In our ELD recordkeeping post, we said personal conveyance and yard moves deserve a post of their own. Here it is — and the reason it needs one is in CVSA's own numbers: across more than 41,000 roadside inspections, CVSA found that 38% of drivers using personal conveyance were using it improperly, and the alliance reports that carriers whose drivers misuse it are about four times more likely to be involved in a crash. Falsified records of duty status were the second most-cited driver violation of 2025, at 58,382 violations.
Personal conveyance isn't a loophole, and it isn't a trap. It's a narrow, genuinely useful provision with a precise test — and an ELD that records exactly where you went while you claimed it. This post covers what the rules actually say, where the rules end and FMCSA guidance begins, and how misuse becomes a false-log finding.
First, an honest distinction: regulation vs. guidance
This trips up almost everyone, so let's put it up front.
The categories of personal conveyance and yard move are created by regulation: 49 CFR §395.28 says a motor carrier may configure an ELD to let a driver indicate these special driving statuses. Two things follow from that one word "may." The categories are optional — your carrier (or you, as your own carrier) must enable them on the ELD, or they don't exist for you. And §395.28 only governs how the ELD records the statuses. It never defines what personal conveyance is.
The substance — what qualifies as personal conveyance, and what counts as a yard — lives entirely in FMCSA regulatory guidance, not regulation text. Personal conveyance is defined in FMCSA's June 2018 regulatory guidance (83 FR 26377, Question 26 to §395.8). Yard moves rest on guidance to §395.2. Neither term appears as a definition anywhere in the CFR.
Why does this matter to you? Because guidance is what officers and auditors are trained on, and because guidance has no regulatory cushion of vagueness working in your favor. When the only authority is a published interpretation with explicit examples, your defense is matching those examples — not arguing about what the rule "really means."
The personal conveyance test
FMCSA's core test, from the 2018 guidance: a driver may record CMV movement as off-duty personal conveyance only when the driver is relieved from work and all responsibility for performing work by the motor carrier. The movement must not be for the commercial benefit of the carrier at that time.
Two clarifications from FMCSA's own guidance that surprise people:
- A loaded vehicle can be used for personal conveyance. The determination is based on the nature of the movement, not whether the vehicle is laden. Hauling your dispatched load to dinner doesn't disqualify the dinner trip.
- There is no federal maximum distance or time limit on personal conveyance. But §392.3 — no driving while ill or fatigued — always applies, and distance is exactly what enforcement looks at when deciding whether a "personal" trip was really load progress.
FMCSA also says explicitly that carriers may impose their own limits: ban personal conveyance entirely, cap the distance, or prohibit it while laden. As an owner-operator you're setting policy for yourself, but writing that policy down is still worth doing — more on that at the end.
What qualifies, per FMCSA
The 2018 guidance gives the official examples of qualifying personal conveyance:
- Driving from en route lodging (motel, truck stop) to restaurants or entertainment, and back.
- Commuting between your terminal or trailer-drop lot and your residence — provided the commute still leaves enough time for required restorative rest.
- After loading or unloading, traveling to a nearby, reasonable, safe location to get required rest — and it must be the first such location reasonably available.
- Moving the CMV at the request of a safety official during your off-duty time.
- Transporting personal property while off duty.
- Authorized use of the CMV to travel home after working at an offsite location.
What does not qualify, per FMCSA
The non-qualifying list is where the citations live:
- Moving to enhance operational readiness — the named example is bypassing available rest locations to get closer to the next loading point or scheduled destination. Repositioning 80 miles toward tomorrow's shipper "off duty" is the textbook violation.
- Continuing a trip for a business purpose, including bobtailing or pulling an empty trailer to retrieve another load, or repositioning at the carrier's direction.
- Returning to the terminal after loading or unloading. FMCSA's FAQ is blunt: returning home or to the terminal from a dispatched trip is a continuation of the trip, not personal conveyance.
- Driving home from a repair facility. Travel for repair and maintenance is in furtherance of the business — on-duty time.
- Driving to a rest location after being placed out of service for exceeding Part 395 limits — unless directed by the enforcement officer at the scene.
The out-of-hours exception everyone gets wrong
The single most misunderstood question: can I use personal conveyance when I've run out of hours?
FMCSA's answer is no — with one exception. A driver who runs out of hours while at a shipper's or receiver's facility may use personal conveyance to drive to the nearest safe location to obtain required rest. That's the whole exception. It does not cover running out of hours on the highway and continuing to a "better" truck stop three exits past the first one, and it absolutely does not cover advancing toward the next pickup. The resting location must be the first reasonable one available, and FMCSA recommends annotating the record if you have to pass a full lot and continue to the next — the annotation is your defense.
How the clocks interact
This is the part worth memorizing, because personal conveyance and yard moves are exact inverses:
Personal conveyance is off-duty time. It doesn't extend your 14-hour window — off-duty time simply isn't on-duty time — and it can't be used to keep driving for the operation after the 14th hour. But because it's genuinely off duty, PC time can count toward your 10-hour break and your 34-hour restart. Driving to dinner during your 10-hour break doesn't reset the break.
A yard move is on-duty not driving — line 4. It burns your 14-hour window like any other on-duty time, but it does not count against the 11-hour driving limit. That's the entire value of the status: moving the truck inside a yard without accumulating driving time.
So: PC buys you off-duty movement, but only for genuinely personal purposes. YM buys you non-driving movement, but only inside a yard, and the 14-hour clock keeps running.
Yard moves: what a "yard" is (and the definition that never happened)
Here's where honest precision matters most. FMCSA's operative yard-move guidance is a single short Q&A under §395.2: a driver jockeying CMVs in the yard — private property — records that time as on-duty (not driving). The answer was updated to "not driving" in February 2020; before that, the 1997-era answer was on-duty driving.
What FMCSA never did is define "yard." In January 2021 the agency published proposed guidance (86 FR 179) that would have defined a yard as a confined area on private property — including intermodal and port facilities, and even brief movement on a public road where access is restricted by traffic control like gates, lights, or flaggers. That proposal took comments in early 2021 and, as of June 2026, was never finalized. It is not the rule. Anyone telling you "FMCSA says you can cross a public road on yard-move status" is quoting a proposal that never took effect.
The conservative practice, and the one we'd write into a policy: use yard-move status only off public highways, within a controlled or restricted-access area — your own terminal, a shipper's private lot, an intermodal or port facility. If you operate somewhere ambiguous, define your own yard boundaries in writing. With no federal definition, your written policy is the standard you'll be judged against consistently — and a reasonable written standard beats an improvised one at every inspection.
ELD mechanics: the details that generate findings
A handful of device-level facts, all from FMCSA's published ELD materials:
- The carrier enables the categories. If your driver account isn't configured for personal conveyance, the alternative is switching to Off Duty and annotating the start and end of the personal movement. The status without configuration isn't available; the annotation path is.
- Select before, annotate when prompted. §395.28 requires the driver to select the special category before the movement starts, deselect when it ends, and annotate the record describing the activity. "Personal — dinner, 6 mi" takes ten seconds and is the difference between a documented status and a suspicious one.
- Personal conveyance does not auto-revert. FMCSA is explicit: the ELD does not change your duty status after a PC period ends. Forget to switch back before powering off, and your next movement may be misrecorded. Fix it by annotation.
- The 5 mph rule is about driving, not yard moves. The ELD spec requires the device to switch automatically to Driving once the vehicle moves at a threshold no greater than 5 mph. That's the general in-motion trigger. Vendor settings that flip yard-move status at some speed are vendor configuration choices, not an FMCSA yard-move speed limit — no such federal speed limit exists.
- You can't shorten driving time to fix a forgotten selection. Automatically recorded driving time can't be edited down. If you forgot to select PC or YM, the remedy is an annotation explaining what happened — not an edit that makes driving time disappear, which is its own problem.
- PC records with reduced location precision — roughly a 10-mile radius rather than the standard resolution. Reduced, not invisible. The trail still shows direction and distance, which is all an auditor needs to see a "personal" trip pointed straight at the next shipper.
What enforcement actually does in 2026
Two current enforcement documents tell you exactly where the attention is.
CVSA Inspection Bulletin 2026-02, effective April 1, 2026, covers false records of duty status and ELD tampering. Its example reads like it was written for this post: a driver "drove 3.75 hours using personal conveyance in the furtherance of their load." The inspector documents the 11-hour violation, the 14-hour violation, and the false record. The bulletin also draws the line between §395.8(e)(1) — a standard false log, where the inspector can determine when the falsification occurred — and §395.8(e)(2), tampering so thorough that real driving time can't be reconstructed. An (e)(2) finding puts the driver out of service for 10 consecutive hours.
The 2026 International Roadcheck (May 12–14) made ELD tampering, falsification, and manipulation its driver focus area. Five of the top 10 driver violations in 2025 were hours-of-service or ELD related.
The method is cross-checking. The bulletin's signature example caught a falsified log with a fuel receipt timestamped 1,304 miles from where the log claimed the driver was. Your supporting documents — fuel receipts, bills of lading, dispatch records — either corroborate your personal conveyance claims or contradict them. So does unassigned driving time: yard moves done without logging in pile up under the unidentified driver profile, and unresolved unidentified driving time is exactly the kind of pattern that turns a routine records request into a falsification investigation. A false-log finding is also the kind of thing that surfaces in a new-entrant audit, where the HOS records request comes with the supporting documents for the same days.
Worth knowing as context, clearly labeled as not law: CVSA has petitioned FMCSA repeatedly to tighten personal conveyance — most recently approving a petition this spring that would cap PC at two hours per day. FMCSA denied the earlier petitions and has not adopted this one. Nothing has changed yet. But the direction of enforcement interest is not a mystery, and the drivers who use PC precisely have nothing to adjust if it ever does.
The practical setup for a small carrier
- Enable the categories deliberately. Decide whether your operation uses PC and YM, configure the ELD accounts accordingly, and don't leave it to whatever the vendor defaulted.
- Write a one-page policy. FMCSA explicitly permits carrier-imposed limits. Define when PC is allowed, any distance cap you choose, whether laden PC is permitted, and what counts as a yard for your operation. A one-truck operation writing policy for itself feels silly right up until an inspector asks what your standard is.
- Annotate everything. Before the movement, select the status; describe the purpose in plain English. Passing a full rest area? Annotate it.
- Keep the corroboration filed. Supporting documents matched to driver and date are what prove your PC claims were real — the same filing habit covered in our ELD post.
- Clear unidentified driving time weekly. Yard moves and shop runs done while logged out shouldn't sit unexplained.
Roadworthy HQ handles the records side of this: HOS supporting documents upload against driver and date so the corroboration for any duty-status claim is matchable, and the audit binder generator assembles the records-plus-supporting-documents package in the structure an auditor requests. The duty-status decisions in the cab are yours; the proof they were honest is what we keep organized.
This article is general guidance, not legal advice. The rules described are current as of June 2026. Personal conveyance is defined by FMCSA regulatory guidance (83 FR 26377) rather than regulation text, the proposed yard definition (86 FR 179) was never finalized, and CVSA's pending petition is advocacy, not law — we'll cover any of these if and when their status changes. FMCSA's personal conveyance page and published ELD guidance are the authoritative sources.