Daily trip inspections: NSC Standard 13, province by province
Last updated: Written by Blake Cowan, NCSO
The national standard, the core every province enforces, and the places individual provinces go their own way. Confirm the current version for the province you run in.
The short answer
NSC Standard 13 is the National Safety Code standard for daily vehicle trip inspections, and every province has adopted it into its own legislation. The core is the same everywhere: inspect the vehicle at least every 24 hours against the schedule for its type, produce a report even when nothing is wrong, carry it, and do not operate with a major defect. The details differ by province.
If you run commercial vehicles in more than one province, this is the page you want, because the rule you were trained on does not always travel with you.
What follows is the national standard, the common core every province enforces, and the places where individual provinces go their own way.
What NSC Standard 13 is
The National Safety Code is a set of standards the provinces and territories use to keep commercial vehicle rules broadly consistent across the country. Standard 13 is the daily vehicle trip inspection standard.
It sets out the inspection interval, the schedules of systems that have to be checked, the split between minor and major defects, and what has to be recorded. Schedule 1 covers trucks, truck tractors and trailers, and lists the 23 systems a driver works through. Buses and their trailers fall under a separate schedule.
Is the standard itself the law?
No, and this is worth being clear about because it trips up carriers who think compliance is a single national exercise.
The standard is a national model. What binds you is your own province's regulation that adopts it: Alberta's Commercial Vehicle Safety Regulation, Ontario Regulation 199/07, Saskatchewan's Trip Inspection Regulations, Manitoba's Commercial Vehicle Trip Inspection Regulation, Nova Scotia's Commercial Vehicle Trip Inspection Regulations, and so on.
Those regulations can be more or less restrictive than the standard. A carrier complying with Standard 13 in general terms can still be offside a specific provincial requirement, which is why the answer to "what are the rules" always ends with the name of a province.
What every province requires
Wherever you run, these five hold.
- An inspection at least once every 24 hours while the vehicle is in use, before it is first driven that day.
- Every system in the applicable schedule, not a selection of them. The schedule is what makes the inspection an inspection rather than a glance.
- A written or electronic report for every inspection, including the ones where nothing is found. A report recording no defects is the evidence the inspection happened.
- The report and the schedule carried in the vehicle, produced on request. Electronic copies are generally accepted.
- No operation with a major defect. A minor defect is recorded and repaired on schedule. A major defect stops the vehicle until it is fixed.
There is a sixth that is a duty rather than a document: you keep monitoring the vehicle through the trip and report defects to the carrier as soon as possible. The morning inspection is not the end of the obligation.
The rules, province by province
| Province | Regulation | The detail worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
| Alberta | Commercial Vehicle Safety Regulation | Schedule 1 of NSC Standard 13 Part 2 applies. Captures commercial vehicles and combinations registered over 4,500 kg. The inspection is valid for 24 hours from the time recorded on the report |
| British Columbia | Motor Vehicle Act regulations, enforced by CVSE | The pre-trip is done each day before the first trip. On trips running more than one day, no later than the first stop on each following day |
| Saskatchewan | The Trip Inspection Regulations | Inspection once every 24 hour period while in use. The driver carries the completed report for both the current and the previous day, plus the applicable schedule, produced for a peace officer on request |
| Manitoba | Commercial Vehicle Trip Inspection Regulation | Inspection every 24 hours the vehicle is in service, against the components listed in the regulation |
| Ontario | O. Reg. 199/07 | Inspection every 24 hour period, with the driver monitoring the vehicle through the trip. Both the current report and the inspection schedule must be carried, electronic permitted. Schedule 1 for trucks, tractors and trailers, Schedule 2 for buses |
| Nova Scotia | Commercial Vehicle Trip Inspection Regulations | Inspection at least once every 24 hours against the schedule for the vehicle type, documented and submitted to the carrier. Schedule 1 for trucks, tractors and trailers, Schedule 2 for buses and their trailers |
Scroll the table sideways to see every column. The first column stays in place.
Source: CCMTA National Safety Code Standard 13; Alberta Commercial Vehicle Safety Regulation guidance, alberta.ca; SGI trip inspection standards; Manitoba Commercial Vehicle Trip Inspection Regulation; Ontario Ministry of Transportation truck handbook and O. Reg. 199/07; Nova Scotia Commercial Vehicle Trip Inspection Regulations. Verified August 2026. Confirm the current version for your province before relying on any of it.
New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, Quebec and the territories all run daily trip inspection requirements of their own. We have not verified their current wording and are not going to summarise a regulation we have not read, so ask the province directly if you run there.
What has to be on the report
The report is the part that gets audited, and a surprising number of them fail on identification rather than on inspection quality.
Alberta's published minimum content is representative of what the others expect:
- Legible, which rules out more reports than you would think
- Licence plate or unit number
- Odometer or hubometer reading
- Carrier name
- The location where the inspection was done
- Each defect found, or a note recording that there were none
- Date and time of the report
- Name of the person who did the inspection
- Name and signature of the driver
A report that cannot be tied to a specific vehicle on a specific day, by a named person, does not do its job, however carefully the walk-around was done.
How long you have to keep them
Six months is the common minimum. NSC Standard 13 calls for the carrier to retain the original report and any certification of repairs for at least six months from the date it was prepared. Alberta requires trip inspection reports kept in chronological order for each vehicle for at least six months after receipt. Ontario sets a six month minimum.
Plenty of carriers keep twelve months instead, and I would. Safety fitness audits, roadside enforcement follow up and incident investigations all reach back further than six months, and the cost of holding the records is nothing next to the cost of not having them when somebody asks.
Where this meets your safety program
Trip inspection records are not a separate filing problem. They are part of your safety evidence, and they get sampled.
An auditor looking at a carrier's COR or safety fitness evidence will ask for trip inspection reports for particular vehicles on particular dates, usually from awkward periods rather than last month. What they are testing is whether the inspections happened continuously, whether defects that were found actually got repaired, and whether the repair closed the loop back to the report.
That last one is where carriers lose marks. A defect recorded and never closed out is the same finding in a transport audit as a corrective action left open is in a COR audit, and it comes from the same root cause: the record was collected but nobody was responsible for reading it.
The two spokes off this page
Pre-trip inspection: what the law requires covers the legal detail and the minor versus major defect split, with the line drawn on the systems that come up most.
The circle check, step by step covers the walk-around itself: a single loop from the cab, down the driver side, through the coupling, along the trailer, up the passenger side and finishing at the front, so nothing is missed to backtracking.
Get the form
Daily trip inspection (pre-trip)
A fill-in daily trip inspection that covers all 23 systems in the National Safety Code schedule, and carries the minor and major defect list with it.
Direct download. No email, no signup, no form.
Free, no email required, covering every system in Schedule 1 with the minor and major defect list on it so a driver can classify a defect without leaving the truck. The rest of the template library is on the same terms.
In the app, the same daily trip inspections are completed in the cab, the defect routes to whoever fixes it, and the repair closes back against the original report, which is the loop an auditor is actually looking for.
Questions people actually ask
What is NSC Standard 13?
Is NSC Standard 13 the law?
How often does a commercial vehicle need a trip inspection?
What has to be on a trip inspection report?
How long do you have to keep trip inspection reports?
Do the trip inspection rules change between provinces?
Next step
Take the templates and use them, whether or not you ever talk to us. If you would rather not build the program yourself, we will build it inside the app and keep it current.