Where our content comes from
LicenseReady is built from public-domain federal materials. This page documents exactly what we use and where to find the originals.
Primary source: FMCSA CDL Manual
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) publishes the CDL Manual, a complete reference for the federal Commercial Driver’s License knowledge standards. As a U.S. government work it is in the public domain and may be reproduced and adapted freely. Every question on LicenseReady is paraphrased from the manual’s ten core sections (Driving Safely, Transporting Cargo Safely, Air Brakes, Combination Vehicles, Doubles & Triples, Tank Vehicles, Hazardous Materials, School Buses, Pre-Trip Vehicle Inspection Test, Basic Vehicle Control Skills, On-Road Driving).
The official manual is published at fmcsa.dot.gov.
Supplementary: state DMV CDL handbooks
Each state DMV publishes its own CDL handbook, which is essentially the FMCSA CDL Manual with a state cover and additional state-specific notes (agency name, intrastate weight rules, school-bus crossing procedures, retest fees). We use these handbooks to set the state-specific framing on each test page. Examples we reference include the California DMV CDL handbook (dmv.ca.gov), the Texas DPS Commercial Motor Vehicle Drivers Handbook, the New York DMV Commercial Driver’s Manual, and the Florida FLHSMV CDL handbook.
Metadata: Wikidata SPARQL
State names, ISO 3166-2 abbreviations, and licensing agency identifiers are sourced from the Wikidata SPARQL endpoint at query.wikidata.org, which is published under CC0. Our seed script falls back to a built-in list if the SPARQL endpoint is unreachable; the actual source used in this build is recorded in the project’s replit.md.
What we don’t use
We do not scrape, copy, or republish content from commercial CDL prep sites. We do not reproduce the literal questions from any state DMV exam (those are confidential). We do not use OpenAI, Anthropic, or any large language model to generate the question explanations — explanations are written by hand against the FMCSA CDL Manual.
Reporting an error
Found a mistake? Email editorial@licenseready.example with the page URL and the issue. We re-check every reported question against the most recent FMCSA CDL Manual edition and post corrections as soon as we’ve verified them.