Yard moves: on-duty, not driving

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A driver can spend an hour moving a truck without ever going anywhere. Trailers spotted at doors, a tractor shuffled across a terminal, a rig eased around a repair yard — wheels turning, engine working, and not one mile of road travelled. Logging all of that as driving time would eat the 11-hour driving limit for work that is not highway driving at all. Logging it as off duty would be false in the other direction: the driver was plainly at work.

The yard move status is the honest middle answer. It records that time as what it is — on-duty, not driving. Used where it belongs, it keeps the driving clock for the road. Used where it does not belong, it becomes something worse than a mistake: a record that hides real driving. This guide draws the line between the two, in the terms the rule itself uses.

The test is the ground: is it a highway?

One question decides almost every yard-move case: is the ground the truck is moving on a highway — a road or way open to public travel?

A yard is ground the public is kept out of. A carrier's terminal. A shipper's or receiver's facility. A repair shop yard. These places are typically closed to the public by gates or signs restricting access: the public has no right to wander in, drive through, or park there. Movement on that ground is not highway driving, and it is exactly the movement the yard move status was made for — repositioning inside the fence, at working speed, in the course of the job.

Now the other side of the line, because it is where the trouble lives. A public parking lot is open to public travel. A truck stop is open to public travel — any driver, in any vehicle, can enter and move around it freely. A mall lot, the same. Any place the public can freely enter is ground open to public travel, and movement there is driving, not a yard move, however short the distance and however slowly the truck rolls. Crossing a truck stop lot to the fuel island feels like yard work. By the rule's test, it is not: the ground is open to everyone.

And any movement on a public road is driving, full stop. The street between two gates of the same facility, the public road from the yard to the lot across the way — driving. The status follows the ground under the wheels at each moment, not the driver's errand, not the shortness of the hop, and not the fact that the whole trip began and ended inside a fence.

When you are unsure, ask it the rule's way: could a member of the public, in their own car, freely drive where I am about to drive? If yes, it is driving. If the public is kept out — gate, fence, signs restricting access — it is yard ground.

Before the wheels roll

The driver must select the yard move status before moving the truck. Order matters. The status is a declaration made ahead of the movement it describes: I am about to move this truck inside a yard, as on-duty not driving. Selecting it after the move, to re-describe driving that already happened, is not how the status works — it is editing the past into a shape it did not have, and on an ELD record the sequence shows.

The driver should also add the annotation the ELD asks for: what the move was. Keep it plain and specific — “spotting trailer at door 12” is the spirit of it. The annotation is what lets a reader later, an officer or the office, see a stretch of on-duty not driving inside a facility and understand it at a glance. Yard time with a clear note is a routine entry. Yard time with no note, in a record full of them, invites every question the note would have answered.

One more condition, set by the carrier rather than the driver: the carrier may turn the yard-move status off for its drivers. The status exists on your ELD only if the carrier allows it. If it is not there, that is a company setting, not a fault in the device — and yard work then records as the ordinary statuses provide. Do not borrow another way to describe it.

What yard time does — and what it does not do

Yard move time is on-duty not driving, and everything follows from that one classification. Run through the clocks:

• The 11-hour driving limit: untouched. Yard time is not driving, so it does not count against the 11. An hour of spotting trailers leaves all 11 driving hours where they were.
• The 8-hour break clock: untouched. Since the break clock counts driving time, and yard time is not driving, it does not advance the count toward the 30-minute break.
• The 14-hour window: it runs. Yard time is on-duty time, and the window counts from when you came on duty regardless of whether the on-duty time is driving or not. The yard move does not stop the window, pause it, or give any of it back. An hour in the yard is an hour off the window.
• The 60/70-hour week: it counts. Like all on-duty time, yard time goes onto the week in full. It is real work and the week treats it as real work.

Read that list again and the shape is honest in both directions. The yard move protects the two clocks that count driving — because the driver was not highway driving. It gives no relief at all on the two clocks that count time on duty — because the driver was fully on duty. Anyone who describes yard moves as a way to save the day, stretch the window, or rest the week is describing a status that does not exist.

The mistake that turns it into a false log

The yard move does not erase real driving. That sentence deserves its own space, because the serious yard-move cases are never about a driver misunderstanding a terminal. They are about driving that happened on a highway — on a public road, or across ground open to the public — recorded under the yard status so it would not count as driving.

Rolling out of the gate still flagged as a yard move is the classic shape. The status was true inside the fence; the moment the truck is on the public road, it is driving, and every yard-flagged minute out there is a minute of driving hidden from the record. Hiding driving time is falsification of the record of duty status — the gravest kind of log fault, in a different class from a missed annotation or a late status change. A record that understates driving to stretch a day is false in the part that matters most.

The same care applies in miniature at the start of a move. Flag the status before the wheels roll, on yard ground, for a yard move — and end it when the yard work ends. The status describes a place and a purpose. When either one changes, the status must change with it.

A short drill for yard work

1. Test the ground

   Is this ground open to public travel? Gate, fence, or signs restricting access — yard ground. Public lot, truck stop, or any road — driving. Decide before anything else.

2. Select the status first

   Choose yard move on the ELD before the wheels roll, not after the move is done.

3. Annotate the move

   Write what the move was, plainly — which trailer, which door, what work. Future readers should need no imagination.

4. End it at the gate

   When the yard work ends or the truck leaves yard ground, come off the status. The road ahead is driving, and the record should say so from the first yard of it.

Used this way, the yard move is a small, clean tool: it keeps terminal work from eating road hours, and it tells the truth about a working driver at the same time. Keep the test on the ground, the selection before the movement, and the status inside the fence — and the entry will never need explaining twice.

Rules checked October 2026. Rule sources: 49 CFR Part 395, Subpart B, Appendix A, sec. 4.3.2.2; 49 CFR 390.5.