How to verify a piano mover
Every source telling you how to check a mover is itself a mover. We are not one. Below are five checks against public records, all free, all doable in about ten minutes, and none of which require you to hand over your phone number to anybody.
Live USDOT lookup
Straight from the US Department of Transportation carrier census.
This is a plain web form and works with JavaScript switched off. If our lookup is ever down, the same record is onSAFER, the government's own search.
Check 1 — get the USDOT number and the legal name
Ask for both, in writing, before anything else. Any company that moves household goods across a state line for money must be registered with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and must have a USDOT number. A mover who will not give you one, gives you a number that turns up nothing, or gives you a number registered to a different company name, has answered your question.
Trading names are normal and are not a warning sign — the census records a legal name and a "doing business as" name, and they are often different. What matters is that the record exists and describes the same business, in the same city, with a phone number you recognise.
Check 2 — operating authority, not just registration
A USDOT number on its own only means the carrier is in the system. For an interstate household goods move you also want active operating authority for household goods, which is a separate thing, shown on the SAFER company snapshot along with the MC docket number. Our lookup links you straight to it for whatever number you searched.
If a mover only works inside one state, they may legitimately have no interstate authority. That is check 5 territory, not a red flag.
Check 3 — insurance on file
The FMCSA Licensing and Insurance system publishes whether a carrier's required insurance filings are active, and which insurer made them. Search it atli-public.fmcsa.dot.gov. An expired or cancelled filing on a carrier that is still taking bookings is the single most useful thing you can find in ten minutes.
Federal filings are the floor, not the ceiling. For the move itself ask the mover's insurer for a certificate of insurance, and settle the valuation question before you sign — the default liability is60 cents per pound, which on a 502 lb upright is $301.20.
Check 4 — read the record, not the star rating
The SAFER snapshot shows inspections, crashes and the safety rating. Most piano specialists are one-truck operations with a thin file, and a thin file is not bad news. What is worth reading is a carrier whose registration lapsed and restarted, a fleet size that does not match the operation being sold to you, or an out-of-service order.
We publish the same federal fields on every company page in this directory, with the date we checked and a link to the government source, so you can start from a company profile instead of a search box.
Check 5 — the state register for a local move
A move that starts and ends inside one state is regulated by that state. The FMCSA record may say very little about it, or nothing at all. Four states run the registers people ask about most.
| State | Who regulates movers | What to check |
|---|---|---|
| California | California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) | Household goods carriers operating inside California need a CPUC permit, a T-number. Search the permit holder list by name. |
| Texas | Texas Department of Motor Vehicles | Intrastate household goods movers must hold a TxDMV motor carrier registration. The TxDMV runs a public mover search. |
| Florida | Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (FDACS) | Intrastate movers must register with FDACS. Registration and complaint history are searchable by company name. |
| Illinois | Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC) | Illinois household goods carriers need ICC authority. The Commission publishes the licensed carrier list. |
These are statements about the state registers, not about any company we list. Requirements change; the linked page is the authority.
The free piano scam
This one is not about bad movers. It is an advance-fee fraud that uses a piano as the bait, and it is running at industrial scale. It arrives as an email or a message board post offering a piano free to a good home, usually with a sad story attached — a bereavement, a downsize, a church closing. You reply. You are told the piano is yours; you only have to pay the shipping company.
The shipping company is the same people. They ask for the delivery fee by Zelle, Cash App, PayPal, Apple Pay or cryptocurrency, and they collect your name, address and phone number along the way. No piano exists. The security firm Proofpoint counted at least 125,000 messages in this campaign cluster in a single year, and traced one associated Bitcoin wallet holding over $900,000 in transactions.
Source: Proofpoint threat research, "Security Brief: Sing Us a Song You're the Piano Scam" —proofpoint.com. Read 3 August 2026.
What a good answer looks like
A mover worth booking will give you a USDOT number without being pushed, put the stair count and the crane decision in the written quote, explain the valuation choice before you sign it, and produce a certificate of insurance for your building without drama. None of that is exotic. It is just the difference between a business and a phone number.