If you operate anywhere near the Southern border, you’ve probably already felt the shift. English Language Proficiency (ELP) enforcement, largely dormant for the better part of a decade, roared back to life over the past year, and FMCSA is now moving to lock it into the regulations for good as an out-of-service condition.

Here’s the quick history. The requirement itself isn’t new; drivers have had to read and speak English well enough to converse with the public, understand traffic signs, respond to officials, and complete records since the 1930s. What’s changed over the years is the consequence. CVSA added ELP to its Out-of-Service (OOS) Criteria in 2005, removed it in 2015, and FMCSA followed in 2016 with a policy telling inspectors to cite ELP violations but not to place drivers out of service. For nearly ten years, an ELP violation was essentially a paperwork ding.

That all changed in 2025.

The last twelve months

Following an April 2025 Executive Order directing FMCSA to put teeth back into ELP enforcement, CVSA voted to return ELP violations to its OOS Criteria, effective June 25, 2025. FMCSA rescinded its 2016 policy and issued new guidance instructing inspectors to open every inspection in English and, where there’s a communication problem, to run a two-step assessment: a driver interview followed by a highway-sign recognition check. Fail it, and the driver is out of service.

The impact was immediate and dramatic. In the roughly six months before the change in 2025, the entire country logged 7,812 ELP violations, with just 33 resulting in OOS orders. Thus far in 2026, roadside inspectors have issued 49,956 ELP violations — the number one cited driver violation — and issued 17,990 OOS orders (#4). ELP enforcement went from a footnote to the most active area of enforcement almost overnight.

There’s an important geographic wrinkle. The overwhelming majority of the OOS orders occurred outside the U.S.–Mexico border commercial zones. 31,530 of the ELP violations happened inside those zones but did not trigger OOS orders. A subsequent April 2026 FMCSA policy however, clarified that if the driver’s trip will take him or her outside the zone, the driver is to be placed OOS; if not, they’re cited but keep rolling.

What the NPRM proposes

On August 10, 2026, FMCSA published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking responding to an October 2025 CVSA Petition for Rulemaking. The proposal would formally write the OOS consequence into the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations, would add ELP violations to the definition of an “out-of-service order” and create a new regulation (§391.11(c)) that requires an offending driver to be placed OOS immediately, subject to the border-zone exception.

Why bother codifying what’s already happening? Because CVSA’s OOS Criteria are non-binding guidance. A federal court confirmed as much back in 1999. CVSA can add or drop the ELP OOSC at will, as history shows. By putting it into the regulations, FMCSA locks in the OOS consequence because the states are required to adopt a compatible requirement regardless of future CVSA changes to preserve federal dollars.

Where industry should weigh in

Comments are due October 9, 2026, and there are several areas industry should consider commenting on.

How does a driver get back in service? This is the big one. The NPRM tells inspectors how to place a driver OOS but is silent on how a carrier cures the violation and returns that driver to duty. No retraining standard, no re-test procedure, no waiting period, no defined authority to lift the order. Carriers need operational certainty here.

What is the ELP proficiency standard? The current regulation and enforcement regime is subjective. Neither FMCSA or CVSA have established in rule or policy for an objective standard on what a driver is expected to know to be proficient in English. To be compliant and to have uniform enforcement requires a standard that is clear and understandable for both industry and enforcement. This would also assist licensing agencies in establishing tests to assess a driver’s proficiency at the point of licensure, an idea that has been floated by many stakeholders.

Is the cost estimate realistic? FMCSA pegs the annual cost at about $14.4 million — roughly 9,000 border-zone OOS orders a year, two days of delay each, at $800 a day. That figure excludes supply-chain ripple effects, missed-delivery penalties, recruiting, and customer-service costs. FMCSA specifically asked for comments on whether it’s undercounting this number.

Where are the safety benefits? The agency quantifies the costs but describes the safety benefits only qualitatively by describing the primary benefit as “improved safety outcomes resulting from more uniform and consistent enforcement of driver qualification standards and noting that codifying the requirement would close an existing safety loophole and yield compounding benefits for highway safety by ensuring drivers can read and understand English-language traffic signs and signals, The Agency offers no crash-reduction estimate, no dollar figure. That’s a notable asymmetry, especially since FMCSA withdrew a similar codification effort back in 2003 for lack of “quantifiable data” and “no discernible safety benefit.”

The bottom line

This is fundamentally an enforcement rule, not a new requirement — the English standard has been on the books for ninety years. But the practical stakes are real: an ELP violation has gone from a citation to an immediate, trip-ending OOS order and FMCSA wants to make that permanent and nationwide.

Whether you support the rule or have concerns about its costs and unanswered questions, the comment window is open now. If ELP enforcement touches your operation — and increasingly it touches everyone — this is the moment to be heard.