• KNOWLEDGE HUB
Yard time, loading and early starts all count as working time - not just driving. What does and doesn’t count towards a driver’s working day.
QUICK ANSWER
For a transport manager, this is the single most important thing to get right about working time, because a driver can be well inside the driving limits and still breach the working time ones.
Working time is any time you’re at your workstation - which includes the vehicle, the yard, the depot and any site where you carry out transport work - at your employer’s disposal and doing the job. So loading the wagon, sheeting and strapping, the walk-round defect check, fuelling, yard moves, paperwork and any waiting you can’t plan around all count towards your working day. Driving is only one slice of it.
This matters because a driver can be perfectly legal on driving hours and still break the working time limits - because the loading, the early yard start and the waiting all stacked up.
Drivers’ hours rules cap your driving and set your breaks and rest. Working time rules cap your total work. They are two separate systems running over the same shift, and you have to stay inside both.
So a tipper driver who does five hours behind the wheel but spends three hours loading, tipping and waiting has done eight hours of working time - even though the driving was nowhere near its limit.
For the full overview of the working time system, see the pillar guide. This article deals with one question only: what actually counts towards the working day, and how to record it correctly.
Working time is the time from when you start work to when you finish, during which you are at your workstation (which includes the vehicle, the depot and subsidiary premises), at your employer’s disposal and carrying out your duties. In practice, that means:
The headline point for yard-based operators: time spent in the yard before you drive counts. If a driver clocks on at 05:00 and spends 40 minutes loading scaffold or aggregate before pulling out at 05:40, that 40 minutes is working time.
Three things are excluded from the working time calculation:
A period of availability is waiting time where you know the likely duration in advance and you’re free to leave your workstation - you just have to be reachable to resume work. The classic examples are accompanying the vehicle on a ferry or train, or sitting as the non-driving member of a two-up crew.
The catch most operators miss: if you don’t know how long the wait will be, it is not a POA. It is working time. Telling a driver to record an open-ended wait as availability doesn’t make it availability - the label only works if the facts support it.
There’s also a line worth drawing at the start of the shift. Arriving early by choice and sitting in the car park with the engine off, before you’ve booked on, isn’t working time. The clock starts when the operator requires you to be there, or when you actually start the job - not just because you happened to turn up early.
Ordinary commuting from home to your regular yard isn’t working time either. Where a driver travels to a vehicle based somewhere other than the operating centre, the position can differ and the travel to that location/vehicle does count as working time.
Waiting is the area operators get wrong most often, so it’s worth its own treatment. Waiting is not automatically a period of availability. Two questions decide it:
If the answer to both is yes, it can be a POA. If either fails, it’s working time.
Likely a POA: the driver is told before the period starts that the next load won’t be ready for 45 minutes, and is free to wait in the cab or canteen with nothing to do.
Likely working time: sitting in a live queue that keeps creeping forward; waiting for instructions with no known end time; having to supervise the load; or needing to be ready to move every few minutes.
The queue that keeps moving is the classic trap. It looks like waiting, but because the driver doesn’t know the duration and keeps shuffling forward, it should be recorded as other work, not availability.
This is where yard-based operations get caught out. If a driver does any work during night time, their total working time in that 24-hour period is capped at 10 hours - not the usual higher ceiling.
For goods vehicles, night time is the period between midnight and 4:00am. So:
A scaffold gang or muckaway crew loading at 03:30 and then putting in a long day can hit that 10-hour wall well before the driving limit. The cap can be lifted to a higher figure, but only under a collective or workforce agreement - not by informal arrangement.
For drivers under the The Road Transport (Working Time) Regulations 2005 - which covers most HGV work, see the regime section below - the limits are:
The 45-minute driving break required under the assimilated drivers’ hours rules will normally satisfy your working time break as well - but you have to actually take it as a break, not as availability, and not while doing other work.
There are two regimes, and which one you’re under decides whether the night work limit and the break rules above even apply.
If your vehicle is in scope of the assimilated drivers’ hours rules (broadly, goods vehicles over 3.5 tonnes using a tachograph), the Road Transport (Working Time) Regulations 2005 apply - the full set above.
If your vehicle runs under GB Domestic drivers hours rules instead, or your driver is an “occasional mobile worker”, only four provisions of the older Working Time Regulations 1998 apply: the 48-hour average week (which an individual can opt out of), a longer possible reference period, the right to adequate rest, and night-worker health checks. The 10-hour night cap and the 30/45-minute break structure do not apply.
An occasional mobile worker is someone who drives in scope of the assimilated rules on fewer than 11 days in a reference period shorter than 26 weeks, or fewer than 16 days in a reference period of 26 weeks or more.
A common mistake in construction and local-trade work is to assume that because a vehicle stays local, or because much of the work happens in the yard, it sits outside working-time control. Local work may change which drivers’ hours rules apply, but it does not by itself make loading, checks or depot duties disappear.
One point for owner-operators: self-employed drivers have been inside these rules since 2012, so running as a sole trader doesn’t take you out of them.
Knowing the yard hour counts is one thing; capturing it correctly is another. The tachograph record should reflect the working day - it doesn’t decide when the working day starts.
If a driver starts at 05:30 loading scaffold, checking a mixer or sorting a removals load, and only inserts the card at 06:05 when they reach the vehicle, that earlier work has still happened and still has to be recorded. The usual way to capture it is a manual entry when the card goes in, marking the pre-vehicle time as other work.
Mode-switch discipline matters because, depending on how the unit was set up at calibration, a digital tachograph may default to rest or to other work when the vehicle stops. Setting the wrong mode is one of the most common - and most visible - infringements at the roadside.
Leaving the card on rest while the driver is actually tipping, washing down or completing paperwork is exactly the kind of mismatch an examiner looks for.
For drivers in scope of the assimilated drivers’ hours rules, the driver must be able to produce a full set of records - driving, other work, availability, breaks and rest - for the current day and the previous 28 calendar days. That includes manual entries for work done before the card went in or away from the vehicle. For goods journeys between the UK and the EU, the roadside carry requirement is 56 days, not 28, and has been since 31 December 2024. There is no change for journeys made solely within the UK.
Separately from what the driver carries, the operator must keep working-time records for at least two years. Timesheets and planning tools help you manage working time, but they don’t replace the tachograph or manual record where the drivers’ hours rules apply. Whatever your analysis process is, make sure it picks up other work, manual entries and POA - not just driving infringements.
The “what counts” rule is the same everywhere - yard time, loading and early starts all count. What changes by sector is which regime you’re under, and that turns on the exemptions.
Tippers, grab lorries and plant-movers over 3.5 tonnes are in scope of the assimilated rules, so the full 2005 Regulations apply. There is no general construction exemption.
The day routinely fills with non-driving work: loading aggregate, sheeting, tipping, cleaning out, shunting around a site, and dealing with gatehouse or weighbridge paperwork. All of it is working time. Quarry and site queues need careful recording - a known wait with real freedom may be a POA, but a stop-start queue is not. A narrow road-maintenance derogation exists, but it only covers vehicles actually engaged in the maintenance work, not the run out to site or the trip back to the yard.
The honest answer for concrete is that there’s no exemption. There’s no rule that concrete work sits outside working-time counting just because the product is time-sensitive or the vehicle is specialist. A standard drum mixer’s main activity is driving, so it’s squarely in scope of the assimilated rules and the full 2005 Regulations apply.
Batching and loading, the run to site, the pour itself, operating the controls, washout and site paperwork all count. The point that bites hardest is waiting at a pour: if the driver doesn’t know in advance how long they’ll be held - which is usually the case - that wait is working time, not a period of availability. Logging it as availability to protect the day’s figures is exactly the error an examiner looks for.
Volumetric mixers have their own weight and licensing history, so check the vehicle-specific drivers’ hours and operator-licensing position - but for working time the driver’s non-driving work is treated the same way.
Scaffolding is the one sector here with a genuine exemption worth knowing. A scaffold wagon can run under GB domestic rules - and so under the lighter 1998 Regulations for working time - if all of the following hold:
Take any one of those away - a wagon over 7.5 tonnes, a driver who only drives, a job beyond 100km - and you’re back under the full 2005 Regulations. Either way, the work counts: a driver who starts in the yard selecting boards, tubes and fittings, helping load, checking straps and collecting job sheets is working before the wheels turn. The unload on site is working. Waiting while the gang directs where to place kit is work, not availability.
Removals lorries over 3.5 tonnes are in scope of the assimilated rules, with no removals-specific exemption, so the The Road Transport (Working Time) Regulations 2005 apply in full.
Padding furniture, loading, supervising the load, securing goods, checking access and completing inventories are all working time - and on a big house move that can be the bulk of the day, with relatively little driving. Sitting outside a property because the keys haven’t arrived isn’t automatically a POA; it depends whether the wait was known in advance and whether the driver is genuinely free. Multi-day jobs are where the 48-hour average quietly builds up - and if it’s a European move, remember the 56-day record rule.
Waste splits two ways. Door-to-door household refuse collection - including domestic-type waste collected from commercial premises - is generally exempt from the assimilated rules and runs under GB domestic rules, so only the lighter 1998 working time provisions apply to those rounds.
But skip work, roll-on/roll-off, hook-loader, tipper-style waste haulage and trunking between transfer stations are not door-to-door collection. They’re in scope of the assimilated rules, so the full 2005 Regulations apply - including the night work limit, which bites on early-start rounds. Vehicle checks, bin and skip handling, loading, site movements, transfer-station queues of unknown length, tipping and washing down all count, and multi-drop rounds can build large working-time totals even when the driving looks modest.
A practical control system should be able to answer these questions for each depot and shift pattern:
The working day is bigger than the driving day. Once you count the yard time, the loading, the early start and the waiting, plenty of operators are closer to the working time limits than the tacho’s driving figures alone suggest - and the gap usually hides in other work that never made it onto the record.
Keeping on top of that across a fleet is exactly the kind of analysis Tacho Agent takes off your desk - turning raw tachograph and working time data into clear infringement reports and trend analysis, so you can see where the day is really going instead of trying to spot the patterns by hand after the event.
This article is provided for general guidance only and reflects our understanding of the rules as they apply in Great Britain as at the date shown on this page. It is not legal advice and should not be relied on as a substitute for advice tailored to your specific operation.
Drivers' hours, tachograph, working time and operator licensing rules are detailed and change over time, and some requirements differ in Northern Ireland and for international journeys. Always check the current guidance on GOV.UK and the underlying legislation on legislation.gov.uk, and consult your transport manager or a qualified compliance professional before acting.
To the fullest extent permitted by law, Tacho Agent Ltd accepts no liability for any loss arising from action taken, or not taken, in reliance on this article. Nothing here excludes or limits any liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence or for fraud. Use of this article is also governed by our Terms of Use.
Tacho Agent reviews your download data, flags the infringements and risks, and shows you exactly where you stand - before DVSA does. Free first report, within 2 working days.
Request a free report →