The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has proposed two pilot programs to study increased flexibility in truck driver hours of service rules, including pausing the 14-hour driving window and larger sleeper berth splits.

The agency wants to see if giving commercial drivers greater control over their own schedules will reduce fatigue and improve safety.

“Truck drivers are the backbone of our economy, and we owe it to them to explore smarter, data-driven policies that make their jobs safer and more enjoyable,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy in a news release.

“These pilot programs will help identify real solutions for America’s drivers without compromising safety.”

Split Duty Period Pilot Program

This will allow participating drivers to pause their 14-hour “driving window” for no less than 30 minutes and no more than three hours. 

The program seeks to collect data and assess whether added flexibility can maintain or improve safety outcomes. 

Flexible Sleeper Berth Pilot Program

This will explore additional sleeper berth split options beyond the current 8/2 and 7/3 configurations.

FMCSA will test the safety implications of allowing drivers to divide their 10-hour off-duty requirement into 6/4 and 5/5 split periods. The research will examine how these alternatives affect driver fatigue and overall safety performance in order to determine whether a wider range of rest options could benefit both drivers and the motoring public.

Protocol development for both pilot programs will begin in early 2026, with more than 500 commercial truck drivers expected to participate in the efforts, according to the agency.

Comments must be received on or before November 17, 2025.

Asked For By Drivers

When Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association Executive Vice President Lewie Pugh testified in front of the House Highways and Transit Subcommittee in March, he asked for provisions that would allow truck drivers to pause their clock for up to three hours and use split sleeper berth options of 6/4 and 5/5.

“This ‘split-duty period’ would provide truckers greater flexibility to rest when they’re tired and avoid factors that make driving unsafe,” Pugh wrote in his March testimony. 

“It makes far more sense to allow alert drivers to leave the sleeper-berth and begin driving with the option to obtain additional rest later in the day, rather than forcing drivers to idly wait for their driving clock to restart. More restrictive sleeper-berth splits can force a trucker to drive when tired and rest when alert. The truth is that not all drivers are able to sleep seven, eight or 10 hours at a time.”

FMCSA announced the pilot programs in June as part of its “Pro-Trucker Package,” but it now has published the detailed proposals and asked for comment.

In both pilot programs, participation would be limited to approximately 256 CDL holders who meet certain criteria specified for participation. 

This pilot program would examine whether such flexibility achieves a level of safety that is equivalent to, or greater than, the level of safety that would be achieved through compliance with the current regulations.

FMCSA said the pilot programs would take about three years to complete overall. The timeline for each participating driver would take four months – one month to collect data under “baseline” conditions (under the current regulations), and three months to collect data under the proposed changes.

More details on each proposed pilot program are outlined below.

Pausing the Driver's 14-Hour Clock

It’s not the first time the agency has looked at drivers being able to “pause” the clock.

This concept was part of the 2019 proposed rules on driver hours of service, but it did not make it into the final HOS rule published in 2020.

When asked why this provision was omitted, FMCSA officials explained that the split sleeper berth provides essentially the equivalent, if not more flexibility, in that regard.

So if a driver wanted to take up to a three-hour break to wait out rush hour, for instance, he or she could take that as split sleeper berth time, rather than the paused split-duty time.

Previous Pilot Program on Pausing the Clock Never Got Off the Ground

The decision not to implement that part of the proposal was not a popular one among many drivers, including the Owner Operator Independent Drivers Association, which had pushed for the provision.

So in August 2020, during the Biden administration, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration was asking for public comment on a pilot program to study the effectiveness of such a provision.

However, many commenters on the proposal believed that drivers would be pressured by carriers, shippers, or receivers to use the break for reasons other than accommodating their own rest or schedule. These comments suggested that the pause could have unintended consequences.

FMCSA ultimately did not initiate the pilot program. 

As the new proposal explains, since then, drivers have continued to encounter scenarios where they could benefit from the flexibility to extend the 14-hour “driving window,” including encountering unreasonably long periods of detention time when waiting to load or unload. 

The previously proposed pilot program would not have allowed on-duty time of any type to count toward a “pause.”

The New Split Duty Period Pilot Program

In a Federal Register notice published on September 17, FMCSA proposed the Split Duty Period Pilot Program.

Participating commercial drivers would have the option to extend their 14-hour “driving window” by taking one off-duty, sleeper berth, or on-duty/not driving period (taken at the location of a pick-up or delivery of cargo), including detention time, of no less than 30 minutes and no more than three hours. 

FMCSA believes that the exemption covered by the proposed pilot program provides the flexibility to take extra rest, avoid driving during traffic congestion, and mitigate the impacts of unreasonable “detention times.”

During the proposed pilot program, FMCSA plans to track the type of duty status participating drivers use to extend their 14-hour “driving window.” This will help it determine the extent of detention time and its potential effects on driver fatigue and safety compared to pauses taken under other circumstances.

In addition to potentially providing relief from “detention time,” the agency believes that a pause may enable drivers to avoid congestion, which was an argument made for the provision by drivers during the previous rulemaking.

This would make drivers more productive and could also reduce the pressure to speed in order to make up lost miles due to congestion or delays.

Drivers would continue to take 10 consecutive hours off-duty at the end of the duty period, 

More Split Sleeper Options

This is also not the first time the agency has said it would study split sleeper programs beyond the currently available options.

In December 2013, the American Trucking Associations and the Minnesota Trucking Association submitted a joint proposal for a “flexible sleeper-berth pilot program.” FMCSA's current proposal is based, in part, on that joint proposal for a pilot program, according to the new proposal.

The 2020 revisions of the hours-of-service rules did allow a shorter main period in the sleeper berth of up to seven hours (previously it was a minimum of eight) with the other break being up to three hours to make up that 10-hour rest break. 

At the time, however, the agency said it did not feel comfortable allowing a larger split because there was not enough data or studies on their safety.

In 2021, in the last days of the first Trump administration, FMCSA proposed a pilot program that would study allowing commercial motor vehicle drivers to split their required 10-hour rest period into a 6/4 split and a 5/5 split. 

In today's Flexible Sleeper Berth Pilot Program, the proposal would reduce the minimum length of the required sleeper berth period from 7 hours to 5 hours. In practice, this would allow participating drivers to use additional splits, including, for example, a “6/4” split or a “5/5” split.

Details of the Flexible Hours of Service Pilot Programs

In both pilot programs as proposed, participants would receive a smartphone provided by FMCSA’s research services contractor installed with data collection apps necessary for the research (e.g., fatigue measurement apps, survey apps, etc.). Drivers also would get a “wrist actigraphy device” (aka a smartwatch).

FMCSA proposes the collection of the following information:

• Records of duty status prepared using an electronic logging device, to evaluate participants’ use of the split duty period exemption/optional pause.

• Roadside inspection data and crash records. 

• Wrist actigraphy data, to evaluate total sleep time, time of day sleep was taken, and sleep quality, e.g., sleep latency and intermittent wakefulness. 

• Psychomotor Vigilance Test (PVT) data, to evaluate drivers’ behavioral alertness/effects of fatigue, based on reaction times. For this study, drivers would be required to complete daily iterations of a brief PVT, a 3-minute behavioral alertness test that measures alertness levels by timing their reactions to visual stimuli.

• Subjective sleepiness ratings to measure drivers’ perceptions of their fatigue levels. 

• Survey data (e.g., driver pre-and-post study surveys to provide contextual information).

FMCSA in its proposal for both pilot programs said it would also actively monitor and watch for any indication that shippers, receivers, or motor carriers are misusing a driver’s ability to determine how and when to use the flexibility provided by the exemptions.