DOT Fines for Hours of Service ViolationsFederal fines turn broken driving limits into proof. We put that proof to work in your Kentucky truck accident case.

On This Page

1. How FMCSA Sets HOS Fine Amounts
2. Fine Amounts for Hours of Service Violations
3. Hours of Service Rules Behind the Fines
4. Out-of-Service Orders
5. HOS Violations as Evidence in Kentucky
6. Records That Prove an HOS Violation

How FMCSA Sets HOS Fine Amounts

Every dollar figure in this article comes from one document: Appendix B to 49 CFR Part 386, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s penalty schedule. The appendix states that its adjusted amounts supersede the civil penalty figures written into title 49 of the United States Code, which makes it the single authoritative source for what an hours of service violation costs today.

Those amounts do not sit still. The Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act Improvements Act of 2015 requires federal agencies to adjust their civil penalties for inflation, and FMCSA updates the schedule accordingly. An article quoting fine amounts from a few years ago is quoting a schedule that no longer exists. The figures on this page reflect the eCFR version current as of June 2026.

One more thing the schedule makes clear: these are ceilings, not flat rates. Each non-recordkeeping violation is “subject to a civil penalty not to exceed” the listed amount. When FMCSA decides what to assess inside that ceiling, 49 U.S.C. 521(b)(2)(D) directs the agency to weigh the nature, circumstances, extent, and gravity of the violation, along with the violator’s degree of culpability and history of prior offenses. A carrier with a clean record and a single bad day gets treated differently than a fleet with a pattern. That same gravity-and-history analysis is exactly what a liability case examines, which is why the penalty record travels so well into civil litigation.

The statute also states what the penalty is for. The amount assessed “shall be calculated to induce further compliance,” in the words of section 521. Congress sized these numbers to change the behavior of companies that profit from every extra hour a tired driver stays on the road. When a carrier absorbs the fine and keeps the same schedules, it has made a documented business decision, and that decision is discoverable. For the longer arc of how federal trucking enforcement reached this point, see our piece on the history of truck regulations.

Fine Amounts for Hours of Service Violations

The table below covers the penalty categories that come up in hours of service enforcement. Every row is taken from the current Appendix B to Part 386; nothing here is estimated or rounded.

Source: Appendix B to 49 CFR Part 386, eCFR current version, June 2026.

Two structural details in that schedule deserve attention. First, the per-violation language means the numbers stack: a carrier that pushed a driver past the limit on ten separate days is exposed on ten separate violations, and a false-log problem accrues at $1,584 for every day it continues. Second, the falsification penalty exists alongside the underlying violation. A driver who blows through the 11-hour limit and then edits the record to hide it has generated two distinct penalty events, and so has the carrier that knew about it.

The schedule also draws a sharp line between recordkeeping and everything else. Sloppy paperwork, an incomplete grid, a log that does not match the day, accrues at the daily recordkeeping rate. Actually driving past a limit, or requiring a driver to, is the non-recordkeeping violation that carries the $19,246 ceiling. Defense lawyers like to describe hours of service cases as paperwork disputes. The penalty schedule itself says otherwise: the federal government prices a driving-limit violation at roughly twelve times the daily rate for a messy log.

The last row reaches past hours of service. A carrier whose liability coverage falls below the financial responsibility levels prescribed by 49 CFR Part 387 accrues penalties by the day, with each day a separate offense. That row belongs in this table because insurance enforcement lives in the same Appendix B schedule, and after a serious truck accident, the carrier’s coverage and its compliance record get examined together.

Hours of Service Rules Behind the Fines

The fines only make sense against the rules they enforce. For property-carrying drivers, the limits live in 49 CFR 395.3:

• A driver may not drive without first taking 10 consecutive hours off duty.
• Within the work shift, driving is capped at 11 total hours.
• All driving must happen within 14 consecutive hours of coming on duty. Breaks and waiting time do not pause that clock.
• Once 8 hours of driving time accumulate, the driver must take at least a 30-minute break before driving again.
• A driver may not drive after 60 hours on duty in 7 consecutive days, or 70 hours in 8 days for carriers that operate every day of the week. An off-duty period of 34 or more consecutive hours restarts the count.

Notice what the 14-hour rule does not do: it never pauses. A driver who spends four hours waiting at a dock has burned four hours of the driving window while earning nothing and resting badly. That pressure is the engine behind most hours of service violations, because the only way to recover a wasted afternoon is to keep driving after the clock says stop.

Compliance is tracked electronically. Under 49 CFR 395.8, motor carriers have been required to install and use electronic logging devices since December 18, 2017, with narrow exceptions for drivers who need logs on no more than 8 days in a 30-day period and for driveaway-towaway operations. An ELD pulls engine data directly, which is why modern hours of service cases turn less on what a driver wrote down and more on what the device recorded and who tried to edit it afterward. Our Truck Talk guide to the hours of service rules walks through each limit, its exceptions, and how drivers and dispatchers work around them in practice.

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Out-of-Service Orders

Fines arrive months after a violation. The out-of-service order is the enforcement tool that works at the roadside, immediately. Under 49 CFR 395.13, every special agent of FMCSA is authorized to order a driver out of service on finding that the driver has been on duty beyond the maximum periods or cannot produce a current record of duty status for the day of the inspection and the prior seven days. The regulation allows one narrow grace: a driver missing only the current day’s and prior day’s entries, with the previous six days complete, gets the chance to bring the log current at the roadside instead.

An out-of-service order is a driving ban, and the regulation locks both sides of the cab. The driver may not operate a commercial motor vehicle until the required off-duty time is complete, though sleeper berth time can count toward it. The motor carrier may not require or permit the driver to operate until the driver can lawfully do so. There is no dispatcher exception, no “the load is hot” exception, and no customer-deadline exception. These orders typically issue during the roadside inspections we cover in our Truck Talk guide to truck inspections.

The order also generates its own paper trail. The driver must deliver a copy of the out-of-service form to the carrier within 24 hours. The carrier must then complete the “Motor Carrier Certification of Action Taken” on the examination report and return it to FMCSA within 15 days. Both documents survive in agency and company files, which means a crash case can later show exactly when the company learned its driver had been pulled off the road and exactly what it claims to have done about it.

Breaking the ban is where the penalty schedule gets aggressive. A CDL holder convicted of violating an out-of-service order faces a civil penalty of at least $3,961 for a first conviction and at least $7,924 for a second, under Appendix B to Part 386. An employer that knowingly allows, requires, permits, or authorizes a driver to operate during an out-of-service period faces $7,155 to $39,615. Notice the difference in exposure: federal law reserves its sharper number for the company, because a dispatched truck means someone at the carrier made the decision to send a banned, fatigued driver back onto the highway.

That decision is also the single most damaging fact pattern we see in trucking litigation. A crash that follows a violated out-of-service order is a crash that a federal officer specifically tried to prevent.

HOS Violations as Evidence in Kentucky

An FMCSA fine is an administrative penalty paid to the federal government. It never reaches the person the violation injured. Agency enforcement and a civil injury claim run on separate tracks: the penalty exists to change the carrier’s future behavior, while the civil case compensates the person already injured. The two tracks share one thing, the underlying record, and that record reshapes a Kentucky truck accident case in three distinct ways.

Negligence Per Se

Kentucky adopted the federal driving limits as its own. 601 KAR 1:005 applies 49 CFR Part 395 to commercial motor vehicles operating in Kentucky whether the trip is interstate or intrastate, so a hauler that never leaves the Commonwealth is held to the same clock as a cross-country fleet. The same regulation adopts the federal rules on driver qualification, safe driving, and vehicle inspection and maintenance, so the hours of service limits sit inside a complete safety code that Kentucky enforces on its own highways. Layered on top of that, KRS 446.070 provides that a person injured by the violation of any statute may recover from the offender the damages sustained by reason of the violation. Read together, these provisions let an injured Kentuckian point to the violated safety rule itself as the standard the driver and the carrier failed to meet, instead of arguing in the abstract about what a careful trucker would have done. The rulebook becomes the yardstick.

Pattern Evidence

A single violation can be framed as one driver’s mistake. A history of them cannot. FMCSA publishes carrier-level inspection and violation data through its Safety Measurement System, where hours of service compliance is tracked as its own category, and discovery reaches further: prior enforcement actions, penalty assessments, and the carrier’s internal responses to each one. A company that paid hours of service fines and kept the same dispatch practices has documented its own knowledge of the problem. That record of conscious indifference is what supports a punitive damages claim, which targets the company’s conduct rather than only the losses from one collision.

Fatigue Behind the Wheel

The driving limits exist because tired truckers crash. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, 4,354 people died in crashes involving large trucks in 2023, and most of the dead were not in the trucks: 65 percent were people in passenger vehicles and another 17 percent were pedestrians, bicyclists, or motorcyclists. IIHS research has found that truck drivers behind the wheel for more than eight hours are twice as likely to crash, the very threshold at which 49 CFR 395.3 forces a 30-minute break. The same IIHS reporting notes that drivers who report hours of service violations are more likely to report having fallen asleep at the wheel in the previous month, and in IIHS surveys of Pennsylvania truckers, 19 percent admitted dozing at the wheel at least once in the prior month in 2005, up from 13 percent two years earlier. When ELD data shows the driver was past a limit at the moment of impact, the chain from violation to fatigue to collision stops being a theory and becomes a timeline.

Records That Prove an HOS Violation

Hours of service cases are won with documents, and federal law conveniently requires the trucking company to create and keep them. The ELD record required by 49 CFR 395.8 is the spine of the case, including its edit history. Around it, 49 CFR 395.11 requires carriers to retain supporting documents for every driver, every duty day, in five categories:

• Bills of lading, itineraries, schedules, or equivalent documents showing each trip’s origin and destination
• Dispatch and trip records
• Expense receipts tied to on-duty time
• Electronic mobile communication records from the fleet management system
• Payroll records

Each category is a cross-check on the logs. A fuel receipt stamped in Bowling Green at an hour the log shows the driver in a sleeper berth is a falsification case assembling itself. The driver must submit these documents to the carrier within 13 days, and the company cannot claim it never saw them.

Timing is the catch. Under 49 CFR 395.8(k), the carrier only has to retain duty-status records and supporting documents for 6 months. After that, the records that would prove the violation can be destroyed in the ordinary course of business, lawfully. Add the carrier’s inspection history from the Safety Measurement System, dispatch messages, and telematics data, and the picture of what the driver was actually doing gets sharp, but only if someone demands preservation before the retention clock runs out. In our trucking cases, preservation letters targeting these exact records go out early for precisely that reason. Our truck accident practice page covers how the full liability case comes together, and the Truck Talk library goes deeper on every regulation discussed here.

The fee structure stays simple while all of that work happens. Your fee never increases, even if the case goes to litigation or trial, and you pay $0 out-of-pocket forever. If a truck accident has already put an insurance adjuster in your voicemail, get a free case review before you respond. The review costs nothing, and the records that decide these cases are easiest to save in the first weeks after the collision.

Frequently Asked Questions About HOS Fines

How much is a DOT fine for an hours of service violation?

Under Appendix B to 49 CFR Part 386, a motor carrier faces up to $19,246 for each hours of service violation and a driver faces up to $4,812. Those are ceilings: FMCSA sets the assessed amount based on the gravity of the violation and the violator’s history.

Does an FMCSA fine go to the person injured in the accident?

No. Civil penalties under the FMCSA penalty schedule are paid to the federal government. An injury claim is a separate civil case against the driver and the trucking company, and the violation behind the fine becomes evidence in that case rather than compensation by itself.

What counts as an egregious hours of service violation?

Appendix B to Part 386 deems a driving-time violation egregious when a driver exceeds the driving limit in 49 CFR 395.3(a) by more than 3 hours. FMCSA treats the gravity of an egregious violation as sufficient to warrant the maximum penalty permitted by law.

Can a trucking company put a driver back on the road after an out-of-service order?

Not until the required off-duty time is complete. 49 CFR 395.13 bars a carrier from requiring or permitting an out-of-service driver to operate, and an employer that knowingly does so faces a civil penalty of $7,155 to $39,615 under the federal penalty schedule.

Do hours of service rules apply to intrastate truckers in Kentucky?

Yes. 601 KAR 1:005 adopts 49 CFR Part 395 for commercial motor vehicles operating in Kentucky in interstate or intrastate commerce. A Kentucky-only hauler is held to the same driving limits as a cross-country carrier, and the same violations supply the same liability evidence.

How often do the HOS fine amounts change?

Every year. The Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act Improvements Act of 2015 requires federal agencies to adjust civil penalties for inflation, and the current schedule at Appendix B to Part 386 supersedes the amounts written in title 49 of the United States Code, so the live eCFR version is the one to trust.