queries do I need for my carrier?
One limited query per current CDL driver per rolling 12 months, plus one full query for every new CDL driver you hire (the pre-employment query must be a full query). Add a second, full query for any driver whose limited query returns “match found” — that one is due within 24 hours. So a carrier with 8 drivers hiring 3 people needs at least 11 queries in the next year: 8 limited and 3 full.
What is the difference between a limited query and a full query?
A limited query tells you only whether information exists in a driver’s Clearinghouse record — it does not release that information to you. It needs the driver’s general consent, which you can collect outside the Clearinghouse. A full query releases the actual record and requires the driver’s specific electronic consent given inside the Clearinghouse itself. Pre-employment queries must be full queries; the annual query can be a limited query.
Is the annual query based on the calendar year?
No. FMCSA tracks it on a rolling 365-day basis from the date of the driver’s last query. If you queried a driver on December 1, 2025, that driver’s next query is due by December 1, 2026 — not January 1. This is why the annual query is the requirement carriers miss most: there is no single company-wide date, there are as many due dates as you have drivers.
What happens if a limited query comes back “match found”?
Under 49 CFR 382.701(b)(3) you must conduct a full query within 24 hours of the limited query. If you do not, you must not allow that driver to continue performing any safety-sensitive function until the full query is complete and the results confirm the record contains no prohibitions. Budget a second query for any driver you already know has a record.
What happens if I miss the annual query?
It is a violation of 49 CFR 382.701(b) and one of the drug-and-alcohol findings investigators look for, because it is trivially provable — the Clearinghouse itself holds the timestamped record of every query you ran. There is no way to backdate it. Missing annual queries commonly show up as an acute or critical violation in a compliance investigation and feed the Controlled Substances/Alcohol BASIC.
How do owner-operators run Clearinghouse queries on themselves?
They cannot. Under 49 CFR 382.705(b)(6), an employer who employs himself or herself as a driver must designate a Consortium/Third-Party Administrator (C/TPA) to meet the employer query requirements on their behalf. You still need the pre-employment full query and the annual query on yourself — a C/TPA just has to be the one running them.
How much does a Clearinghouse query cost?
FMCSA publishes a flat $1.25 per query, for both limited and full queries, on its Query Plan page, and a $24,500 annual unlimited plan for very high-volume employers. Queries are sold in bundles that you buy in advance from the Clearinghouse site; FMCSA does not publish the individual bundle sizes on that page, so buy the smallest bundle that covers your 12-month total. Prices are set by FMCSA and can change — confirm before you buy.
General information, not legal advice. Query requirements, consent rules and prices are set by FMCSA and can change — confirm the current requirements with the FMCSA Clearinghouse and 49 CFR Part 382 Subpart G before you rely on any figure here.
One requirement, thirty different due dates
Fleetive tracks every driver's Clearinghouse query date next to their CDL, medical card and testing records — and tells you before the 365 days run out. Start your 14-day free trial, no card required.