The Hours of Service Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Category (BASIC) is one of seven categories that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) uses to determine how a motor carrier ranks relative to other carriers with a similar number of safety events (i.e., inspections, violations, or crashes). This is used to determine a carrier's CSA score.
What is the Hours of Service BASIC?
The Hours of Service BASIC is one of the most heavily enforced areas of the FMCSA's BASIC categories. These violations are tied to the driver's hours of service requirements for operating a CMV.
This area of the 7 FMCSA BASIC categories deals with a driver's ability to safely operate a commercial motor vehicle, awareness, and level of fatigue during their normal working hours.
There are 73 sections in the FMCSA CFR that relate to hours of service and their requirements. These include areas such as ELD violations up to driving while ill or fatigued.
Getting violations in this FMCSA BASIC category can lead to DOT audits and other penalties by the FMCSA.
What are the Hours of Service groups?
Hours of service violations are broken into seven different groups. These groups help determine the severity of the infraction as it relates to safety. Items such as keeping poor form and manner on a logbook is less severe while items like driving ill of fatigued are the most severe.
| Violation Group | Severity Weight |
| EOBR Related | 1 |
| False Log | 7 |
| Hours | 7 |
| Hours, Nominal | 1 |
| Incomplete/Wrong Log | 5 |
| Jumping OOS/Driving Fatigued | 10 |
| Other Log/Form & Manner | 1 |
Top 10 most issued hours of service violations
Below is the top 10 most issued hours of service violations issued across the country for 2021. This gives some indication into what the DOT finds most important in terms of proper hours of service.
| Violation | Count |
| False Record of Duty Status - Improper use of Personal Conveyance Exception | 16,725 |
| Not using the appropriate method to record hours of service (ELD) | 15,593 |
| Record of Duty Status violation (general/form and manner) | 10,754 |
| Driver use of ELD to transfer hos records | 7,464 |
| Driver’s record of duty status not current | 6,683 |
| Driver failed to maintain supply of blank drivers records of duty status graph-grids | 6,606 |
| 14 hour rule violation | 5,514 |
| Driver failing to maintain ELD instruction sheet | 5,461 |
| Driver failed to manually add shipping document number | 5,370 |
| Portable ELD not mounted in a fixed position and visible to driver | 5,060 |
If you are ever wrongfully issued a violation keep all of your documentation and fill out a DataQ to have the violation reviewed by the FMCSA
To see the full list of hours of service violations that make up the hours of service basic you can download here.
