What Is a Common Carrier? Legal Definition, Duties, and Liability

A common carrier is any person or business that transports passengers or goods for a fee and offers its services to the general public. The label is a legal designation, not just a description: once a business qualifies, it takes on obligations that ordinary businesses never face, including a duty to serve anyone who asks and, for freight, near-strict liability when a shipment is lost or damaged. Federal law applies the term to rail carriers, motor carriers, water carriers, pipeline carriers, and express carriers, and the Communications Act extends it to telecommunications companies that provide interstate service by wire or radio.¹²

What Makes a Business a Common Carrier

The decisive factor is what lawyers call “holding out.” A carrier that advertises its services, publishes rates, and accepts shipments or passengers from anyone willing to pay is holding itself out to the public. The FAA’s advisory guidance on the question describes common carriage as service offered to the general public rather than to a select group of customers under individually negotiated contracts.³

Beyond the public offering, a few other hallmarks fill out the picture. Common carriers operate on a regular, ongoing basis rather than through one-off deals. They typically run along defined routes or schedules. They charge published rates. And they operate for compensation, not as a favor or as an incidental part of some other business.

Federal law puts specific categories inside the common carrier umbrella: express carriers, pipeline carriers, rail carriers, motor common carriers, water common carriers, and household goods freight forwarders all qualify.¹

Common Carrier Versus Private Carrier

The cleanest way to see the line is to ask who the service is available to. A common carrier holds its doors open to the public. A private carrier does not. A company that ships its own inventory in its own trucks is a private carrier. So is a trucking outfit that hauls freight for two or three clients under individually negotiated contracts and no one else.

Private carriers choose their customers and can turn away business for any reason. Common carriers generally cannot. The distinction matters because it drives everything that follows: the duty to serve, the standard of care, and the liability rules when something goes wrong. A private carrier’s liability is largely whatever the contract says. A common carrier’s liability is set by statute and common law, and those sources are far less forgiving.

The Duty to Serve

Common carriers have a legal obligation to provide service to anyone who makes a reasonable request and is willing to pay the established rate. Federal law says a rail carrier “shall provide the transportation or service on reasonable request.”⁴ The Communications Act imposes a parallel duty on telecommunications carriers to “furnish such communication service upon reasonable request.”²

In practice, this means a common carrier cannot cherry-pick profitable customers and ignore the rest. It cannot charge unreasonable rates. And it cannot discriminate between similarly situated customers. Refusals are allowed in narrow situations, like when the goods are inherently dangerous and the carrier lacks proper equipment, or when the carrier is already at capacity. The refusal has to be justified, not arbitrary.

Liability for Lost or Damaged Freight

This is where common carrier law has its sharpest teeth. Under the Carmack Amendment, a motor carrier or freight forwarder that receives property for interstate transportation is liable for “the actual loss or injury to the property” while it is in the carrier’s custody.⁵ The carrier does not have to have been negligent. If the freight arrives damaged or doesn’t arrive at all, the carrier pays unless it can prove one of five recognized defenses:

An act of God, meaning an unforeseeable natural event like a tornado, flood, or earthquake.
An act of a public enemy, such as war or similar hostile action.
An act or default of the shipper, like improper packaging or mislabeling.
An act of public authority, such as government seizure, quarantine, or embargo.
The inherent nature of the goods, meaning they were perishable or prone to deterioration regardless of handling.

Outside those five situations, the carrier is on the hook. The shipper only needs to show that the goods were in good condition when handed over, that they arrived damaged or didn’t arrive, and the amount of the loss. Carriers can cap their exposure, but only if the shipper agrees in writing, the limitation is reasonable, and the shipper had a genuine choice between full-value coverage at a higher rate and limited liability at a lower one. A liability cap buried in fine print without a meaningful alternative is unlikely to be enforced.

Liability for Passenger Injuries

The rules for passenger injuries are different. Common carriers don’t face strict liability the way they do for cargo. Instead, courts hold passenger carriers to what is often called the “highest degree of care” or “utmost care” for passenger safety.⁶ A passenger still has to show the carrier was negligent, but the bar for proving negligence is lower than it would be against an ordinary business. Some courts have held carriers liable for even the slightest negligence causing injury to a fare-paying passenger.

Common Examples

The designation spans several industries. In transportation, the familiar examples are commercial airlines, freight and passenger railroads, intercity and local bus systems, and trucking companies that offer their services to the public. The test is always whether the operator holds itself out to the public rather than serving only select clients under negotiated contracts.

Telecommunications companies also operate as common carriers under the Communications Act, which requires them to furnish service on reasonable request and keep rates just and reasonable.² Whether internet service providers belong in that category has been one of the more contested regulatory questions of the past two decades. The FCC reclassified broadband as a common carrier service under Title II in 2024, but a federal appeals court struck down that order in early 2025, ruling the FCC lacked the authority to impose the classification. As of 2026, broadband providers are not regulated as common carriers.

Electric and water utilities get grouped with common carriers in casual conversation, but they operate under a different legal framework. Public utilities are regulated by state public utility commissions under rate-of-return or similar models, not under the common carrier statutes that govern transportation and telecommunications.

1
GovInfo. 49 USC 10102 – Definitions
2
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 47 USC 201 – Service and Charges
3
Federal Aviation Administration. Advisory Circular 120-12A – Private Carriage Versus Common Carriage of Persons or Property
4
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 49 USC 11101 – Common Carrier Transportation, Service, and Rates
5
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 49 USC 14706 – Liability of Carriers Under Receipts and Bills of Lading
6
Transportation Research Board. Selected Studies in Transportation Law – Section 11 Liability