Drivers' working time and periods of availability: what it puts on your payslip

The published figures

What it puts on, or takes off, the payslip

Basic or contracted hours

The block of paid hours your rate is built on, often expressed as a weekly figure or a shift rate. This number is a contract term. It has no fixed relationship to your working time under the 2005 Regulations, to your driving hours, or to the length of your duty, and on a bad week all four will be different.

Duty hours, driving hours or shift hours

Where pay follows the clock rather than a salary, this is the figure the money is calculated from. What matters is which clock. A payroll that pays from the tachograph's driving mode alone leaves out loading, unloading, the walkaround check, fuelling and paperwork, and every one of those is named in the definition of working time in regulation 2.

Period of availability hours

Often absent from the payslip entirely, sometimes shown as a separate line at a lower rate, occasionally rolled into a shift allowance with no hours attached. There is no legal requirement to itemise POA as its own line. Where pay varies by time worked, though, the hours behind the variable pay do have to appear somewhere on the statement.

Night out, subsistence or overnight allowance

A reimbursement, not pay. HMRC accepts £34.90 a night for a UK night away as doing no more than reimbursing accommodation and subsistence, and 75% of that, £26.20, where the driver sleeps in the cab. Paid within an approval notice it carries no Income Tax and no National Insurance, which is why it usually sits below the gross pay total rather than inside it.

Mileage, trunking, drop or parcel rate

Pay by output rather than by the hour. It changes how the money is worked out and not how the hours are counted. Regulation 36 of the National Minimum Wage Regulations 2015 defines output work as work other than time work, so a driver who is told when to start and where to be is doing time work paid by the drop, and the minimum wage is tested against the hours actually worked.

Overtime

Hours above the contracted block, usually at a premium. Two things follow that drivers often miss. The hours count in full towards the 48 hour average and the 60 hour week whatever they are paid at, and where overtime has been paid regularly in the 52 weeks before a period of leave it belongs in the week's pay used to work out holiday.

Total hours worked

Section 8(2)(e) of the Employment Rights Act 1996, in force since 6 April 2019, requires the total number of hours worked to be on the itemised pay statement wherever the amount of wages or salary varies by reference to time worked. It can be a single aggregate figure or separate figures for different types of work or different rates of pay. A salaried driver whose pay does not move with the clock is outside this requirement.

Holiday pay

Paid at a week's pay for each week of leave. For the four weeks under regulation 13 and for leave under regulation 15B, the week's pay has to take in commission and payments intrinsically linked to the performance of contractual tasks, payments for seniority or professional status, and other payments such as overtime that have been regularly paid in the preceding 52 weeks.

What goes wrong

Time logged as availability when its length was never known in advance

Regulation 6(1) says a period is not a period of availability unless the mobile worker knows before the start about that period and its reasonably foreseeable duration. The definition of working time in regulation 2 pushes the other way at exactly the same point: periods awaiting loading or unloading where their foreseeable duration is not known in advance are working time. A bay that says "we will call you" is the second of those, not the first, and logging it as availability keeps it out of the 48 hour average and often out of the pay run as well.

A night out allowance paid above the approved figure with no tax taken

£34.90 a night, and £26.20 where the sleeper cab is used, are the amounts HMRC accepts as doing no more than reimbursing the expense. Anything above that can only be paid free of tax where the employer holds an approval notice for a bespoke rate. Without one the excess is earnings and should have Income Tax and National Insurance on it. The same page also says a meal can only be reimbursed once, so benchmark meal rates paid on top of a night out rate are double counting.

Holiday pay worked out on basic hours where overtime is regular

Regulation 16(3ZA) of the Working Time Regulations 1998, in force since 1 January 2024, requires other payments such as overtime that have been regularly paid in the 52 weeks before the calculation date to be included in a week's pay. A tramper who runs 55 hours most weeks and is paid holiday at 40 basic is being paid for a week they do not work. Note the limit of it: paragraph (3ZA) applies to leave under regulations 13 and 15B, not to the additional 1.6 weeks under regulation 13A.

A 48 hour average nobody is measuring

The average is taken across a reference period of 17 weeks, or 26 where an agreement says so, and the arithmetic in regulation 4(5) is total working time plus excluded hours, divided by the number of weeks. Leave and sickness are excluded hours counted at eight hours a day and 48 hours a week. Nothing on a weekly payslip shows a running average, so a driver can sit over the limit for two months with every individual week looking ordinary. The duty to take all reasonable steps to keep within it is on the employer under regulation 4(8).

No hours on the payslip where the pay moves with the clock

Where wages vary by reference to time worked, section 8(2)(e) of the Employment Rights Act 1996 puts the total hours on the statement. A payslip showing only a gross figure for a driver paid by the hour, by the shift length or by the day is missing a required particular, and without it there is nothing on the document to check the money against.

The second driver's cab time treated as availability when work was being done

Regulation 6(2) makes time spent travelling in, but not driving, a moving vehicle as part of a team a period of availability. That holds only while the co-driver does nothing. DVSA's own guidance says the first 45 minutes of automatically recorded second driver time is accepted as a break provided the second driver carries out no work, and that any periods of other work must be recorded manually by the driver. Navigating, taking calls or dealing with paperwork in the passenger seat is other work, and it should leave the availability column.

Travel out to a vehicle parked somewhere else booked as rest

Where a vehicle in scope of the assimilated rules is neither at your home nor at the base where you are normally based, DVSA guidance says the time spent travelling to or from that location to take charge of it cannot count as rest or break, whatever the mode of transport, and must be recorded as other work or availability. The guidance adds that this holds even where the driver is not paid for the travel, which is a plain statement that the record and the pay are two separate questions.

What to check on your next payslip

• Regulation 11(e) requires the employer to provide, at the request of a mobile worker, a copy of the record of hours worked by that worker, and regulation 11(d) requires those records to be kept for at least two years after the period they cover. Working time records are the only document that holds the 48 hour average, and the employer holds them. Without a copy there is no way to test a reference period, and after two years the duty to keep them ends.
• DVSA's guidance on operator responsibilities states that operators provide copies of charts, manual records and digital data to drivers if requested to do so, and must be able to produce records to enforcement officers for 12 months. The tachograph record is the minute by minute account of a driver's day in four modes. It is the only evidence that can be set beside a payslip, and the driver does not hold it by default because the operator downloads it.
• Driver card data is downloaded by the operator at least every 28 calendar days and the vehicle unit at least every 90, because the card holds about 28 days of data at an average of 93 activity changes a day and the unit about 365 days, after which the oldest data is overwritten. The window to recover a disputed day is measured in weeks on the card. Once it has rolled over, the only surviving copy is the one the operator downloaded.
• The tachograph mode switch records four things and DVSA defines the third of them as periods of waiting time, the duration of which is known about in advance: driving, other work, availability, and break or rest. Those four modes are where a day is classified, and which mode a wait lands in decides whether it counts towards the 48 hour average. Comparing the modes against a payslip is the whole exercise.
• Regulation 6(1) provides that a period is not treated as a period of availability unless the mobile worker knows, before the start of it, about that period of availability and its reasonably foreseeable duration. It is a condition, not a label an employer can apply afterwards. An open ended wait fails it, and the definition of working time in regulation 2 then catches the same time from the other side.
• Regulation 7 of the National Minimum Wage Regulations 2015 sets the test as remuneration in the pay reference period divided by hours of work in that period, and regulation 32 counts hours when a worker is available, and required to be available, at or near a place of work for the purposes of working as time work unless the worker is at home. The minimum wage is an average across the pay period, so an unpaid hour is not automatically a breach. It is the divisor that moves: unpaid availability hours go into the hours side of the calculation and pull the effective rate down.
• Section 8(2)(e) of the Employment Rights Act 1996 puts the total number of hours worked on the itemised pay statement wherever the amount of wages or salary varies by reference to time worked, either as a single aggregate figure or as separate figures for different types of work or different rates of pay. Without the hours on the statement there is nothing to reconcile the gross figure against, and no way to see which categories of time were paid and which were not.

The 6 occupations this reaches, and how

Each line is specific to that trade. Where a scheme depends on how you are engaged rather than on the work itself, the line says so.

Bus Driver

Route length decides it, and the number is 50 kilometres. A regular service whose route does not exceed that is exempt from the assimilated rules, which takes it out of these Regulations as well and puts it on GB domestic rules: a 10 hour driving limit and a spreadover of no more than 16 hours between starting and finishing, with the 1998 Regulations governing weekly hours. Take a coach out past 50 kilometres or on an excursion and the 2005 Regulations arrive with the 48 hour average and the 60 hour week, and the night window for passenger vehicles is 1am to 5am rather than the midnight to 4am that applies to freight.

Courier

For couriers the instrument itself decides this, and it draws three lines rather than one. Regulation 2 defines a worker in the wide way, taking in any contract to perform work personally and not only a contract of employment, which is what catches most people riding or driving for a platform. It defines a self-employed driver much more narrowly, as someone whose main occupation is carriage for hire or reward under a Community licence or other professional authorisation, free to organise their own activities and free to hold commercial relations with several customers, and brings them in too. Regulation 14 then treats whoever pays you as your employer where you are supplied through an agency, and regulation 15 makes a genuine owner driver both the mobile worker and the employer of themselves.

Delivery Driver

Multi-drop is where the two pay questions collide. If the van is over 3.5 tonnes you are a mobile worker and the drops, the doorstep waits and the returns paperwork are all named activities inside the definition of working time. If it is under, this scheme does not reach you and the 1998 Regulations do instead. Either way a rate per parcel is not output work just because it is paid per parcel: regulation 36 of the minimum wage rules defines output work as work other than time work, and a round with a fixed start, a fixed van and a fixed route is time work with the money worked out by drop, so the minimum wage is measured against the hours the round actually took.

HGV Driver

An articulated unit or a rigid over 3.5 tonnes is squarely inside the assimilated drivers' hours rules, which is the gateway regulation 3 uses, so every part of the 2005 Regulations reaches the cab. That means the 48 hour average with no opt-out, the 60 hour ceiling on a single week, and the 10 hour cap on any 24 hours touching midnight to 4am. It also means breaks at six and nine hours of working time, counted separately from the 45 minutes the driving rules want after four and a half hours at the wheel. Your card carries the four modes and the tachograph is therefore the only minute by minute account of which of your hours were driving, which were other work, and which the operator has booked as availability.

Removals Operative

You do not have to hold the wheel to be covered. A mobile worker is any member of the travelling staff in the service of an undertaking that operates transport by road, and regulation 3(2) reaches those who drive or travel in the vehicle, so a porter riding in a removals lorry over 3.5 tonnes is inside the scheme alongside the driver. The exemption that looks like it fits does not: carriage of goods in a vehicle up to 7.5 tonnes is exempt only where it is non-commercial, which covers a householder moving their own furniture and never a firm being paid to move it. Loading, carrying and wrapping are working time; the run between two addresses with nothing to do is not automatically availability unless you were told its length first.

Truck Driver

Everything turns on maximum permissible mass, and the line is 3.5 tonnes including any trailer or semi-trailer. At or below it the assimilated rules do not apply and neither do these, so a 3.5 tonne rigid runs on GB domestic rules with a 10 hour driving limit and an 11 hour duty limit, and the Working Time Regulations 1998 govern the hours, opt-out and all. There is a trap in mixed work that costs whole days: DVSA guidance says even a short period of driving under the assimilated rules on any day puts you in scope for the whole of that day. The heaviest vehicle you got into rates the week, not the one you drove most.

Questions

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