English Just Made the Top Five: Roadcheck 2026 Parked 361 Drivers for Language — and 'No Medical Card' Doubled

The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance released the results of the 2026 International Roadcheck on Tuesday, and at first glance it looks like a rerun of last year: 54,575 inspections over three days in May, 19% of vehicles placed out of service, 5.8% of drivers. Read the driver table, though, and the story changes. Two categories have swapped weight — hours of service is no longer the top reason a driver gets parked, a missing medical card is — and a violation that wasn't on last year's list at all now ranks fourth: English language proficiency, 361 drivers.

The numbers that didn't move

Inspectors in the U.S., Canada and Mexico conducted 54,575 inspections on May 12–14, down from 56,178 during the 2025 event. They placed 10,350 vehicles out of service, a 19% rate against 18.1% last year, and 3,184 drivers, 5.8% against 5.9%. Put the other way: 81% of vehicles and 94.2% of drivers had no out-of-service violation at all. Inspectors handed out 11,880 CVSA decals to power units (11,411 in 2025) and 17,680 in total including trailers and buses (16,521).

The numbers that did: the driver list, rewritten

CVSA reports driver violations for the U.S. and Canada combined (Mexico's out-of-service violations were all vehicle-side). Here is the 2026 top five, with 2025 alongside.

The category that fell off the list is driving on a suspended license, which was fifth last year with 170 orders (5.1%). The 2026 driver focus area — ELD tampering, falsification or manipulation — did not crack the top five either: 146 out-of-service orders, 3.7%, seventh overall.

CVSA's release offers no explanation for the medical-card surge. One change does sit between the two Roadchecks: since June 23, 2025, FMCSA's medical certification integration rule has routed CDL medical certificates electronically from examiners to state licensing agencies, and in states that have completed the switch the paper card is no longer the proof of certification it used to be. Whether that transition — expired certificates, records that never reached the state, drivers still carrying paper — is what inspectors found at the roadside, the data does not say. It only says the count went from 493 to 1,072.

Vehicle side: brakes, brakes, and brakes

Nothing surprising here. Brake systems were the top vehicle violation for the second year running — 3,379 out-of-service orders, 24.3% of the total (3,304 and 24.4% in 2025). Add the '20% defective brakes' category and braking accounted for 5,451 orders, 39.1% of every vehicle placed out of service (41.1% last year). The same five categories filled the top of the list both years — brake systems, tires, 20% defective brakes, cargo securement and lights, together 84.4% of vehicle OOS orders — with one shuffle: cargo securement, this year's announced vehicle focus, moved up to fourth with 1,724 orders (12.4%) from 1,549 (11.4%), trading places with lights at 1,659 (11.9%).

Roadcheck is three days a year, but the criteria inspectors used in May are the same ones they use every other day. The lesson of 2026 is that the driver side of an inspection has changed more than the truck side: the paperwork and the conversation at the window now park more drivers than the logbook does.