FMCSA Hours of Service Rules: Limits, Exceptions, and ELDs

Under the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s hours of service rules, a property-carrying commercial driver may drive up to 11 hours after 10 consecutive hours off duty, and all driving must finish within a 14-hour on-duty window that starts when the driver goes back on the clock. Weekly caps of 60 hours in 7 days or 70 hours in 8 days sit on top of the daily limits, with a 34-hour off-duty period available to reset the weekly total. These rules apply to most drivers of vehicles weighing 10,001 pounds or more, vehicles carrying 9 or more passengers for compensation (16 or more not for compensation), and any vehicle hauling placarded hazardous materials.¹

What Counts as On-Duty Time

The limits only make sense once you know what the clock counts. On-duty time starts when you begin work or are required to be ready to work, and it doesn’t end until you’re relieved of all work responsibility.²

That covers driving, but it also covers waiting at a terminal or shipper to be dispatched, inspecting or servicing the truck, loading and unloading (or standing around while someone else does it), attending to a broken-down vehicle, providing drug or alcohol test samples, and any other compensated work for any employer. If you’re being paid or you’re expected to be available, the clock is running.²

Daily Limits for Property-Carrying Drivers

After 10 consecutive hours off duty, you may drive up to 11 hours. Once you’ve hit 11 hours behind the wheel, you cannot drive again until another 10 consecutive hours off.³

The 14-hour window is what most often trips drivers up. This clock starts the moment you do anything work-related after your 10-hour rest, and it runs continuously for 14 hours regardless of what you do inside it. It does not pause for meals, fuel stops, naps in the cab, or three hours sitting at a dock waiting on a forklift. Start at 6 a.m. and you cannot drive after 8 p.m., even if you only drove six hours and spent the rest waiting.³

The 30-Minute Break

You cannot drive after accumulating 8 hours of driving time without at least a 30-minute break. The break doesn’t have to be off-duty time in the strict sense. Sleeper berth time works, and so does on-duty-not-driving time such as fueling or paperwork. What matters is that you aren’t behind the wheel for those 30 minutes.³ Drivers who qualify for the short-haul exception don’t have to take the break.

The 16-Hour Short-Haul Extension

If you routinely return to your home terminal each night, you may occasionally stretch the 14-hour window to 16 hours. To qualify, you must have returned to your normal work reporting location and been released from duty there for each of your previous five duty tours. You also cannot have used this extension within the prior six consecutive days, unless you’ve started a fresh 7- or 8-day period with a 34-hour restart.⁴ It’s a once-a-week tool at most.

Weekly Caps and the 34-Hour Restart

If your carrier operates every day of the week, you cannot drive after 70 on-duty hours in any 8 consecutive days. If the carrier doesn’t operate every day, the cap drops to 60 hours in 7 consecutive days.³

The 34-hour restart resets those weekly totals to zero. You take 34 consecutive hours off duty, and under current rules there are no additional requirements about when those hours fall during the day, or any limit on how often you can use the restart.⁵ A driver who takes every weekend off resets naturally.

Passenger-Carrying Vehicle Limits

Drivers of buses and other passenger-carrying commercial vehicles operate under different numbers. The driving cap is tighter and the duty window is a bit looser:

10 hours of driving after 8 consecutive hours off duty.
A 15-hour on-duty window after those 8 hours off, after which no driving is allowed.
The same 60-hour/7-day and 70-hour/8-day weekly caps as property carriers.

These sit under a separate section from the property-carrying rules.⁶

Sleeper Berth Splits

If your truck has a sleeper berth, the 10-hour off-duty period doesn’t have to happen all at once. You can split it into two periods as long as one is at least 7 consecutive hours in the sleeper berth and the other is at least 2 hours of off-duty or sleeper berth time. Combined, the two must total at least 10 hours.⁴

The advantage is that neither qualifying rest period counts against your 14-hour window. Your available driving and duty time is recalculated from the end of each qualifying rest rather than running from a single start point, which lets you avoid rush hour or wait out bad weather without burning your whole window. You can take the periods in either order. The driving time in the window immediately before and after each rest period, added together, still cannot exceed 11 hours or push past the 14-hour limit.⁴ Most drivers let their ELD track the recalculated clocks.

Team drivers get one more option. Instead of two sleeper periods, one driver can combine at least 7 consecutive hours in the sleeper with up to 3 hours in the passenger seat while the co-driver operates the vehicle. That passenger-seat time counts toward the 10-hour rest requirement as long as it occurs immediately before or after the sleeper berth period.⁴

Exceptions to the Standard Rules

A handful of operational scenarios let drivers deviate from the standard limits or step outside them entirely. Using the wrong one, or failing to document it, can convert a lawful trip into a violation.

Short-Haul Exception

Drivers who operate within a 150 air-mile radius (about 173 statute miles) of their normal work reporting location and return there within 14 hours are exempt from keeping a record of duty status and from the 30-minute break. The employer keeps time records showing start and end times for each day instead.⁴

Non-CDL drivers of property-carrying vehicles have a related version. They work inside the same 150 air-mile radius but can go up to 14 hours on five days per week and up to 16 hours on two days per week, and they’re also exempt from RODS and ELD requirements. The carrier keeps time records for six months.⁷

Adverse Driving Conditions

Conditions you couldn’t have reasonably anticipated before starting your trip, such as a sudden ice storm, an unexpected highway closure, or dense fog rolling in mid-route, unlock an extra 2 hours of both driving time and duty-window time. For property-carrying drivers, that’s up to 13 hours of driving inside a 16-hour on-duty window.⁴ Routine congestion on a familiar route doesn’t qualify. Document the specific condition in your log, because inspectors will ask.

Agricultural Commodities

Drivers hauling agricultural commodities such as livestock, produce, and farm supplies are completely exempt from HOS rules while operating within a 150 air-mile radius of the commodity’s source during state-determined planting and harvesting seasons. No log, no ELD, no hour limits within that radius. Once you cross the boundary, standard rules apply, but time worked inside the radius doesn’t count toward daily or weekly limits.⁸

Livestock haulers get more flexibility at the end of a trip: between a point 150 air miles from the source and 150 air miles from the delivery destination, HOS rules don’t apply. Covered farm vehicles, which are those privately transporting agricultural products, machinery, or supplies to or from a farm by the farm’s owner, family, or employees, are exempt from HOS entirely.⁸

Oilfield Operations

Specially trained drivers operating vehicles built to service oil or natural gas wells can exclude waiting time at a well site from their on-duty calculation. That waiting time is recorded as off-duty and doesn’t count toward the 14-hour window. Drivers annotate their logs to distinguish this waiting time from ordinary off-duty rest.⁴

Personal Conveyance vs. Yard Moves

Two duty statuses cause more confusion than almost anything else in the regulations.

Personal conveyance lets you drive a commercial vehicle for personal use while off duty, such as grabbing dinner, commuting between home and terminal, or moving to the nearest safe rest location after unloading, and log that time as off-duty. The vehicle can even be loaded, as long as you aren’t advancing the carrier’s freight. The core test is whether you’ve been genuinely relieved from all work responsibility.⁹

Drivers get in trouble when personal conveyance becomes operational advantage. Bypassing an available truck stop to get closer to tomorrow’s pickup, bobtailing to reposition for the carrier’s benefit, or driving to a maintenance facility all cross the line. If the movement serves the carrier’s business rather than your personal needs, it’s on-duty time.⁹ Your carrier can also impose stricter policies than FMCSA requires, up to banning personal conveyance outright.

Yard moves are different. Moving a truck around a yard, terminal, or facility gets logged as on-duty not driving. You must manually set your ELD to that status when the move begins and manually end it when you’re done; the device won’t switch on its own.¹⁰ Yard move time counts toward the 14-hour window and weekly totals, but not toward the 11-hour driving limit.

Electronic Logging Devices

Most commercial drivers required to keep records of duty status must use an ELD, which connects to the engine and automatically records driving time from engine status, vehicle motion, and miles driven.¹¹ Several categories are exempt from the mandate:

Short-haul drivers who qualify for the timecard exception and don’t keep RODS.
Drivers keeping RODS for 8 or fewer days in any 30-day period.
Driveaway-towaway operations where the vehicle being driven is itself the commodity being delivered.
Vehicles manufactured before model year 2000, which typically lack the electronic engine interface an ELD needs.

Exempt drivers who still have to keep RODS can use paper logs or logging software.¹²

If Your ELD Fails

Switch to paper logs immediately and keep using them until the device is repaired. The carrier has 8 days from discovering the malfunction or being notified by the driver, whichever comes first, to fix the ELD. If a longer repair is needed, the carrier can request an extension from the FMCSA Division Administrator, but that request must go in within 5 days of the driver’s notification.¹³ At a roadside inspection, you provide ELD data through wireless transfer or email from the device, or produce your paper logs if the ELD is down.

Penalties for HOS Violations

Consequences hit both the driver and the carrier. A driver who commits a non-recordkeeping HOS violation, meaning actually exceeding driving or duty limits, faces civil penalties of up to $4,812 per violation. For the carrier that permitted or required the violation, the maximum runs up to $19,246 per violation. Recordkeeping failures such as incomplete, inaccurate, or falsified logs carry penalties of up to $1,584 per day the violation continues, capped at $15,846.¹⁴ Egregious violations, meaning exceeding the driving limit by more than 3 hours, can draw the statutory maximum.¹⁵

At a roadside inspection, a driver found in violation can be placed out of service. The truck sits parked until the driver has accumulated enough off-duty time to legally drive again, and that downtime costs money on every side.

For carriers, violations feed into FMCSA’s Safety Measurement System, which scores companies across several safety categories, including HOS compliance. Carriers whose HOS percentile hits the intervention threshold, 65 percent for general carriers, 60 percent for hazmat carriers, and 50 percent for passenger carriers, get flagged for warning letters, investigations, or both. Patterns of violations found during investigations, especially falsified logs, can trigger accelerated enforcement regardless of the carrier’s overall percentile.¹⁶

1
Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Hours of Service
2
eCFR. 49 CFR 395.2 – Definitions
3
eCFR. 49 CFR 395.3 – Maximum Driving Time for Property-Carrying Vehicles
4
eCFR. 49 CFR 395.1 – Scope of Rules in This Part
5
Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Summary of Hours of Service Regulations
6
eCFR. 49 CFR 395.5 – Maximum Driving Time for Passenger-Carrying Vehicles
7
eCFR. 49 CFR 395.1 – Scope of Rules in This Part
8
Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. ELD Hours of Service (HOS) and Agriculture Exemptions
9
Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Personal Conveyance
10
Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Yard Move ELD Duty Status
11
eCFR. 49 CFR Part 395 Subpart B – Electronic Logging Devices (ELDs)
12
Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Who Is Exempt from the ELD Rule?
13
eCFR. 49 CFR 395.34 – ELD Malfunctions and Data Diagnostic Events
14
Federal Register. Revisions to Civil Penalty Amounts, 2025
15
eCFR. Appendix B to Part 386 – Penalty Schedule: Violations and Monetary Penalties
16
Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Safety Measurement System (SMS) Methodology