Guide
More good claims die of a wrong address than of any other cause. The surety holding a broker's bond today may have taken it over last month — and your load, delivered last spring, belongs to a company whose name appears nowhere on the broker's current paperwork. Here is why, and how to get the right name every time.
A broker's $75,000 security is a commercial product. Brokers switch sureties for price. Sureties drop brokers they no longer trust — itself a warning sign worth noticing. Bonds are cancelled and replaced, sometimes in a scramble while authority hangs in the balance. Each change is filed and dated in the federal Licensing & Insurance records, in the bond's history file: every surety, the day its cover started, and the day it ended. The claim rule that follows from it is simple and absolute: a claim belongs to the bond in force on the delivery date.
Send a complete, honest claim to the surety that holds the bond today, for a load delivered under last year's surety, and the answer is a polite no — weeks later, when the file comes back. Weeks matter: the 60-day window does not restart for a misdirected envelope, and the pool does not hold a place for a claim that was never really filed. Carriers who follow the free guides by hand do this step in the federal portal, date by date; it is the step the guides themselves warn about most.
The bond history is a timeline, and a lookup is just the timeline asked a question: on this date, whose line was live? The free delivery-date lookup on our homepage does exactly that — broker's MC number, delivery date, and it names the surety, the form (BMC-84 bond or BMC-85 trust) and the bond number for that day. The same timeline is printed in full on the broker's page in the broker record, so you can see every hand the bond passed through, not just the one you need.
Edge cases the timeline settles on sight: two bonds overlapping around a switch (the one live on the delivery date governs); a gap with no bond in force (a hard fact to learn early, not after filing); a bond cancelled after your delivery with its 60-day window still open (file, now — see the 60-day window).
With the right name in hand, the rest of the claim is the standard road: the five papers, the letter in your name, that surety's own way of taking claims, the acknowledgment. It is all laid out in how to file on a freight broker's bond — free, complete, and written to be used at midnight with a truck idling outside.
Everything above is the whole job, and it is yours. If the papers are in a shoebox and the clock is running, FileTheBond finds the surety, builds the package and files it for a flat $79, $129 or $189 by the amount owed — The fee buys the filing — prepared right, filed on time. It never buys a recovery.