Tachographs and drivers' hours, the basics

What the tachograph is recording

A digital tachograph logs your time in one of four modes, and your driver card carries that record with you between vehicles.

• Driving. Selected automatically the moment the vehicle moves. You cannot choose it and you cannot avoid it.
• Other work. Loading, unloading, paperwork, checks, anything you are doing for the employer that is not driving.
• Period of availability. Waiting, where you know in advance you will be waiting and you are not required to work. Ferry crossings, queuing to be loaded.
• Rest or break. Time that is genuinely your own.

The distinction between other work, availability and rest is where nearly every problem starts. Mode selection is a manual decision at the end of a long shift, which is exactly when people get it wrong.

The driving limits

These follow the rules published for most goods vehicle work by DVSA. Specialist operations and some vehicles run under different domestic rules, so check which set applies to your job.

Limit	Amount
Daily driving	9 hours, extendable to 10 hours twice a week
Weekly driving	56 hours
Any two consecutive weeks	90 hours
Driving before a break	4.5 hours

The fortnightly limit is the one that catches people out. A 56 hour week is legal, but two of them back to back is not, because the second week is capped by what the first one used.

Breaks

After four and a half hours of driving you take 45 minutes, or a 15 minute break followed by a 30 minute break, in that order, within the driving period.

Break time has to be break time. If you are moving the vehicle in a yard, signing paperwork or being asked questions by a transport office, that is other work, and the break restarts.

Daily and weekly rest

• Daily rest is 11 hours, which can be reduced to 9 hours a limited number of times between weekly rests. It can also be split, with the second part being the longer one.
• Weekly rest is a regular period of 45 hours. A reduced weekly rest is shorter and has to be compensated later by attaching the missing hours to another rest period.

[VERIFY: exact reduced-rest counts and compensation deadlines, DVSA drivers’ hours guidance] The structure above is stable. The precise numbers for reductions and compensation are the part most worth reading from the source before you plan a fortnight around them.

Your driver card

The card is personal to you, not to the vehicle or the employer. You keep it, you insert it at the start of the shift, and it holds the record that proves what you did.

• Carry it when driving. An enforcement officer can ask for it and for your records at the roadside.
• Your employer downloads data from your card and from the vehicle unit at set intervals and keeps it. [VERIFY: current download intervals for driver card and vehicle unit, DVSA]
• If it is lost, damaged or stolen, report it and apply for a replacement immediately. Driving without it is only permitted in defined circumstances and with manual records.

What an infringement actually means

An infringement is a recorded breach of the rules, flagged when the data is analysed. Some are seconds over a limit because a barrier was slow. Some are a shift that should never have been planned.

Two things follow. The operator has to show what it did about it, because the operator’s licence depends on demonstrating systems that work. And a pattern attached to one driver becomes a driver conduct matter.

Neither of those is a reason to hide one. A driver who flags a mistake and explains it is in a considerably better position than one whose employer finds it three weeks later in an analysis report.

This guide summarises rules that are amended periodically and that have different versions for domestic and international work. It is general information about how the system works, not a compliance document for your operation.