The rule
If your carrier operates every day of the week, you run the 70-hour/8-day cycle: you may not drive after you've accumulated 70 on-duty hours in any 8 consecutive days. Note the wording — hitting the cap doesn't forbid working; you can still legally do non-driving work like loading or paperwork, but every one of those hours keeps counting against your cycle (and delays your recovery). (Carriers that don't operate daily use 60 hours in 7 days — same logic, smaller numbers.) "On-duty" means driving plus on-duty-not-driving: fueling, inspections, loading, paperwork. Off-duty and sleeper time don't count toward the cycle.
The regulation itself is short about it. 49 CFR 395.3(b) bars driving after "having been on duty 60 hours in any period of 7 consecutive days if the employing motor carrier does not operate commercial motor vehicles every day of the week," or "70 hours in any period of 8 consecutive days" if it does. Which one applies to you is your carrier's operating schedule, not your choice — if you don't know which cycle you're on, that is the first thing to ask dispatch, because every number below changes with it.
"On duty" is defined broadly in §395.2: all time from when you begin work or are required to be in readiness to work until you're relieved from work and all responsibility for performing it. That's why sitting at a shipper waiting on a door counts even though nothing is happening.
The rolling window
Here's the part that trips everyone up: the 8 days aren't a calendar week that resets on Sunday. It's a window that slides forward one day at the end of every 24-hour log day. When your log day rolls over, the day that just became 8 days old falls out of your window — and every hour you worked that day comes back to you. Those are your recap hours.
A note on "midnight": your carrier designates when your 24-hour log day begins, using your home terminal's time zone. Midnight is the near-universal default, so this guide (and every driver at every truck stop) says "midnight" — but if your carrier uses a different boundary, your day rolls at that hour instead.
One sentence to remember: tomorrow you get back what you worked eight days ago.
A worked example
Say you've run hard for the last 7 days: 10, 11, 10, 10, 11, 8, and 6 hours (oldest to newest), and you're off today so far. That's 66 hours in the window — you have 4 hours available right now.
- Tonight at midnight, the 10-hour day from a week ago drops out. You wake up with 4 + 10 = 14 hours available (still capped by the 11-hour driving / 14-hour daily limits).
- The next midnight returns the 11-hour day. And so on — each morning's hours depend on what you did 8 days before.
- If you'd taken that day off 8 days ago instead, midnight would return nothing. Same 66 used, totally different week ahead.
That's why smart drivers plan light days strategically: a short day today is a short recap eight days from now. Our recap calculator runs this whole projection for you.
Recaps vs. the 34-hour restart
You have two ways to get hours back:
- Ride the recaps: keep working whatever's available and collect the returning hours each midnight. Best when you ran big days 8 days ago (big recaps coming) or when freight won't wait.
- Take a 34-hour restart: 34 consecutive hours off duty resets your cycle to a fresh 70. Best when your upcoming recaps are thin — no point limping along on 3-hour days when 34 hours of rest buys back the whole clock.
The break-even is simple: add up what the next few midnights will return. If several days of recaps still give you less usable time than one restart, and your schedule allows the downtime, restart.
The restart language in the regulation is one sentence: "Any period of 7 consecutive days may end with the beginning of an off-duty period of 34 or more consecutive hours" (§395.3(c)), and the same for the 8-day period. Two things people miss in it. Consecutive means unbroken — a 34-hour break interrupted by twenty minutes of on-duty paperwork isn't a restart, it's 34 hours of mostly rest and a cycle that didn't reset. And the restart replaces your recaps; it doesn't stack with them. The moment you take it you're back to a full cycle, and the hours that were going to come back to you at the next few midnights are simply gone from the ledger — which is exactly why you only take it when those recaps were thin.
Three things that quietly cost drivers hours
Counting driving hours instead of on-duty hours. The cycle counts on-duty time, and §395.2 defines that as everything from beginning work to being relieved of it. Pre-trip, fueling, waiting on a door, scaling, paperwork. A driver who logs 9 driving hours and thinks he burned 9 cycle hours is usually short by two or three, and finds out on the eighth day when the recap comes back smaller than expected.
Assuming the window resets on Sunday. It doesn't reset at all. It slides. There is no weekly reset in the 60/7 or 70/8 rule — the only reset is the 34-hour restart. If you're planning the week around a calendar boundary that doesn't exist, your projections will be wrong every time.
Planning a big day off a big recap without checking the daily limits. Cycle hours are a ceiling, not a schedule. Waking up with 18 hours available doesn't buy an 18-hour day; the 11 and 14 still apply, and they apply first.
Exceptions that change the arithmetic
Three provisions can move the numbers above. None of them touch the cycle itself — they change what a single day looks like — but they change what your week can hold, so they belong here.
The sleeper-berth split. You may split the required 10 consecutive hours off duty into two periods: one of at least 7 consecutive hours in the sleeper berth, and another of at least 2 hours either in the berth or off duty, with the pair adding up to at least 10. The part that matters for planning is in §395.1(g)(1)(iii)(B): "The 14-hour driving window for purposes of § 395.3(a)(2) does not include qualifying rest periods." Used correctly, the qualifying rest doesn't burn your 14 — which is how a driver stuck waiting on a live unload salvages a day instead of losing it. Used incorrectly, it's a violation, and the pairing rules are unforgiving.
Adverse driving conditions. You may extend both the 11-hour driving limit and the 14-hour window by up to 2 hours. But the definition in §395.2 is narrow: weather or "unusual road or traffic conditions that were not known, or could not reasonably be known, to a driver immediately prior to beginning the duty day… or to a motor carrier immediately prior to dispatching the driver." Rush hour you drive through every week is not adverse conditions. A blizzard that wasn't forecast when you rolled is. This one gets claimed far more often than it applies, and it is checkable after the fact.
Short-haul. If you operate within a 150 air-mile radius of your normal work reporting location and don't exceed a 14-hour duty period, you're exempt from the logging requirements of §395.8 and §395.11. Note what that exempts: the paperwork, not the driving limits.
All three have conditions and edge cases this page doesn't cover. Read them in the regulation before you rely on any of them.
What recaps don't change
The cycle limit sits on top of the daily rules, which apply no matter how many cycle hours you have:
- 11-hour driving limit after 10 consecutive hours off duty
- 14-hour on-duty window — driving isn't allowed beyond the 14th hour after coming on duty
- 30-minute break once 8 cumulative hours of driving time have passed without an interruption — and the interruption doesn't have to be off duty. §395.3(a)(3)(ii) says it "may be satisfied either by off-duty, sleeper berth or on-duty not driving time or by a combination" of them. A 30-minute fuel stop or a live unload where you're on duty but not at the controls counts, as long as it's 30 consecutive minutes of not driving. This is worth knowing: drivers routinely take an unpaid half hour they'd already satisfied.
Waking up with 20 recap hours doesn't mean you can drive 20 — the daily limits still cap the day.
→ Open the 70/8 Recap Calculator