A trucking company is not simply a business that happens to own heavy vehicles. It is a regulated one, and the regulations reach how long its drivers may work, what they may take before a shift, how the fleet is maintained, how a load is secured and how much insurance has to sit behind all of it.
This page sets out those rules in the order they tend to matter after a crash. It is written to be useful to somebody who has just been hit by a commercial vehicle rather than to somebody studying for a licence, so each section ends with what the rule leaves behind — because that is the part a claim is actually built from.
Free case review
You speak to the attorney who would try it, not to a screener.
No fee unless we win
Nothing up front, and the fee comes out of the recovery.
We get the records
Logs, maintenance files and driver history, requested before the retention periods run out.
Scope
Which trucks these rules reach
Worth settling first, because this is the question people get wrong against their own interest — assuming a van or a box truck is just a large car and that none of what follows applies to it.
- 01
Over 10,000 pounds is the line, not 18 wheels
The federal safety rules reach any vehicle over 10,000 pounds gross weight or rating used in commerce. That takes in a great many box trucks, landscaping rigs and contractor vans, not just the freight fleet.
- 02
A commercial licence is a separate question
A CDL is required from 26,001 pounds, or for passengers and placarded hazardous loads. Below that a driver needs nothing special — and the carrier is still bound by the safety rules.
- 03
Texas applies its own version to Texas-only carriers
A truck that never leaves the state is not outside the rules. Texas has adopted most of the federal regulations for intrastate carriers, with its own registration and insurance requirements on top.
Hours Of Service
How long a driver may lawfully be at the wheel
The most litigated rules in the book, and since December 2017 the most reliably documented: a device in the cab reads the engine rather than taking the driver’s word for it.
The window, once the shift starts
14 hours
Driving allowed inside it
11 hours
Break due after this much driving
30 min
Eleven hours of driving
A driver may drive a total of 11 hours, and only after taking 10 consecutive hours off duty first.
A fourteen-hour window
No driving after the 14th consecutive hour following the start of the shift. The window runs on the clock rather than on hours worked, so meal breaks, loading delays and waiting at a dock do not extend it — which is exactly where the pressure on a driver running late comes from.
A thirty-minute break
Driving is not permitted once 8 hours of driving time have passed without at least a consecutive 30-minute interruption.
Sixty or seventy hours a week
60 hours in any 7 consecutive days for a carrier that does not run every day of the week, and 70 in any 8 for one that does. It is a rolling total rather than a calendar week, so a driver’s availability on any given morning depends on the eight days behind them.
The thirty-four-hour restart
A period of 34 or more consecutive hours off duty ends the weekly count and starts a new one. It is the mechanism a well-run fleet uses and the mechanism a badly run one skips.
The sleeper-berth split
The 10 hours off may be taken in two periods rather than one, provided neither is shorter than 2 consecutive hours, one of them is at least 7 consecutive hours in the sleeper berth, and the two together come to at least 10 hours.
The logs, which are now a device
Drivers kept these hours on paper from 1938 until the electronic logging device mandate took effect in December 2017.
At The Wheel
Drink, drugs and the phone
A commercial driver is held to a stricter standard than everybody else on the road on all three, and the gap between the two standards is where a great deal of the argument in these cases sits.
0.04, not 0.08
A commercial driver may not perform a safety-sensitive function at an alcohol concentration of 0.04 or more — half the limit that applies to everybody else on the road, and it is a job-ending number rather than merely a criminal one.
Any detectable alcohol at all
Separately from the 0.04 offence, a driver may not use alcohol within four hours of going on duty, may not have it in their possession, and may not drive with any measured concentration or detected presence of it.
Testing is not optional after a fatal crash
Drivers are tested pre-employment, at random, on reasonable suspicion, on return to duty and after a crash.
Prescriptions and the medicine cabinet
The commonest impairment finding in the federal crash causation study was not alcohol or illegal drugs, which were rare. It was prescription medication, coded in around a quarter of the large-truck crashes studied, with over-the-counter medication not far behind.
No phone in the hand
Since January 2012 a commercial driver may not hold a mobile telephone while driving, and a carrier may not allow or require it.
Maintenance
Keeping the vehicle fit to be on the road
A brake or a tyre that failed is rarely the end of the enquiry. These rules decide whether it was bad luck or a decision, and they do it by requiring somebody to have written it down.
Systematic inspection, repair and maintenance
Every motor carrier must systematically inspect, repair and maintain all vehicles under its control, and keep every part and accessory in safe and proper operating condition at all times.
The driver’s end-of-shift report
A driver must file a written report on any defect or deficiency that would affect safe operation or cause a breakdown — brakes, steering, lights, tyres, wheels, coupling devices, the emergency equipment.
Annual inspection, and the roadside
Every commercial vehicle must pass a periodic inspection at least once a year, to a federal standard, with the record kept.
Records for a year, and six months after
The maintenance file lives where the vehicle is housed for a year, and for six months after the vehicle leaves the carrier’s control.
The Load
Securement, size and weight
The rules with the most arithmetic in them, which makes them unusually provable after the fact — and the rules most likely to bring in a defendant who was never at the scene.
Cargo must be immobilised
A load must be contained, immobilised or secured so that it cannot leak, spill, blow or fall from the vehicle, and cannot shift to the extent that the vehicle’s stability or handling is affected. Those are two separate failures and the second causes crashes without anything ever leaving the trailer.
The securement has a number on it
Tiedowns must hold the cargo against 0.8 g of forward deceleration, 0.5 g rearward and lateral, without exceeding their working load limits, and there are commodity-specific rules for logs, metal coils, concrete pipe, vehicles, crushed cars, boulders and roll-on containers.
Size and weight, under Texas law
The general Texas limits are 8 feet 6 inches wide, 14 feet high, and 80,000 pounds gross without a permit.
Insurance
What a carrier must be covered for
The reason a claim against a trucking company is a different proposition from a claim against a driver. These are statutory floors, not typical cover.
- $750,000the federal floor for an interstate carrier hauling ordinary freight
- $1,000,000for oil and most hazardous materials
- $5,000,000for bulk hazardous, explosive and highway-controlled radioactive loads
- $500,000for a Texas-only carrier over 26,000 pounds
Interstate minimums: 49 CFR §387.9. Texas intrastate minimums: 43 Texas Administrative Code §218.16, as published by the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles. These are floors rather than typical cover — most large fleets carry layers well above them, frequently with a different insurer on each layer.
Why It Matters
What a broken rule is actually worth
None of the above is useful as trivia. It matters for three reasons, and the third is the one with a deadline attached.
- 01
A broken safety rule is evidence of negligence
Where a regulation exists to prevent the kind of harm that happened, breaching it is not just bad practice. It shifts the argument from what a careful driver would have done to what this driver was required to do.
- 02
A rule creates a document, and a document has a date
This is the practical value of the rulebook. Every obligation above leaves a record behind it, which means a claim can be proved from the carrier’s own paperwork rather than from competing accounts.
- 03
Records destroyed after notice is its own problem
Once a carrier knows a claim is coming, letting the evidence go is not compliance any more. Courts have remedies for it, and a preservation letter is what makes the knowledge undeniable.
Questions
Questions about the rules
What people ask once they realise the other side is a regulated business rather than another motorist.
Does a violation of the trucking regulations mean the company automatically loses?
No. It has to be shown that the breach actually caused the crash and the harm complained of. A driver over their hours who was rear-ended while stationary has broken a rule that had nothing to do with what happened.
The truck never left Texas. Do the federal rules still apply?
In substance, generally yes. Texas has adopted most of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations for intrastate carriers, so the hours, the maintenance obligations, the drug and alcohol rules and the inspection requirements look much the same.
How do we get the driver’s logs and the maintenance file?
By asking for them in writing straight away, and then by formal discovery once a suit is filed. The first letter matters more than it looks: it puts the carrier on notice, which is what makes later destruction a problem for the carrier rather than for you.
What if the driver was an owner-operator rather than an employee?
It rarely helps the carrier. Under the federal leasing rules, the carrier whose operating authority and markings are on the truck has exclusive possession and control of it for the duration of the trip, and answers for it accordingly.
Was the truck required to have a dashcam or a black box?
Neither is federally required as such. But almost every modern tractor has an engine control module that records road speed, throttle, brake application and hard-braking events, most large fleets run telematics, and many run cameras.
Also Handled Here
Where to go from here
The rest of the firm’s trucking pages, and the neighbouring claims a commercial vehicle crash turns into.
- 01Texas Truck Accident LawsThe federal and state rules a carrier operates under
- 02Truck Accident LawsuitsWhat happens once one of these claims is filed
- 03Fatal Truck AccidentsWhere a crash killed a member of the family
- 04Car AccidentsCollisions between passenger vehicles
- 05Motorcycle AccidentsRiders struck by commercial and passenger vehicles
- 06Wrongful DeathWho may bring a Texas death claim, and what it covers
- 07Construction AccidentsSite injuries, including vehicle and machinery claims
- 08Pedestrian AccidentsPeople struck on foot, including by turning trucks
