The number is six months. The part that catches carriers out is when the six months starts, and how much of the file counts as a supporting document.
Key takeaways
Six months, and the clock starts when the carrier receives the record, not when the driver drove. Section 85(3) of the Commercial Vehicle Drivers Hours of Service Regulations requires a motor carrier to deposit records of duty status and their supporting documents at its principal place of business within 30 days after receiving them, and to keep them in chronological order for each driver for at least six months after the day they were received.
Six months is a floor set by the hours of service rules. It is not the whole answer for a carrier, because several other clocks run alongside it and at least one runs for years.
Read together, a record completed on 1 March could legitimately reach the file on 20 April and then be retained until late October. Carriers that purge on a rolling “six months from the driving date” rule delete records they are still required to hold.
Section 1 defines the term broadly and the list is worth reading before you decide what to throw out: electronic mobile communication records between driver and carrier through a call-in or fleet management system; payroll records, settlement sheets or equivalents showing payments to the driver; government-issued documents indicating the vehicle’s location; anything relating to the load, including bills of lading, itineraries and schedules showing origin and destination; anything relating to servicing, repair, conditioning, fuelling, inspection or rental of the vehicle; and any dispatch or trip records or receipts indicating the date, time or location of the vehicle during a trip, including arrival and departure times.
In other words, most of what your dispatch and accounting systems generate is a supporting document. The retention question is not really about the logs; it is about whether you can find the fuel receipt that proves the on-duty entry.
Fourteen days plus today. Section 84 prohibits a driver from driving unless they have in their possession the records of duty status for the preceding 14 days, the current day’s record completed to the last change of duty status, and the supporting documents received during the current trip. Section 98 lets an inspector demand exactly that, and an inability or refusal to produce it is a ground for an out-of-service declaration under section 91(1)(c).
Worked example: what a six-month file actually has to answer
An inspector arrives at a Barrie carrier in November and asks for the records of duty status for two drivers for the week of 3 June, plus supporting documents.
The carrier has the ELD data, because the vendor retains it. What it does not have is the bill of lading for a 5 June trip that would substantiate three hours of on-duty not driving, because the customer’s portal purges at 90 days and nobody downloaded it.
The gap is not an ELD problem. It is a document-capture problem: the supporting document existed, was received in the normal course, and was allowed to expire in somebody else’s system. The fix is to capture the document into your own file at the moment the load closes, which is a well-defined extraction job — read the PDF, attach it to the trip, index it by driver and date. A person still decides what the record means; the machine just makes sure it is there in November.
Two considerations usually push a sensible retention policy past six months. The first is that other records in the same file have longer statutory lives — British Columbia requires carrier records maintained under section 37.67, which include the driving record transcript for each driver, to be kept and readily accessible for the calendar year in which they were made and the following four calendar years (s.37.68). The second is evidentiary: a collision, an insurance dispute or a wrongful dismissal claim can surface long after six months, and the log is often the only contemporaneous record of what the driver was doing.
The counterweight is that records about identifiable employees should not be kept indefinitely without a reason, a point Treadstone Law develops in its guide to employee privacy and personal information. A written schedule that says what is kept, for how long, and why is worth more than either extreme.
A carrier operating in the United States retains records of duty status and supporting documents for each driver for not less than six months from the date of receipt (49 CFR 395.8(k)(1)), and short-haul carriers relying on 395.1(e) keep time records showing report time, hours on duty and release time for the same six months. The number matches; the categories of supporting document a carrier must retain are enumerated differently, so a cross-border fleet should build its file to the union of the two lists rather than the intersection.
The obligation in section 85(3) is on the carrier, to deposit and keep the records at its principal place of business, defined in section 1 as the place the carrier designates where records of duty status and supporting documents are stored. Read your vendor contract for what happens to the data if you leave, and for how quickly you can extract six months of it.
Section 99(2) contemplates the carrier transmitting electronic records of duty status to an inspector, and section 98(2) contemplates a driver producing a display, a printout or a transfer at roadside using a method supported by the device. What matters is that they are complete, in chronological order by driver, and producible when asked.
The retention obligation attaches to the record, not to the employment relationship. Six months from receipt still applies, and the driver qualification file has its own, longer clock in most provinces.
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