HGV Working Time Directive: The 48-Hour Week

The Working Time Directive is a second, separate rulebook that runs alongside drivers' hours. Drivers' hours limit how long you can drive. The Working Time Directive limits how long you can work — driving plus loading, unloading, paperwork, vehicle checks and fuelling. Under the Road Transport (Working Time) Regulations 2005, the working time of a mobile worker or self-employed driver cannot exceed 60 hours in any single week, and must average no more than 48 hours a week across a reference period. Those are different numbers, measured differently, from a different set of records.

That "two rulebooks" point is where most small operators come unstuck. You can be perfectly legal on drivers' hours and still be in breach of working time — and the tachograph alone will not tell you.

General guidance, not legal advice. Working time and drivers' hours rules are enforced by DVSA and are amended from time to time. Check the current regulations and DVSA guidance for your own operation, and take advice on any specific case.

Two Rulebooks, Two Sets of Limits

Here is the distinction stated plainly, because almost every conversation about this starts with the two being conflated.

	Drivers' hours (assimilated rules)	Working Time Regulations 2005
What it measures	Driving time	All working time
Daily limit	9 hours driving (10 twice a week)	No fixed daily limit — except a 10-hour cap on any 24 hours containing night work
Weekly limit	56 hours driving	60 hours working time
Averaged limit	90 hours driving per fortnight	48 hours working time per week, averaged
Break trigger	After 4.5 hours driving	After 6 hours working
Recorded by	Tachograph	Tachograph plus other working-time records

The driving figures come from the assimilated drivers' hours rules, which set "9 hours in a day - this can be extended to 10 hours twice a week", "56 hours in a week" and "90 hours in any 2 consecutive weeks". Our HGV driving hours guide covers that side in full.

The working time figures come from a different instrument entirely — the Road Transport (Working Time) Regulations 2005 (SI 2005/639).

What Actually Counts as Working Time

This is the part operators consistently underestimate. Working time is not driving time with a bit added on — it is the whole duty.

It includes:

• Driving
• Loading and unloading
• Assisting passengers on and off
• Cleaning and technical maintenance of the vehicle
• The daily walkaround check
• Paperwork — delivery notes, defect reports, customs documents
• Waiting where the duration is not known in advance

A driver who drives 8 hours, spends 2 hours on a loading bay and 40 minutes on checks and paperwork has worked over 10.5 hours. Drivers' hours sees 8. Working time sees 10.5+.

Periods of availability — the one exclusion that matters

A period of availability (POA) is waiting time that does not count towards working time. But it only qualifies under narrow conditions. Regulation 6 provides that "a period shall not be treated as a period of availability unless the mobile worker or self-employed driver knows before the start of the relevant period about that period of availability and its reasonably foreseeable duration."

The practical test is foreknowledge of duration. A driver told "you're second in the queue, expect about 90 minutes" can record POA. A driver sitting at a gate with no idea whether it will be 20 minutes or three hours is working, not available — and that time counts.

Regulation 6 also treats time spent travelling (but not driving) in a moving vehicle as part of a team as a period of availability for that worker or self-employed driver.

Getting POA wrong in either direction is costly. Record too much as POA and you understate working time and mask a breach. Record too little and you make drivers look non-compliant when they are not.

The Three Limits

1. The 60-hour absolute weekly cap

Regulation 4(1) states that "the working time, including overtime, of a mobile worker or self-employed driver shall not exceed 60 hours in a week."

This is a hard ceiling in every single week. There is no averaging, no reference period, no offsetting a quiet week against a busy one. Sixty hours is the line.

2. The 48-hour average

Regulation 4(2) provides that "in any reference period which is applicable to his case, the working time of a mobile worker or self-employed driver shall not exceed an average of 48 hours for each week."

The average is taken over a reference period. Regulation 4(3) sets out how that period is fixed — most commonly successive 17-week periods, or the fixed annual periods running 1 December to 1 April, 1 April to 1 August, and 1 August to 1 December.

Regulation 4(5) sets the calculation, and it is not the one most operators assume. The average weekly working time "shall be determined according to the formula— (A+B)÷C for mobile workers, or A÷C for self-employed drivers", where "A is the aggregate number of hours comprised in … working time during the course of the reference period; B is the number of excluded hours during the reference period; and C is the number of weeks in the reference period." Regulation 4(6) defines excluded hours as annual leave, sick leave, and maternity, paternity, adoption or parental leave.

Read that carefully: excluded hours are added to the numerator, not subtracted from it, and the leave weeks stay in C. The reason is regulation 4(7): "For the purposes of paragraph (5), the number of hours in a whole day shall be eight and the number of hours in a whole week shall be forty-eight." A week of leave is therefore credited at exactly 48 hours — so it pulls the average towards 48, down if the weeks actually worked averaged more than 48, up if they averaged less. It is neutral against the 48-hour limit, not neutral to the average.

That is the point operators get wrong in the expensive direction. A leave week is credited at 48 hours, not a free zero-hour week. Take a 17-week period with 15 weeks worked at 58 hours (870 hours) and 2 weeks' annual leave: the calculation is (870 + 96) ÷ 17 = 56.8 hours — comfortably over the 48-hour average. Subtracting the leave instead would give 45.5 hours and a false clean bill of health. Operators who assume a fortnight's holiday will absorb a run of 58-hour weeks are wrong, and the arithmetic that appears to rescue them is the wrong arithmetic.

3. Night work — 10 hours in any 24

Regulation 9: "The working time of a mobile worker or self-employed driver, who performs night work in any period of 24 hours, shall not exceed 10 hours during that period."

The definition is narrower than most operators assume, and it is the part worth memorising. Regulation 2 defines "night time" as "in respect of goods vehicles the period between midnight and 4 a.m. and in respect of passenger vehicles the period between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m", and "night work" as "any work performed during night time".

So for a goods vehicle operator the window is midnight to 4 a.m. Any work at all inside that window makes the whole 24-hour period night work, at which point the cap is 10 hours of working time — not 10 hours of night work.

That produces a sharp and slightly counterintuitive line:

• A driver starting at 03:00 works one hour inside the window. The whole duty is capped at 10 hours, so a 12-hour shift breaches regulation 9 even though most of it was in daylight.
• A driver starting at 05:00 does no work inside the window. Regulation 9 does not bite at all, and the duty is governed by the ordinary limits.

Two hours' difference in start time changes which rule applies. Operators running early tramping shifts are frequently over this line without realising there is a line.

The limit can be extended, but how depends on who you are — and the difference matters most to exactly the readers who assume it does not apply to them.

Regulation 9(2) covers employed drivers: the 10-hour period "may be extended in relation to particular mobile workers or groups of mobile workers for objective or technical reasons or reasons concerning the organisation of work, by a collective agreement or a workforce agreement." Without such an agreement in place, 10 hours applies.

Regulation 9(2A), inserted in 2012, puts self-employed drivers on a different footing: "A self-employed driver may elect to extend the period of 10 hours for objective or technical reasons or reasons concerning the organisation of work." That is a unilateral election — no collective or workforce agreement is required, and an owner-driver operating alone has nobody to make one with. What the election does not do is remove the duty: regulation 9(5) requires a self-employed driver to "take all reasonable steps, in keeping with the need to protect his health and safety, to ensure that the limit specified in paragraph (1), or extended in accordance with paragraph (2A), is complied with." The reasons still have to be objective, technical or organisational, and the health-and-safety duty survives the extension.

Working Time Breaks Are Not Drivers' Hours Breaks

This trips people up more than any other part of the regime, because both regimes use a 45-minute number for different things.

Regulation 7 sets the working time rule: "No mobile worker or self-employed driver shall work for more than six hours without a break." Where working time exceeds six hours but not nine, "the mobile worker or self-employed driver must take a break lasting at least 30 minutes and interrupting that period." Where it exceeds nine hours, the required break is "at least 45 minutes and interrupting that period." Each break "may be made up of separate periods of not less than 15 minutes each."

Note the verb. Since 11 May 2012 regulation 7 has said the driver must take the break — it is a positive duty, not an entitlement the driver can waive by working through.

Compare that with drivers' hours, which requires "a break or breaks totalling at least 45 minutes after no more than 4 hours 30 minutes driving." The split-break option comes from Article 7 of assimilated Regulation (EC) No 561/2006: the 45 minutes "may be replaced by a break of at least 15 minutes followed by a break of at least 30 minutes" — in that order, and not the other way round.

	Trigger	Required break	Minimum segment
Drivers' hours	4.5 hours driving	45 minutes	15 then 30, in that order (Art 7)
Working time (6-9h)	6 hours working	30 minutes	15 minutes
Working time (>9h)	9 hours working	45 minutes	15 minutes

In practice a properly taken drivers' hours break will usually satisfy the working time break as well, because it comes sooner. The failure case is the reverse: a driver on a long duty with little driving — a lot of loading, tramping around a yard, waiting — never triggers the 4.5-hour driving clock, takes no formal break, and breaches regulation 7 at the 6-hour mark.

Records: Two Years, and the Tachograph Is Not Enough

Regulation 11 requires an employer to "keep records which are adequate to show whether the requirements of these Regulations are being complied with in the case of each mobile worker employed by him to whom they apply" and to "retain such records for at least two years after the end of the period covered by those records."

Two points follow, and both matter at an audit.

Two years, not twelve months. Tachograph download retention and working time record retention are different periods. Keeping tachograph data for its own retention period does not discharge the two-year working time obligation.

Adequate records, not raw data. Regulation 11 asks for records adequate to show compliance. A folder of undigested tachograph files does not show whether a driver averaged under 48 hours across a 17-week reference period — someone or something has to do the arithmetic. This is where tachograph analysis earns its place: the analysis output, not the raw download, is what evidences working time compliance. Our tachograph downloads guide covers the download side of the obligation.

Regulation 10 adds a separate duty: an employer "shall notify each worker of the provisions of these Regulations and the provisions of any collective or workforce agreement which is capable of application to that worker." Telling drivers the rules is itself a requirement, and one that is easy to evidence with a signed briefing note.

Where Small Operators Actually Get Caught

• Running to 56 driving hours in a busy week. Fifty-six hours of driving plus loading and checks is almost certainly over 60 hours of working time. The drivers' hours maximum and the working time maximum cannot both be used at once.
• No reference period fixed. If nobody has decided whether you are on rolling 17-week periods or the fixed annual periods, nobody is measuring the 48-hour average at all.
• POA used as a catch-all for waiting. Any waiting time of unknown duration is working time.
• Night work overlooked entirely. Early starts are normal in haulage and the 10-hour cap is frequently the first limit breached.
• Owner-drivers assuming they are out of scope. Since 11 May 2012 the Regulations have applied to self-employed drivers as well as mobile workers — regulations 4, 6, 7 and 9 all name them expressly. "Self-employed driver" has a technical definition in regulation 2, so check your own position against it rather than against the trade-forum consensus, but "I'm my own boss" is not by itself an exemption.
• Treating the tachograph as the compliance system. It records driving. Working time needs a wider record.

A Practical Compliance Routine

1. Fix your reference period in writing and tell drivers which one applies.
2. Capture non-driving work — mode switches on the tachograph for other work, plus a simple record for anything off-vehicle.
3. Brief drivers on when waiting is POA and when it is working time. Foreknowledge of duration is the test.
4. Run working time analysis monthly, not at the end of the reference period. A 48-hour average is only recoverable if you spot the drift early.
5. Watch the 60-hour cap weekly — it has no recovery mechanism at all.
6. Check night duties against the 10-hour limit. If you genuinely need the extension, put a collective or workforce agreement in place for employed drivers — or, if you are self-employed, record your regulation 9(2A) election and the objective, technical or organisational reasons for it.
7. Retain the analysis output for two years alongside the raw data.

The Transport Manager carries responsibility for this monitoring as part of continuous and effective management of the operation — it is not something that can sit unowned.

To sanity-check how your wider compliance picture looks, the free O-Licence Compliance Health Check walks through the main areas DVSA examines and flags the gaps worth fixing first.

For how working time sits alongside the daily and weekly rest requirements, see our HGV weekly rest periods guide.

Sources

• The Road Transport (Working Time) Regulations 2005 (SI 2005/639) — legislation.gov.uk
• Regulation 4 — Working time — legislation.gov.uk
• Regulation 6 — Periods of availability — legislation.gov.uk
• Regulation 7 — Breaks — legislation.gov.uk
• Regulation 9 — Night work — legislation.gov.uk
• Regulation 10 — Information and records — legislation.gov.uk
• Regulation 11 — Employer duties and record retention — legislation.gov.uk
• Regulation (EC) No 561/2006, Article 7 — Breaks — legislation.gov.uk
• Drivers' hours: assimilated rules — GOV.UK