The 150 Air-Mile Short-Haul Exception: No ELD, But a 6-Month Time Record

If you run local and come home every night, you have probably been told you don't need an ELD. That is usually true, and it is not the whole sentence. The short-haul exception in 49 CFR §395.1(e) does not exempt you from the hours-of-service rules. It exempts you from recording them one particular way, and it replaces that recording obligation with a different one — a time record your carrier has to keep for six months.

Carriers get audited on the replacement record far more often than they expect, because it's the one nobody set up. This post covers who actually qualifies, what the exception waives and what it does not, what the time record has to contain, and what happens on the day a driver runs long.

There are two short-haul exceptions, not one

Almost every guide describes §395.1(e) as a single rule. It's two, they have different conditions, and a driver who qualifies for one is sometimes barred from the other:

• §395.1(e)(1) — the 150 air-mile radius driver. The common one. Applies to CDL and non-CDL drivers, property or passenger.
• §395.1(e)(2) — non-CDL property-carrying drivers. A separate, more generous exception for drivers of property-carrying CMVs that don't require a CDL — the 10,001–26,000 lb range where most hotshot and box-truck work lives.

Pick the wrong one and you'll be following conditions that don't apply to you while missing the ones that do. Start by asking whether the vehicle requires a CDL under Part 383. If it does, §395.1(e)(1) is your only option.

§395.1(e)(1): the four conditions, all of which must hold

The regulation is written as a conditional — a driver is exempt from §§395.8 and 395.11 if all of the following are true:

1. The driver operates within a 150 air-mile radius of the normal work reporting location. The regulation itself gives the conversion: 172.6 statute miles. An air-mile is a nautical mile, which is why the number isn't round. It's also a radius, not odometer distance — a driver can legally cover 400 road miles inside a 150 air-mile circle, and a driver 151 air-miles out in a straight line has broken it even if the odometer says 160.
2. The driver returns to the work reporting location and is released from work within 14 consecutive hours. Not "drives 14 hours" — released within 14 hours of coming on duty. Driver-salespersons are the one exception to the return requirement.
3. Enough time off between shifts. At least 10 consecutive hours off duty separating each 14 hours on duty for a property-carrying driver; 8 consecutive hours for a passenger-carrying driver.
4. The carrier maintains a time record — covered in its own section below, because this is the condition that fails audits.

Miss any one of the four on a given day and the exception does not apply that day. It isn't revoked for the month; it's evaluated per duty tour.

What the exception does not waive — and this is the part that hurts

Read the first line of §395.1(e)(1) closely: the driver is exempt from the requirements of §395.8 and §395.11. That is the record of duty status and the supporting-documents rule. It says nothing about §395.3, which is where the actual driving limits live.

So a short-haul driver is still bound by all of this:

The weekly clock is the one that catches local fleets. A driver who works 12-hour days close to home hits 60 or 70 hours by the end of the week exactly like an over-the-road driver does, and there is no logbook in the truck to make it visible. If you're not tracking the rolling weekly total somewhere, you're running it blind — the 60/70-hour rule and the 34-hour restart post walks the arithmetic.

The one break you do get: the 30-minute rule

This is worth its own heading because it is genuinely useful and almost nobody knows it. The 30-minute break requirement in §395.3(a)(3)(ii) opens with a carve-out, verbatim:

Except for drivers who qualify for either of the short-haul exceptions in § 395.1(e)(1) or (2), driving is not permitted if more than 8 hours of driving time have passed without at least a consecutive 30-minute interruption in driving status.

If you qualify for either short-haul exception, the 30-minute break does not apply to you. That's a real operational difference on a busy local day, and it's the only §395.3 relief the exception actually carries.

Note the wording: drivers who qualify for the exception. Qualifying is a daily test. On a day where the driver blows through 14 hours, the driver did not qualify — and the break requirement was live for that day along with everything else.

§395.1(e)(2): the non-CDL version, which trades differently

If the vehicle doesn't require a CDL, §395.1(e)(2) is a different bargain — and it's a better one on hours, worse on flexibility. The driver is exempt from §395.3(a)(2), §395.8, and §395.11, so the 14-hour window itself is replaced. The conditions:

• The driver operates a property-carrying CMV that does not require a CDL under Part 383;
• within a 150 air-mile radius of the normal work reporting location;
• and returns to the normal work reporting location at the end of each duty tour;
• and does not drive after the 14th hour after coming on duty on 5 days of any 7 consecutive days, or after the 16th hour on 2 days of any 7 consecutive days;
• and the carrier keeps the same 6-month time record.

So two long days a week are built in, up to 16 hours, without any extra paperwork. The trade-off is stated in the regulation's own text: a driver using §395.1(e)(2) is ineligible to use §395.1(e)(1), §395.1(g) (the sleeper-berth splits), and §395.1(o) (the 16-hour exception). You pick a lane.

And note what (e)(2) does not exempt: the 11-hour driving limit, the 10-hours-off requirement, and the 60/70-hour weekly limit all still apply. Only the 14-hour window is replaced.

If you're running a non-CDL operation, the hotshot and non-CDL compliance guide covers the rest of the obligation set that comes with it — the medical card, the DQF, and the marking rules that surprise people at 10,001 lbs.

The time record: what §395.1(e)(1)(iv) actually requires

Here is the condition that turns a compliant operation into an audit finding. The carrier must maintain and retain for a period of 6 months accurate and true time records showing:

• The time the driver reports for duty each day
• The total number of hours the driver is on duty each day
• The time the driver is released from duty each day
• The total time for the preceding 7 days, per §395.8(j)(2), for drivers used for the first time or intermittently

Four fields, per driver, per day. Note what is not on the list: miles, routes, stops, duty-status changes. It is deliberately simple — which is why "we didn't know we had to keep anything" is such a bad answer when the auditor asks.

Three failure modes to plan around:

• Payroll is not a time record. A payroll export usually shows hours paid, which is not hours on duty — unpaid pre-trip inspection time is on-duty time under §395.2, and a record that omits it is not accurate and true.
• The 6 months is a rolling window from the date of the record, and the auditor asks for a specific span. A shoebox of timecards you can't produce by driver and date is functionally no record.
• "On duty" starts before the wheels turn. Pre-trip inspection, waiting at a dock under the carrier's direction, fueling, and paperwork are all on-duty time. A start time recorded as "when he left the yard" understates every day.

The day it breaks: one long run

This is the scenario every short-haul operation eventually hits. A driver gets held up at a receiver, or takes one delivery past the radius, and comes back at hour fifteen.

What happens is precise, and it's better news than most people assume. The exception is conditional and evaluated per day, so on that day the driver does not qualify — which means §395.8 applies and a record of duty status is required for that day. Not for the week, not for the month. That day.

You do not have to buy an ELD for it. Under §395.8(a)(1)(ii)(A)(1), a carrier may have a driver record duty status manually rather than on an ELD if the driver is operating "in a manner requiring completion of a record of duty status on not more than 8 days within any 30-day period." A paper grid log, filled out properly, is compliant for those days.

That gives a mostly-short-haul fleet a clean operating rule:

• 0–8 RODS days in any rolling 30 → paper logs are fine on those days.
• 9 or more → the driver is an ELD operation, and the exception is no longer the shape of your business.

Keep a blank paper log book in every truck. The cost is nothing and the alternative is a §395.8(a) finding — no record of duty status — for a day the driver genuinely could have documented.

The adjacent tool: the 16-hour exception (§395.1(o))

If long days are becoming a pattern rather than an accident, and your drivers hold CDLs (so §395.1(e)(2) is unavailable), §395.1(o) is the next lever. It exempts a property-carrying driver from the 14-hour window — but only under three conditions, all of which are narrow:

1. The driver has returned to the normal work reporting location and been released there for the previous five duty tours;
2. The driver returns and is released within 16 hours after coming on duty following 10 consecutive hours off duty; and
3. The driver has not used this exemption within the previous 6 consecutive days — unless a new 7- or 8-day period began with an off-duty period of 34 or more consecutive hours under §395.3(c).

In plain terms: roughly once a week, after a settled run of local days. It is a relief valve, not a schedule. And it does not waive the 11-hour driving limit or the weekly clock.

A 10-minute self-audit

Run this per driver, once a month:

1. Confirm which exception each driver is actually using — (e)(1) or (e)(2) — and write it down. If nobody has ever decided this in writing, that's your first finding.
2. Check the radius against a map, not a feeling. Draw a 150 air-mile (172.6 statute mile) circle around the work reporting location and mark your regular customers. Anyone routinely near the edge is a driver who will break it.
3. Pull last month's time records and confirm all four fields are present for every driver, every working day. Missing release times are the most common gap.
4. Subtract report time from release time on the longest five days. Anything over 14 hours (or over the (e)(2) pattern) is a day that needed a RODS. Count how many such days fell in any 30-day window.
5. Add up the weekly on-duty totals. 60 in 7 or 70 in 8, same as everyone. This is the limit local fleets actually violate.
6. Check that on-duty start times include pre-trip time, not just departure.
7. Confirm you can produce 6 months of these records by driver and date, today, without reconstructing anything.

If step 4 turns up more than 8 RODS days in a 30-day window, that isn't a paperwork problem — the operation has outgrown the exception, and planning the ELD transition beats being told about it at an audit. The ELD and supporting-documents guide covers what changes when you make that move.

Keeping the record the exception actually requires

The short-haul exception's whole trade is that you keep a simpler record instead of a logbook — which only works if the simpler record exists, is complete, and survives six months. Roadworthy HQ stores the daily time records for short-haul drivers with the four §395.1(e)(1)(iv) fields, holds them for the six months the rule requires with the retention enforced in the database rather than by memory, and counts RODS days against the 8-in-30 threshold so you see the ELD line coming before you cross it. If you're keeping timecards in a drawer today, start a 14-day free trial — no credit card required.

Related violation codes

The requirements covered above are cited as these violation codes in audits and roadside inspections:

• §395.3 — Driving beyond the 11-hour or 14-hour limit
• §395.8(a) — No record of duty status
• §395.8 — Driver's record of duty status not current
• §395.11 — HOS supporting documents missing