Most drivers know they can get a fine for driving too long or resting too little. Fewer understand that not all infringements are treated the same way — there's a grading system, and where your breach sits in that system determines whether you walk away with a warning, a fixed penalty, a prohibition notice, or something that ends up in front of the Traffic Commissioner.
I got my first graded infringement on a run down to Dover about five years in. A 10-minute shortfall on a weekly rest — I'd counted my hours wrong and started the next driving period nine hours and fifty minutes after I should have. The enforcement officer at a check site in Kent could see exactly what had happened. He explained the category, issued a graduated fixed penalty, and let me go.
The education stuck. Here's how the system works.
The three severity categories
DVSA and enforcement authorities across the EU (the grading follows from European rules originally introduced under Directive 2006/22/EC) classify most 561/2006 infringements into three bands.
Minor infringement: A small deviation from the rules — typically a shortfall of less than 10 minutes on a daily rest, a brief driving period overrun that doesn't reach the threshold for a higher category, or a first-time isolated record-keeping gap. A minor infringement, on its own, is unlikely to result in a fixed penalty for a professional driver with a clean history. The officer has discretion. A verbal warning and a note on the encounter record is the typical outcome.
Serious infringement: A more significant breach — a daily rest shortfall of 10 minutes or more (up to the thresholds for very serious), a weekly rest overrun, a driving period that meaningfully exceeds the daily or fortnightly limit. At this level, a graduated fixed penalty is likely. The officer can also issue a PG9 prohibition notice — keeping the vehicle off the road — but typically won't for a first occurrence with an otherwise compliant record.
Very serious infringement: The most severe category, covering breaches that represent a significant risk to road safety. A driving period that exceeds the 9-hour daily limit by more than 50%, a weekly driving total more than 20% above the 56-hour limit, a daily rest of less than 8 hours. At this level, a prohibition is standard — the vehicle gets a PG9 and doesn't move until the driver has taken proper rest. A financial deposit may also be required if the driver has no verifiable UK address.
The specific thresholds
The EU guidance on categorisation gives approximate bands for common infringement types. For daily driving time: a breach of up to 10% above the limit is typically serious, above 10% is very serious. For daily rest: a reduction of up to one hour below the minimum is serious, more than one hour is very serious.
These thresholds aren't always applied rigidly — there's officer discretion, and the context of the infringement matters. A driver who's had a mechanical breakdown, a road closure, or a genuine emergency can often demonstrate mitigating circumstances that influence how the officer grades and records the breach. But the mitigation needs to be documented — a printout showing when the unexpected event happened, a note on the record. Verbal explanations at the roadside get a polite nod and not much else.
For most infringement types, DVSA publishes categorisation guidance used by enforcement officers, though specific fine amounts are updated periodically. I'm not going to put exact figures in here because they shift — the graduated fixed penalty schedule is set by statutory instrument and DVSA publishes current rates on their website. What I can tell you is that the penalty for a serious breach is considerably lower than for a very serious one, and that repeat occurrences at the same category attract higher penalties than first offences.
What a PG9 actually means
A PG9 is an immediate prohibition notice — the vehicle is prohibited from use on the road until the specified condition is met. For a rest period infringement, that condition is usually: the driver takes the missing rest. The vehicle sits where it is, load and all, until the clock has run.
If you're at a check site on the M6 near Knutsford at 2pm with a very serious daily rest infringement — say you've had 7 hours instead of the required 9 — you're looking at a minimum 2-hour wait before the vehicle can move. That's if the TM backs you up, the operator's on the phone sorting it, and you're not fighting anyone about it. The load is late. The customer is unhappy. The dispatcher is stressed. And none of that is DVSA's problem.
A PG10 is a deferred prohibition — the vehicle can continue but must present at a nominated centre within a specified period. This tends to be used for technical defects rather than driver hours, but it can be issued alongside a driver hours matter in some cases.
How infringements are recorded and shared
When DVSA issue a fixed penalty or a prohibition for a 561 infringement, they record the encounter. That record feeds into the OCRS system — which scores operators on their roadside encounter history. A single very serious infringement at a roadside check can move an operator's score noticeably. Multiple infringements across a fleet, or repeat encounters with the same driver, will have a larger effect.
The infringement also appears on the driver's tachograph analysis record. When your card is downloaded and analysed at the next opportunity, the infringement will show in the analysis output. A TM who runs proper analysis should be seeing these flags — and should be having a conversation with you about them — before DVSA see them again at the next check.
The problem is that plenty of operators' TMs are not running proper analysis. They're downloading cards on schedule but not actually reading the output. So the infringement sits in the data, and the first time anyone engages with it might be at a public inquiry, where the Traffic Commissioner wants to know why the operator's infringement analysis records show a pattern of drivers' hours breaches that nobody appears to have addressed.
Repeat infringements: how they stack
One serious infringement at a roadside check, with a clean record otherwise, is not going to end a licence. But the Traffic Commissioner and DVSA both look at patterns. A driver who has three serious infringements in a 12-month period — particularly if they're the same type, suggesting a systemic issue rather than a one-off — is a different profile from a driver with one breach in five years.
For operators, a cluster of infringements across the fleet in a short period will trigger a targeted visit. DVSA use their encounter data to identify operators whose roadside checks are producing consistent infringement patterns. When that targeting happens, the visit isn't just a few roadside stops — it's an examination of the operator's compliance system: how infringements are being identified, recorded, communicated to drivers, and actioned.
A TM who can demonstrate an infringement management workflow — here's the breach, here's when we noticed it, here's the conversation we had with the driver, here's what changed — is in a much better position than a TM who looks at the officer blankly and says the drivers sort it out themselves.
The mitigating circumstances situation
DVSA officers can exercise discretion. The system is not purely mechanical — a breach isn't automatically a penalty. But the discretion only helps if you've got something concrete to show: a reason for the deviation that's documented in the tacho record or on a printout, a clear history of otherwise compliant driving, and a straightforward account of what happened.
What doesn't work as mitigation: being busy, being dispatched late, the load taking longer than expected to be ready, the depot queuing. None of those are emergencies. They're operational constraints that the driver and operator are expected to manage within the rules. If the load takes four hours to be ready and that means you can't complete the delivery and get to a rest location within your remaining driving time — you don't drive. That's what the rules require. The fact that the customer won't like it is not DVSA's concern.
What actually qualifies as mitigation
Genuine road emergencies — a motorway closure that adds two hours to a journey, an accident that blocks the only viable route to a safe stopping point. Mechanical events that required immediate action to ensure safety. Weather events, in exceptional circumstances.
These need to be recorded on the tacho at the time — a manual entry explaining the reason, timed and signed. An explanation at the roadside six hours later, with no contemporaneous record, is much harder to rely on. Officers have heard the motorway closure story before. If it's true, the tacho will support it.
A note on the employer escalation path
If you get a graduated fixed penalty at the roadside, you have a period — typically 28 days — to either pay or contest it. If you genuinely believe the categorisation is wrong, or there's mitigation that wasn't considered, you can request a review. This is uncommon in my experience — the grading is usually accurate — but it exists.
For operators whose licence is being questioned on the basis of an infringement pattern, the route is via the traffic commissioner's office. A public inquiry is a serious matter, but it's also an opportunity to demonstrate that the compliance system has been fixed. Operators who show up at a public inquiry with documented evidence of improvements since the infringement period are treated differently from those who argue the infringements weren't as bad as the record shows.
If you want your compliance tracked so that infringements get flagged before they stack into a pattern, ShiftOwt handles 561/WTD monitoring automatically — £5.99/mo for drivers, fleet pricing on request.
The broader picture on how OCRS is affected by infringement history is in the OCRS post. And if you want to understand what a roadside check looks like from start to finish — including how the officer is determining which issues to record and at what category — the roadside check walkthrough covers it.