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 a pattern 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 carriers with a similar amount of inspection activity, labeled as fleetfax peer estimates (official FMCSA percentiles are not public).
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.