Hours of Service Rules Explained: The 11 and 14 Hour Limits

US Hours of Service (HOS) rules cap a property-carrying driver at 11 hours of driving within a 14-hour on-duty window, and that window only starts after 10 consecutive hours off duty. On top of that, a 30-minute break is required once you've driven 8 cumulative hours without a qualifying break, and a weekly limit caps you at 60 hours on duty in 7 days or 70 hours in 8 days, depending on whether your carrier runs every day. Those numbers, 11, 14, 10, 30, and 60/70, are the whole framework most drivers need to know.

The 14-hour window is the one people misread most. Once it starts, it runs on a wall clock and does not pause for breaks, fuel stops, or loading time. You can drive only 11 of those 14 hours, but the window itself keeps ticking whether the truck is moving or not, so a long detention or a slow load eats directly into your available driving time.

Two exceptions modify the base rules often enough to matter. The 150 air-mile short-haul exception lets qualifying drivers skip records of duty status entirely if they start and end at the same reporting location and are released within 14 hours. The 16-hour "big day" exception lets certain non-short-haul drivers extend the on-duty window to 16 hours once per cycle, but only if they meet the conditions, and it can't be combined with the short-haul exception.

There's also the 34-hour restart, which lets a driver reset their weekly 60/70-hour clock back to zero by taking at least 34 consecutive hours off duty, and the sleeper-berth provision, which lets drivers split their required 10 hours off into two qualifying periods. Each of these has specific conditions, and an ELD is what actually tracks whether a driver stayed inside them.

Hours of Service is the reason the ELD mandate exists. An Electronic Logging Device ties a driver's duty status to the vehicle's engine and movement data, so the 11-hour and 14-hour clocks run automatically and the driver, dispatcher, and an inspecting officer are all looking at the same record. A good ELD warns a driver before they run out of hours rather than after, which is the difference between planning a stop and taking a violation.

For a fleet, the value is that HOS compliance stops depending on manual math at the end of a shift. Geotab's GO device handles HOS logging alongside GPS tracking and diagnostics, so dispatch can see who has hours left before assigning the next load, instead of finding out a driver is out of hours after they've already committed to a run.