While most transport operators can instantly pinpoint a driver's exact daily driving hours, calculating their average weekly working time over an active reference period requires manually piecing data together.
A single shift is governed by two separate frameworks: Drivers’ hours rules regulate time spent driving, rest periods and required breaks. The Road Transport (Working Time) Regulations 2005 govern all duties mobile workers carry out throughout the entire duration of their shift, with actual driving time forming just one part of that complete total.
Who the Road Transport (Working Time) Regulations apply to
The regulations apply to mobile workers forming part of the travelling staff of an undertaking providing road transport services for goods or passengers, including drivers, crew members, trainees and apprentices, where they work within the scope of assimilated or AETR drivers’ hours rules. Certain occasional mobile workers are exempt. For the majority of UK transport operators, the legislation applies directly to their HGV (Heavy Goods Vehicle) fleets. In Great Britain, these rules have also applied to self-employed drivers since 2012.
Conversely, the Working Time Regulations 1998 govern occasional mobile workers and those subject to GB domestic drivers’ hours rules. This key regulatory difference determines opt-out eligibility: while the 1998 Regulations permit workers to opt out of the 48-hour average limit, the 2005 Regulations contain no opt-out provision. A more detailed examination of the 1998 Regulations is available in The Compliance Panic Cycle.
What counts as working time for mobile workers?
Working time applies whenever a mobile worker is on duty, at your disposal and carrying out tasks from start to finish. A workstation, therefore, includes both the vehicle cab and the warehouse.
Working time includes:
- Driving
- Loading and unloading
- The daily defect check and other work to keep the vehicle and its load safe
- Cleaning and maintaining the vehicle
- Training that forms part of normal work
- Administrative work relating to legal or regulatory requirements directly connected to the transport operation
- Other duties at a depot, warehouse, office or elsewhere, where the worker cannot freely dispose of their time and is required to remain available for work
- Waiting where the driver didn’t know the foreseeable duration in advance
Breaks and periods of availability are the two exclusions, and the second is where most calculations go wrong.
Periods of availability: the classification that changes the total
A period of availability (POA) is a period of waiting time that does not count towards working time, provided it meets the relevant conditions. Its duration must be known to the driver in advance, and the driver must be available to resume work when required.
Accompanying a vehicle on a ferry crossing qualifies. So does waiting while other workers load the vehicle, where the driver was told how long it would take and time in the passenger seat while a team-driven vehicle is moving.
Consider an unexpected two-hour delay at a distribution hub, where the driver has no prior knowledge of how long the wait will last. This would generally count as working time rather than a period of availability. If misrecorded as availability, your weekly tally is artificially reduced. Consequently, the rolling average across the reference period becomes skewed, obscuring what genuinely occurred.
The working time limits for mobile workers
The main requirements, according to DVSA’s (Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency) guidance on working time rules, are as follows:
- Working time must not exceed an average of 48 hours a week over the reference period. That’s normally 17 weeks, extendable to 26 under a collective or workforce agreement.
- Working hours are capped at 60 hours in any individual week, provided the overall average remains compliant.
- Where night work is performed, working time can’t exceed 10 hours in those 24 hours unless an agreement allows it. For goods vehicles, nighttime is midnight to 4am.
- No more than six consecutive hours can be worked without a break. Six to nine hours of working time need 30 minutes of breaks, and more than nine hours need 45 minutes, in blocks of at least 15 minutes.
- Records must be kept for two years after the end of the reference period, whether or not your operation runs close to the limits.
- A driver who works for another employer operating in-scope vehicles must tell each employer, in writing, about those hours.
Why a tachograph record isn’t a working time record
Automated tracking on a tachograph triggers only while the vehicle is in motion. Capturing all other activities relies entirely on drivers actively switching mode settings upon stopping, as well as submitting manual entries for tasks performed prior to card insertion or following its removal.
Even when that’s done well, a tachograph record is a day-by-day log of activity on a driver card. It won’t calculate a rolling 48-hour average across a 17-week reference period, pick up a warehouse shift worked without the card in, or check that a wait logged as availability was announced in advance.
Take a shift with 8.5 hours of driving: add a vehicle check, loading, unloading and admin, and working time rises to 11.5 hours. Those three extra hours only reach the total if the mode switching was accurate and someone added them to the right reference period. When that adding up happens in a spreadsheet, the average is an estimate, and at a DVSA inspection or an employment tribunal, an estimate is not a record.
Building a working time record you can defend
The fix is one record that holds every hour, wherever it was worked. Tachograph data, depot clockings, training, leave and payroll need to land in the same place, classified as they’re captured rather than reconstructed later.
Crown connects to tachograph data, so driver hours sit in the same record as everything else. Some operators use the tachograph as the clocking trigger, with additional entries accounting for any work carried out before the card is inserted or after it is removed.
