The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration published the paperwork for two hours-of-service pilot studies on Oct. 6 and Oct. 7, each built around 256 commercial drivers followed for 16 weeks. One lets a driver stop the 14-hour clock for up to three hours while waiting at a pickup or delivery site. The other allows sleeper berth splits as even as 5/5. Comments on both close Dec. 7.
Nothing changes for fleets today. These are information collection notices, the clearance the agency needs from the Office of Management and Budget before it can gather data from participants. But any contractor or supplier whose trucks sit at a batch plant, a steel yard or a jobsite gate waiting to load should read the first one.
How the 14-hour driving window pause would work
The driving window sits at 49 CFR 395.3(a)(2), the provision the Oct. 6 notice cites. Under the study exemption, a participating driver could take a single pause of between 30 minutes and three consecutive hours that doesn’t count against the window. It can be logged as off-duty, sleeper berth or on-duty not-driving time. The catch is location: the pause has to be taken where cargo is picked up or delivered. The 10-hour off-duty requirement before the next shift still applies, according to the notice.
The idea isn’t new. FMCSA proposed a pause in a 2019 rulemaking, left it out of the 2020 final rule after commenters warned that drivers would be pressured to use it, and floated a pilot later that year that never ran.
Sleeper berth split options down to 5/5
Current rules at 49 CFR 395.1(g)(1) require one sleeper period of at least seven hours, which is why drivers talk about 8/2 and 7/3 splits. The Oct. 7 notice describes an exemption that drops the minimum to five consecutive hours, opening 6/4 and 5/5. Drivers in that study must run a sleeper-equipped truck as their main job and use the berth regularly, so it’s a heavy-haul and long-haul question more than a local dump fleet one.
Who qualifies for the FMCSA pilot programs and how to comment
Carriers need interstate operating authority, the financial responsibility minimums in 49 CFR part 387, a Satisfactory safety rating and no FMCSA enforcement action in three years. They can’t be classed as high or moderate risk, and their out-of-service rates can’t exceed national averages. Drivers need a valid CDL and medical certificate, a clean Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse record and no license suspension in the prior two years.
Participants wear a wrist activity monitor, take reaction-time tests, rate their own sleepiness and share telematics and duty-status records with the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute. FMCSA estimates 16.68 hours of study tasks per driver, or 4,270.92 hours a year for each study.
The agency said in an Aug. 27 update that both studies will run at full size in 2027, pay drivers up to $1,600 and take interest from carriers at pilots@dot.gov. Pre-tests this year used nine drivers apiece. Comments go to regulations.gov under dockets FMCSA-2026-2081 (the pause) and FMCSA-2026-2080 (the sleeper split).
The design deserves a hard look in those comments. FMCSA calls it a convenience sample: volunteers, drawn only from carriers with clean records. That’s a reasonable way to run an exemption safely. It’s a weak way to predict what happens when a dispatcher at a carrier with a worse record gets the same three hours to work with. With diesel at $6.45 a gallon pressing on haul margins, the temptation to treat a pause as unpaid waiting time is real.
The pause was proposed in 2019, dropped in 2020 and shelved as a pilot the same year. It’s back as a 256-driver study, and a rule change, if one follows, is still years behind the data.