The US gives you 11 hours. Canada gives you 13.

A driver leaving Laredo with a full tank and a clean clock has 11 hours of driving in front of them. A driver leaving Windsor with the same tank and the same clean clock, bound for Toronto, has 13. Two rulebooks, one seat. The FMCSA hours of service rules govern the American side and Transport Canada's Commercial Vehicle Drivers Hours of Service Regulations govern the Canadian one. A cross-border driver has to stay inside both, and whichever runs out first ends the day.

What the American rule actually says

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration writes the rule at 49 CFR 395.3, and it reads in a fixed order.

A property-carrying driver cannot drive without first taking 10 consecutive hours off duty. Once on duty, that driver has a 14-hour period, and all driving has to finish inside it. The driving total inside those 14 hours is 11 hours.

Then the interruption. After 8 hours of driving, the driver needs at least 30 consecutive minutes not driving. Off-duty time, sleeper berth time, or on-duty not driving time all satisfy it, in any combination, as long as the full half hour is consecutive. Short-haul drivers operating inside a 150 air-mile radius of their reporting location are exempt from this and from keeping a record of duty status.

Then the cycle. 60 hours on duty in 7 consecutive days for a carrier that does not run every day of the week, or 70 hours in 8 days for one that does. A single off-duty stretch of 34 hours or more restarts either one.

And then the part that decides whether any of it matters at the roadside: 49 CFR 395.13 lets an inspector order a driver out of service for running past those maximum periods, and requires the record of duty status to be current for the day of the examination and the prior seven consecutive days.

What Canada's rule says

Canada's regulation is SOR/2005-313, and it counts the day differently.

Section 12 sets the daily limits at 13 hours of driving and 14 hours of on-duty time. Section 13 adds an outer boundary that the American rule does not have in the same form: no driving after 16 hours have passed between the end of one off-duty block of 8 or more consecutive hours and the start of the next.

Section 14 handles rest as a total rather than a single block. A driver takes at least 10 hours of off-duty time in a day. Eight of those must be consecutive. At least 2 hours must fall outside that 8-hour block, and the remainder may be split into blocks of no less than 30 minutes each.

Section 24 splits the cycle into two. Cycle 1 allows 70 hours of on-duty time in 7 days. Cycle 2 allows 120 hours in 14 days, or 70 hours without taking 24 consecutive hours off. A driver resets cycle 1 with 36 consecutive hours off duty and cycle 2 with 72.

The FMCSA hours of service rules against Canada's, line by line

Element	United States, 49 CFR 395	Canada, SOR/2005-313
Start of the day	10 consecutive hours off duty	10 hours off in a day, 8 of them consecutive
Driving limit	11 hours	13 hours
Outer limit	14 consecutive hours after coming on duty	16 hours elapsed, with 14 hours on duty
Break	30 consecutive minutes once 8 hours of driving have passed	Off-duty outside the 8-hour block, 2 hours minimum, splittable into 30-minute blocks
Cycle	60 hours in 7 days, or 70 in 8	70 hours in 7 days, or 120 in 14
Restart	34 consecutive hours	36 hours, or 72 for cycle 2

The one number that catches people is the restart. A driver who takes 34 hours off has cleared the American cycle. That same 34 hours does not clear a Canadian cycle, not even cycle 1, which wants 36.

Where the two clocks collide

The daily windows start in roughly the same place and end in different ones. The American 14-hour period is a wall. It runs from the moment the driver comes on duty and nothing pauses it. Canada gives 16 elapsed hours with 14 of them on duty, so a Canadian day can legally run longer while capping the working portion inside it.

The break is where drivers get caught. In the United States, 8 hours of driving creates a debt of 30 consecutive minutes. In Canada, the off-duty time outside the mandatory 8-hour block can be built from 30-minute pieces. A driver who stops for 15 minutes four times has satisfied neither rule.

And the American rule adds a roadside paperwork test on top of that: the record of duty status has to be current for today and the seven days before it. An inspector who finds a gap in that run is not looking at the current day, they are looking at last week.

What it costs when the clock runs out

An out-of-service order under 49 CFR 395.13 takes the truck off the road until the driver may lawfully drive again. That is a lost day, not a lost hour.

We are not going to print a penalty amount. The civil penalty schedule belongs to the regulator, it is graded, and nothing we hold publishes a figure for a specific violation. What we can say is where the damage lands. It lands on the load, on the appointment behind it, and on whatever the driver had planned for the next morning.

Fuel does not bail anybody out of this. The Natural Resources Canada weekly survey for 27 October 2026 puts the national diesel average at 264.2 cents a litre across 72 locations. Quebec is the dearest market in that survey at 290.2 and the Northwest Territories the cheapest at 226.3. Filling in the cheap province is still correct. It does not add a minute to the window.

The border clock is the other half of the same problem. This morning the CBSA feed shows Pacific Highway at 5 minutes of commercial wait, with Ambassador, Lacolle, Coutts-Sweetgrass and Emerson-Pembina reporting no delay.

What to do with two clocks

Build the crossing into the front of the day, not the end of it. A 5-minute delay at a booth is nothing. That same crossing at hour 13 of a 14-hour period is the whole margin.

Decide which clock is binding before you roll. Running south out of Ontario on a Canadian cycle, the American 11 hours and 14-hour wall are what actually stop the truck. Running north on an American restart, 34 hours does not clear a Canadian cycle.

Keep the prior seven days current. That is the American requirement, and it is the first thing an inspector reaches for.

Buy fuel where it is cheaper. The provincial spread is on the diesel price pages every Tuesday. Just do not plan a stop around the price and forget the clock.

What changes from here

Neither regulation is moving this week. What moves is where the load sits when a window closes, and that is a dispatch decision made hours earlier. The border wait times page holds the crossings that are clear today.

Two limits, one driver. The FMCSA hours of service rules give 11 hours inside a 14-hour wall, Canada gives 13 inside 16, and running both at once means planning the day around the shorter one. If you want to see what a lane costs in fuel before the clock even starts, run it through the fuel cost calculator.

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Sources: Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, 49 CFR Part 395, Hours of Service of Drivers, sections 395.1, 395.3 and 395.13. Transport Canada, Commercial Vehicle Drivers Hours of Service Regulations, SOR/2005-313, sections 12, 13, 14, 24 and 28. Natural Resources Canada weekly diesel survey, print date 27 October 2026. Canada Border Services Agency border wait times, captured 2 November 2026.

How we build the diesel index: methodology.