What this site is
RecapHours is a small set of calculators for over-the-road drivers and owner-operators: how many hours come back on a recap, what a per diem year is actually worth, what a mile costs to run, how far to slide the tandems, whether an axle spread clears the bridge formula, and when the filing deadlines land. Every one of them runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere, and there is no account to make.
It exists because the arithmetic behind these questions is not hard, but it is fiddly, and it usually gets done at 4 a.m. on a phone in a truck stop parking lot with a fuel receipt in the other hand. A calculator that does the fiddly part and shows its work is worth something. A calculator that hides its assumptions is worth less than nothing, because you can't check it.
Who builds it
RecapHours is built and maintained by one person — an independent developer, not a law firm, not a compliance vendor, not a carrier, and not a DOT officer. Nobody pays to appear here and nothing on the site is sponsored. It is funded by advertising, which is disclosed in the privacy policy.
That matters for how you should read the site. The value here is not somebody's professional opinion. The value is that every number is traced back to a public, primary source that you can open and check yourself, and that the worked examples are tested. Where the regulation is ambiguous, the site says it is ambiguous instead of picking a side and sounding confident.
Where the numbers come from
The rule is simple: primary sources only, cited on the page where the number is used.
- Hours of service — the regulation text itself, 49 CFR Part 395 on eCFR, cross-checked against FMCSA's own hours-of-service summary. Two independent sources, because getting this wrong costs a driver a violation.
- Bridge formula and axle weights — FHWA's Bridge Formula Weights publication and 23 CFR 658.17. FHWA's own worked example (51 ft, 5 axles, 80,000 lb) is one of this site's automated tests, so if the calculator ever stopped matching the government's answer, the build would fail.
- Per diem — the current IRS special per diem notice and Publication 463, including the DOT hours-of-service limit percentage and the three-quarter rule for partial travel days.
- Cost per mile — fuel prices from EIA, industry cost-per-mile benchmarks from ATRI's annual operational-costs report, both named on the page with the year of the figure.
- Filing deadlines — IRS instructions for Form 2290 and the IFTA filing schedule, with weekend and federal-holiday shifts computed rather than copied.
If a number on this site has no source next to it, that is a defect. Report it and it gets fixed or removed.
How the math is checked
Every calculator on this site has a matching test file that re-implements the same formula independently and checks it against the source authority's own published example — not against what the page happens to output. Where an authority publishes a worked example, that example becomes a test. Where it doesn't, the test checks internal consistency instead: that a 4-foot tandem spread comes out to exactly the 34,000-pound cap, that rounding always moves in the conservative direction, that a repositioning mile can never make an offer look better than it is.
Nothing ships unless the whole suite passes — currently more than 75 assertions across the RecapHours pages, covering the math, the quoted regulation text, and the wording rules this site holds itself to. This does not make the site infallible — a test can only check the formula it was given — but it does mean a silent typo in a rate or a constant gets caught before you see it.
How often it's reviewed
Pages carrying rates, limits, or deadlines are re-checked against their sources at least twice a year, and immediately whenever a source changes — a new IRS per diem notice, a mid-year mileage rate change, an FMCSA rulemaking. Pages that have been re-checked carry a "Reviewed" stamp with the month and year at the bottom, next to the citation. If a page has no stamp, assume it hasn't been checked since it was written.
The current review pass is July 2026.
The one thing this site will never tell you
It will never tell you that you are legal, clear, or good to drive.
This is deliberate and it is not a lawyer's hedge. The calculators work from the numbers you type in. They cannot see your ELD, your carrier's policy, whether your log is accurate, whether you're running under a state exemption, whether the 34-hour restart you took actually qualified, or whether an officer is going to read your situation the way you do. A number is not a permission slip. What this site gives you is your own numbers, computed correctly and shown with the work — so you can walk into a conversation with dispatch or a scale house knowing what the arithmetic actually says.
Your logbook, your ELD, your carrier's compliance department, and the regulation itself are the authorities. This is a planning tool. If the two disagree, the tool is wrong.
Corrections
If a number here is wrong, or a rule has changed, or something is worded in a way that could get a driver in trouble, say so: [email protected]. Corrections to regulatory content get priority over everything else on the list, including new features. Include the page and, if you have it, the source that contradicts us — that turns a fix from an afternoon into ten minutes.
Privacy, briefly
Your hours never leave your device. The calculators are plain JavaScript running in your browser; there is no server that sees your inputs, because there is no server involved at all beyond delivering the page. The optional "save on this device" feature uses your browser's own local storage and nothing else. Full details, including how the advertising works, are in the privacy policy.