How Long to Keep HOS Logs and Supporting Documents

RODS: six months

49 CFR 395.8(k)(1) is the retention sentence. A motor carrier shall retain records of duty status and supporting documents required under this part for each of its drivers for a period of not less than 6 months from the date of receipt. Thirty days is a habit from older training and from the slice an officer asks to see in the truck. It is not the carrier's retention period. When the letter asks for six months, the months you deleted are violations you cannot reprint from memory.

The date of receipt is the start of the six months, not the date you feel organized enough to file them. ELD records submitted under the 13-day submission rule still have a receipt date. Count from that. A system that auto-deletes at 30 or 90 days is set to the wrong number. Change the retention setting before you change anything else in the office.

Drivers who keep a personal copy may keep it longer. The legal floor for the carrier is six months. Longer is a company choice. Shorter is a violation. Do not adopt a driver's phone as the only archive. Phones get replaced. The carrier's copy is the one 395.8(k) is talking about.

Supporting documents: six months, and what counts

Supporting documents are not a nickname for every PDF in the company. 395.11(c) limits the duty to categories generated or received in the normal course of business, retained to verify on-duty not driving time, for each driver and each 24-hour period. The categories are specific. Each bill of lading, itinerary, schedule, or equivalent document that indicates the origin and destination of each trip. Each dispatch record, trip record, or equivalent document. Each expense receipt related to any on-duty not driving time. Each electronic mobile communication record reflecting communications transmitted through a fleet management system. Each payroll record, settlement sheet, or equivalent document that indicates payment to a driver.

A document in those categories needs to be tieable to the driver, with a date, a location, and, in the usual case, a time. 395.11(d) says the carrier need not retain more than eight supporting documents for one driver's 24-hour period. Each fleet-message thread for that day counts as a single document toward the eight. If you have more than eight, you still keep the ones that contain the earliest and the latest time indications among the eight you retain. The point of the cap is to stop the fantasy that compliance means keeping every scrap forever. The point of the earliest-and-latest rule is to stop the fantasy that you may keep the eight documents that happen to match the log and discard the one that shows a different time.

395.11(f) prohibits obscuring, defacing, destroying, mutilating, or altering existing information on a supporting document. You may age a document out after the six months. You may not edit a fuel time because it disagrees with the log. The disagreement is the finding. Keep the receipt.

Drivers submit supporting documents within 13 days. Build the habit weekly so the six-month file is not a scramble of photos still sitting on a phone. Match them to the RODS so an auditor can pull one day and see both. 395.11(e) requires that match.

ELD backup versus paper printouts

An ELD that retains the records is the record, if you can produce it for six months. A paper printout of pretty graphs is a copy. It is not a substitute for a file that has gone corrupt with no backup. Say that plainly in the office: if the vendor cannot restore the days, the carrier does not have the days. Screenshot folders that skip weekends are not a restoration.

When an ELD malfunctions, a different rule requires paper records of duty status for a limited period. That procedure, including the 8-day clock, is what to do when the ELD malfunctions. Do not treat this retention page as the malfunction manual. Do keep those paper days inside the same six-month file. A malfunction does not excuse the days it touches. It changes how they were recorded.

Test the backup once, on a day you pick at random, before an auditor picks it for you. If the export fails, you have a retention failure already in progress. Fix the vendor relationship while the other copy still exists.

What the driver must have in the truck today

395.8(k)(2) says the driver shall retain a copy of each record of duty status for the previous 7 consecutive days, in the driver's possession and available for inspection while on duty. The ELD is required to display and transfer the current day and that previous 7. Together, the roadside set is the current day plus the previous 7 consecutive days. It is not the six-month archive. Officers are not the people you hand a hard drive of half a year.

A driver who cannot produce the previous 7, because the login failed and no paper was kept when paper was required, is not saved by a promise that the office has the data somewhere. The office copy and the cab copy are both duties. They are not alternatives.

Supporting documents the driver has in hand are shown at the roadside on request, in the format the driver has them. You do not have to carry the entire six-month drawer in the truck. You do have to keep that drawer where the carrier can produce it.

What you can throw away, and when

After six months from receipt, the RODS and the supporting documents required by this part may be discarded. Discard on a schedule so the file does not become a decade of paper nobody will read and nobody can search. Do not discard early because storage costs money. The fine risk of a missing month is not a storage decision this page will price. There is no dollar figure here. There is a duty.

Do not use the HOS six-month period for drug and alcohol records, accident registers, or driver qualification files. Those live in other sections and they use other periods. Mixing them into one shredder date is how a five-year drug record gets destroyed at month six. This page stops at Part 395. The audit guide can point you at the other folders without turning this article into that encyclopedia. Start with how to pass a DOT audit for the shape of the visit, then file each record under its own rule.

Toll receipts are an extra supporting document when the driver was required to keep a paper record of duty status. 395.11(d)(4) says so, and it points at the paper-record paragraph. Keep them for those paper days in addition to the eight-document thinking, for the same six months. Do not keep every toll receipt from ELD days forever out of fear. Use the categories.

New-entrant audits look at this first

A new-entrant safety audit asks whether the carrier requires drivers to keep records of duty status when the rules require them. The pass-or-fail structure of that audit, including the automatic-failure items, is discussed on the new-entrant safety audit. One of those items is failing to require RODS when the 51 percent test in the new-entrant rules is met. A carrier that has been operating and cannot produce the logs is not in a gray area. The absence is the finding.

You do not need a six-month stack on day 10 of a new authority. You need every day you were required to record, retained from the date you received it, and a system that will still have those days at month six. Starting the archive on the day the audit letter arrives creates a file that begins too late. The earlier days are already missing.

The cab rule and the office rule can both be true. The driver has eight days in the truck, counting today. The carrier has six months in the office. Train those as separate sentences so nobody throws away month four because the truck only holds a week.

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