Unidentified driving records

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Every carrier who runs electronic logs meets this screen sooner or later: a stretch of driving that belongs to no one. The truck clearly moved — the record shows the time, the place, the miles — but no driver was logged in when it happened, so the record sits under a name that is not a person at all: Unidentified Driver.

New drivers sometimes read that screen as an accusation. It is not. It is the device doing exactly what the rule tells it to do with driving it cannot attach to a person. This guide explains where unidentified records come from in real life, what the driver must do at the next login, what the office must do after that, and why the pile matters far beyond the day it appears. The short version is worth saying up front: there is no delete. Unidentified time is never erased. It is claimed, assigned, or explained.

Where unidentified records come from

The causes are ordinary, and every shop and yard produces them. None of these is exotic — they happen every week, in well-run fleets as well as loose ones:

• The driver moved the truck before logging in. A short hop across a yard, a reposition before the day starts, a move to the fuel island after logging out. The intention was to log in first; the wheels simply went first.
• A mechanic or shop hand took the truck out. A test drive after a repair is real driving of a real truck, and the device records movement, not job titles. If nobody logged in, the driving lands on the unidentified account.
• Yard or wash staff moved the unit. Trucks get shuffled for space, washing, fuelling, and loading by people whose work is the yard, not the log.
• A team partner moved the truck. In team driving, the truck rolls while one partner rests. When the movement happens outside the logged-in driver's account — a switch made in the wrong order, a login forgotten at a changeover — the time can land unclaimed even though a known driver was at the wheel.

Notice what all four share: the driving itself is honest. The record is not false; it is unclaimed. That is why the rule's answer is never to erase it. The answer is to attach it to the right person, or to write down why it belongs to no driver's hours.

The driver's duty at the next login

The cleanup starts with the driver, at a set moment: the next login. Under 49 CFR 395.32(b), when a driver logs in, the ELD prompts him to review unassigned driving time. He must then do one of two things with each record the device shows him:

1. Assume the records that are his, under his own account — or
2. Indicate that the records are not attributable to him.

Both answers are lawful. What is not an option is waving the prompt past so the day can start. The review is a duty, not a suggestion the device makes.

One part of this deserves plain words, because it is where drivers hesitate. Claimed time counts in your hours — including when claiming it honestly puts you over a limit. A driver who moved the truck for forty minutes before logging in may be tempted to leave that time unclaimed so the day looks cleaner. The rule expects the opposite. The point of the review is that hours are hours, whoever wishes they were not. Claiming your own driving, and taking the consequence in your clocks, is the honest record the whole system stands on. If claimed time creates a problem in your week, that is a conversation to have with the office out in the open — the record itself stays true.

Equally, do not claim driving that is not yours to make the prompt go away. Saying “not attributable to me” for a shop test drive is not dodging; it is the correct answer, and it hands the record to the office in the right shape for the next step.

The office's duty: annotate or assign

The driver's review is only half of the rule. Under 49 CFR 395.32(c)(1), the carrier must ensure unidentified records are reviewed, and must then clear each one in one of two legal ways:

• Assign the record to the appropriate driver, so that driver's hours are correct. Use this when the driving was a driver's — the hop before login, the changeover mistake — and the review or the office's own knowledge settles whose it was.
• Annotate the record, explaining why the time is unassigned. Use this when the driving belongs to no driver's hours: the mechanic's test drive, the yard move. The annotation is a short, true sentence that rides with the record — who moved the truck and why, in plain words.

Those are the only two doors, and every record has to go through one of them. A record left sitting, unreviewed and unexplained, has not been cleared at all. Assignments follow the same pattern as other corrections to a record — the driver review at login is part of how time reaches the right account, which is why the guide on editing your logs is worth reading alongside this one.

How long they are kept, and who can ask

Unidentified records are records like any other, with their own keeping rule. Under 49 CFR 395.32(c)(2)–(3), the carrier keeps unidentified driving records for at least 6 months from receipt, and must make them available during a safety inspection, audit, or investigation, for the period asked about.

That last part is the one that changes behaviour once an office understands it. An auditor does not only ask whether unidentified records exist. An auditor asks to see them — and then reads how they were handled. A short list, each item claimed, assigned, or annotated with a believable reason, tells a story of a carrier that watches its own operation. A pile of unexamined unidentified records is an audit finding by itself, before anyone even asks whose driving it was. The pile says the office does not look. In an audit, that is a bad sentence to have written about you by your own records. The wider record-keeping picture, with the keeping periods for logs, driver files, and vehicle files in one place, is in our guide to the safety audit and retention.

Keeping them rare

The rule tells you how to clear unidentified records; a couple of shop habits tell you how to have fewer of them. Neither habit costs anything.

Log in before the wheels move, every time. Not most times, not when the move counts — every time. The device starts its judgement at motion, not at intention, so the login has to come first even for a two-minute hop. Most driver-caused unidentified time is one forgotten login, repeated. Build the login into the same motion as the seat belt and the mirrors, and this whole category shrinks.

Anyone who moves a truck leaves word of it the same day. A shop rule, written down and kept: the mechanic, the yard hand, the wash crew — if you moved a unit, the office hears about it that day, with the time and the reason. Same-day word turns next week's annotation into a ten-second job, written from a note instead of from memory. It also protects the drivers, whose login prompts stay short and whose records are not haunted by driving they then have to deny one item at a time.

And when a record does appear, deal with it while it is small. One record at one login takes a minute. A month of records takes an afternoon, and by then nobody honestly remembers who moved the truck on the ninth. The rule gives you a fair system — claim what is yours, assign what is a driver's, explain what is not — and it rewards the carrier who uses it little and often.

Rules checked October 2026. Rule sources: 49 CFR 395.32.