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OpenTruck Driver Log Books After the ELD Rule
7 min
49 CFR §395.8
A carrier must require each driver to record duty status for each 24-hour period. Since 2017-12-18 that record comes from an ELD, except in four situations — and where paper is still allowed, the grid must be kept in duplicate for every period recorded.
Where paper is still legal
Paper did not die in 2017. It moved to the edges. A driver may keep the record by hand when the operation requires a record of duty status on no more than 8 days in any 30, in the two driveaway-towaway situations, or in a truck whose VIN shows a model year before 2000.
For a local operation that goes long once a fortnight, the 8-day exception is real and worth using. Count it as a rolling window on a wall calendar, because that is how an auditor will count it: not per month, not per pay period, but any 30 consecutive days.
The day you cross the eighth log in a rolling 30, the exception is gone and the next record owes an ELD. Nothing warns you. A carrier that lives near the line should be counting.
What the grid must show
A hand-drawn log is a legal document and it is judged as one. The graph grid carries four duty lines — off duty, sleeper berth, driving, on duty not driving — and every change of status is a vertical stroke at the time it happened, with the city and state written at the change.
- 01Date, total miles driven, the truck and trailer numbers, and the carrier's name and main office address.
- 02The 24-hour grid with every status change marked, and the remarks line naming the place each change happened.
- 03Total hours in each status, adding to 24, and the driver's signature certifying the record is true.
- 04The shipping document or manifest number, and the name of the co-driver if there was one.
Two things fail inspections more often than the grid itself: missing city-and-state entries at status changes, and a total that does not reach 24 hours. Both are arithmetic, and both are fixable in the cab before the officer asks.
Keeping the file
The driver carries the current day and the previous seven consecutive days. The carrier keeps its copy of every record, with the supporting documents, for six months from the date of receipt. That is a carrier duty, not a driver duty, and it is the first thing a compliance review asks to see.
| Who holds it | What | How long |
|---|---|---|
| Driver, in the cab | Today plus the previous 7 consecutive days | 8 days |
| Carrier, on file | Every record of duty status received | 6 months |
| Carrier, on file | Supporting documents for each record | 6 months |
Supporting documents
A log that nothing corroborates is worth less than one that does. Carriers must keep up to eight supporting documents per driver per 24-hour period — bills of lading, dispatch records, fuel receipts, payroll, expense records — and an investigator reads them against the grid. Fuel purchases are the ones that most often contradict a log: a receipt timestamped in another state at an hour the driver logged off duty is the simplest falsification finding there is.
Out-of-service risk. A false log is not a paperwork violation. A driver found to have falsified a record can be placed out of service on the spot, and the finding lands on the carrier's CSA record under the heaviest severity weights in the system.
The honest version is also the easy one: log the 30 minutes you actually took, and the fuel receipt agrees with the grid without anyone editing anything.
Sources
- 49 CFR §395.8(a)(1)read 2026-09-04
- 49 CFR §395.3read 2026-09-04