Glossary
Hours of service (HOS) & ELDs
Hours-of-service rules are the federal fatigue limits for commercial drivers. The core property-carrier limits: up to 11 hours of driving after 10 consecutive hours off duty, all driving inside a 14-hour on-duty window, a 30-minute break after 8 cumulative hours of driving, and a weekly cap of 60 hours in 7 days or 70 in 8. Since the electronic logging device (ELD) mandate took full effect, driving time is recorded by the vehicle rather than a paper logbook.
Where HOS shows up in the public record
Individual driver logs are not public. What is public is the violation trail: hours-of-service findings from roadside inspections, which feed the Hours-of-Service Compliance BASIC. A carrier whose drivers keep getting written up for HOS violations is showing you something about dispatch pressure and operational discipline that no insurance certificate reveals.
How fleetfax reads it
fleetfax rolls up each carrier's HOS-category violations from the inspection record and benchmarks them against similar-size carriers, labeled as fleetfax peer estimates (official FMCSA percentiles are not public). It is one of the clearest examples of the report's general method: the rulebook is federal, the evidence is roadside, and the pattern across inspections is the signal.
Related terms
CSA & the BASICs
FMCSA's safety scoring system: seven behavior categories. Official percentiles are hidden from the public for all seven; the raw data behind five of them is public.
Roadside inspection (levels 1 to 6)
An enforcement officer's examination of a truck, its driver, or both, at weigh stations and roadside stops. The most abundant safety evidence in the public record; results feed OOS rates and CSA scoring.
Out-of-service (OOS) rate
The percentage of a carrier's roadside inspections that ended with the vehicle or driver ordered off the road. Compared against published national averages, it's a core inspection-failure metric.
fleetfax reads public FMCSA data and is not affiliated with FMCSA or the U.S. Department of Transportation. This page explains terminology; it is not legal advice.