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 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.
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 after 8 cumulative hours of driving
Waking up with 20 recap hours doesn't mean you can drive 20 — the daily limits still cap the day.