How recap hours work (the short version)
Under the FMCSA's 70-hour/8-day limit, property-carrying drivers may not drive after accumulating 70 on-duty hours in any 8 consecutive days (you can still do non-driving work — but it keeps counting against your cycle). The window rolls: at the end of each 24-hour log day — the boundary your carrier designates, in your home terminal's time zone — the day that's now 8 days old falls out of the count, and whatever you worked that day comes back to you. Those returning hours are your recap hours — you "get back tomorrow what you worked 8 days ago."
None of that is a reset. A reset would put you back at zero; a rolling window simply stops counting its oldest day. That distinction is the entire reason this page asks for seven separate day totals instead of one running sum — the size of tomorrow's recap depends on which single day is about to fall off the back, and a total cannot tell you that. Two drivers sitting at the same 65 hours used can face completely different weeks: one worked twelve hours eight days ago and wakes to twelve fresh hours, the other took that day off and gains nothing whatever when the clock rolls over. The projection table above walks that window forward so you can plan loads instead of doing arithmetic in a fuel island. For the underlying rule text, the sleeper-berth split, adverse conditions and the short-haul exception, see How Recap Hours Work.
What the calculator needs from you
Three inputs, and each has a quiet way of going wrong.
On-duty hours, not driving hours. The cycle counts driving plus on-duty-not-driving: pre-trip and post-trip inspections, fueling, scaling, waiting at a shipper for a door, paperwork. Type your driving hours into these boxes and you will understate every single day, and the page will hand back a bigger number than you own — silently, because it has no way of knowing what you meant by the figure you entered. It performs subtraction on what you typed and nothing more. Read the day totals off your ELD's cycle or recap screen rather than rebuilding them from memory.
The right cycle. The 70-hour/8-day limit applies where the employing motor carrier operates commercial motor vehicles every day of the week; a carrier that does not operate every day runs 60 hours in 7 days instead. Which applies to you follows from your carrier's operating schedule, not from preference, and it changes both the ceiling and the length of the window. If you are unsure which one you run, settle it with dispatch before you trust anything on this screen.
Today so far. The final row is kept apart from the seven history rows on purpose, because partial days are exactly where this arithmetic drifts. Enter the hours already accrued today, in decimals — 9.5 means nine hours and thirty minutes.
Your entries stay in this browser's storage on this device; nothing is uploaded anywhere. Return on a later date and the page shifts the saved days backward for you, promotes yesterday's "today so far" into history, and pads any skipped dates with zero. That last behaviour deserves a second reading: if you worked on a day you never opened this page, it is recorded here as a zero, and the result will overstate what remains. Fix those rows by hand before you calculate.
A worked example from the projection table
Suppose your last seven days, oldest to newest, were 11, 9, 0, 0, 10, 10 and 10 hours; you are four hours into today; and the planner is set to 10 hours a day. That is 54 hours used against the 70, leaving 16 on the cycle, with 11 hours returning tonight. Run the window forward and the table reads:
- Tomorrow morning, 27 hours on the cycle. The morning after, 26.
- Third morning, 16 — the first of your two days off is what falls out, and a zero returns a zero.
- Fourth morning, 6 hours. The second zero drops out and the planner shows a six-hour day, not because you chose a short day but because six is all the cycle holds.
- Fifth, sixth and seventh mornings, 10 apiece, as the three ten-hour days begin recycling.
Two days off eight days back cost you nothing today and then arrive as a hole in the middle of next week, at a point no summary figure would have warned you about. That is the argument for reading the table rather than the headline number.
Reading the planner honestly
The "planned on-duty hours per day" selector is not a forecast; it is an assumption you are choosing, and the projection compounds it. Whichever figure you pick is treated as worked on each future day and fed straight back into the rolling window, so an optimistic setting quietly erodes the availability shown further down the column. The table never schedules beyond fourteen hours in a day, and it will show you less than your chosen figure whenever the cycle cannot support that much — the six-hour day in the example above is the calculator declining your own assumption. What it does not model: a day you take off, weather, a reload that falls through, or a restart taken midweek. Change the selector and run it again. Comparing two honest scenarios is worth more than trusting a single flattering one.
What the numbers on this page are not
This tool subtracts hours you typed from a limit. It does not know whether those hours match your ELD, and it does not sign off on your day. A comfortable figure in the "available right now" box means only that the arithmetic left room in your cycle; it is not a finding that you may lawfully drive, and this page will never make such a finding. Your cycle can hold room while your day is already finished — the 11-hour driving limit, the 14-hour window and the 30-minute driving interruption sit on top of the cycle, and any one of them can stop you with fifty cycle hours untouched.
Things this page cannot see, and never will: your ELD's own count, your carrier's internal policy where it is stricter than the federal floor, any exemption or exception you operate under, movement logged as personal conveyance, an adverse-conditions extension, a sleeper-berth split, and every unresolved edit or correction sitting in your log. Where the ELD and this page disagree, the ELD is the record and this page is a guess about your typing.
The restart is an option, not an obligation
Thirty-four consecutive hours off duty restarts the cycle. Nothing obliges you to take one. Recaps are the ordinary state of the rule, and a driver who never restarts all year is still running a perfectly normal cycle. The restart earns its keep only when the hours arriving over the next few midnights are too thin to be worth waiting around for, and the trade is explicit: you surrender the recaps you were owed in exchange for the whole cycle back. So the question is always the same comparison — what do the next several midnights return, measured against what thirty-four hours of downtime costs you? The note beneath the projection lays both sides out. The choice belongs to you and your carrier, never to a calculator.
How the tools here fit together
The recap calculator answers how much of your week is left. Cost Per Mile answers what an hour of that week has to earn before it is worth burning, and Per Diem handles the tax side of nights spent away from home. Bridge Formula and Tandem Slide are scale-house arithmetic — axle groups and weight transfer, checked before an inspector does it for you. IFTA and the compliance calendar cover filings and deadlines. Every one of them shows its sources and none of them tells you that you have passed anything.
Frequently asked questions
Do off-duty and sleeper hours count against the 70? No — only driving and on-duty-not-driving time count toward the cycle.
What's the 60/7 cycle? Carriers that don't operate every day of the week run 60 hours in 7 days instead. Flip the selector above and the calculator handles it — it shortens the history table to six days plus today.
Why does my ELD show fewer hours available than this page? Start with the inputs, because that is where a discrepancy can originate. The ELD counts the on-duty minutes it actually recorded, including ones you may not have counted yourself; your carrier's 24-hour boundary may not align with the dates listed in the table above; and one mistyped row changes every figure downstream of it. Reconcile day by day against the ELD's own cycle screen. The ELD wins that disagreement, every time.
What is the "back at midnight tonight" figure? It is the top row of your table — the oldest day you entered — and nothing else. That single day is what leaves the window at your next log-day boundary, so it is the only hours you can count on getting back.
Why doesn't my week reset on Sunday? Because the rule contains no weekly reset. The window slides one day forward at each log-day boundary, so a calendar weekend means nothing to it. The only reset is the 34-hour restart.
When does a 34-hour restart make sense? When the hours coming back over the next few midnights are too thin to keep you loaded. Run the calculator — the note under the projection compares your recap pace against a full reset.
Does the 30-minute break have to be off duty? No. §395.3(a)(3)(ii) allows the interruption to be satisfied by off-duty, sleeper berth, or on-duty-not-driving time, or a combination — it just has to be 30 consecutive minutes without driving. A fuel stop or a live unload can cover it.