The rate went up in April. Your payslip might not have.
From April 2026 the National Living Wage for workers aged 21 and over is £12.71 an hour. The year before it was £12.21. If you're on agency and your weekly pay went up by £2 in April, someone in a payroll office noticed. If it didn't — or if you're not sure — you need to run the numbers.
I did four months of agency work before I bothered. Three of those weeks came in short when I actually did the calculation. Not by much. Under a pound an hour in two cases. But that's still illegal, and HMRC can recover it with interest plus a penalty on top.
This is how to check, what counts as hours, and where the trap sits for HGV drivers specifically.
The basic calculation
Take your total pay for the week — before tax, before national insurance, but after any umbrella fees if you're through an umbrella. Divide by the number of hours you actually worked. If that number is below £12.71 (from April 2026) or £12.21 (up to March 2026), the employer owes you the difference.
The catch is what counts as hours. That's where it gets specific to driving work.
What counts as working time for NMW purposes
Driving. Obviously. Actual seat time moving the truck.
Other work — loading, unloading, securing the load, completing paperwork, doing your walkaround check. All of it counts. The walkaround at the start of a shift — ten minutes or twenty, depending on the rig — is working time and it's paid time for NMW purposes. A lot of agencies don't bother including it. Most drivers don't think to count it either.
Pre-trip admin. If you're spending fifteen minutes at the depot getting keys, checking in, receiving your paperwork — that's working time if the employer requires you to be there.
Training. This one catches agencies out. A full CPC periodic training day — seven hours — is working time for NMW. If you're on a contract and told to attend a training day, the employer can't pay you half your normal rate for it and claim it's fine. It's not fine. The day has to come in at or above minimum wage.
Waiting at loading bays. This is where it gets nuanced — and where the abuse is most common. If you're at a Lutterworth warehouse waiting for them to load you, and you have to stay with the vehicle, you can't go anywhere, and you're available on demand — that waiting time is working time for NMW. If the same time is a genuine EU 561 rest period where you're legitimately resting in the cab and not required to be available, it's rest, not work, and NMW doesn't apply to it.
The difference is employer control. If the boss has told you to stay on site and be ready, it's working time. If you've taken a legitimate rest period at a truck stop while you happen to be waiting for a time slot — rest. It sounds obvious but it matters at the end of the week when the hours are totalled up.
What doesn't count
Your daily rest period — the 11-hour (or 9-hour reduced) rest under EU 561/2006 — is rest. Not working time. Not subject to NMW. If you're in the bunk in the back of the cab at Lymm at 2am because you've taken your nightly rest, that time is yours.
Your weekly rest is the same. The 45-hour regular weekly rest or the 24-hour reduced rest — that's rest. The employer doesn't owe you NMW for those hours.
Unpaid breaks that are genuinely yours — lunch break away from the vehicle where you're free to go and come back. Same principle.
The per-load and per-delivery trap
Some agency contracts pay per delivery, per load, or per drop. £X for a full load to Bristol, £Y for a curtainsider to Birmingham. There's nothing wrong with this pay structure in itself, but the employer still has to check the effective hourly rate comes out above minimum wage.
On a good week — quick deliveries, no waiting, smooth drops — you're fine. On a bad week — three-hour waits at a supermarket RDC, roadworks adding two hours to the leg, a consignee who can't find the paperwork — your effective rate drops. If the total weekly pay divided by total hours works out below £12.71, the operator has to make it up. They're supposed to spot it and pay it without you having to ask. Most of the time they don't.
Took me three months to figure out the Bristol-heavy weeks were the ones to check. The quick Midlands work was fine. The long-distance runs with the unpredictable wait times were the ones that dipped below the line.
The umbrella company calculation
If you're through an umbrella company, this is where it gets properly confusing.
The agency sends money to the umbrella. The umbrella takes its margin, pays employer's national insurance, auto-enrolment pension contributions, and anything else they claim — then pays you. The number on your payslip at the bottom is after all of that.
The NMW obligation sits with whoever employs you — which in an umbrella arrangement is usually the umbrella company, not the agency. The umbrella is your employer of record. So it's the umbrella that needs to ensure the effective hourly rate comes out right after their deductions.
Some don't. Or rather — some set up the deductions in a way that gets close to the line on slow weeks. If you're unsure whether your umbrella is applying the rules correctly, the ACAS helpline can talk you through it. HMRC's enforcement team also investigates umbrella companies as a priority sector.
How to run the check
Get your payslip for a full week. Add up:
- Total driving hours for the week
- Other work (walkarounds, loading, paperwork)
- Waiting time you were required to be available for
- Training time, if any that week
Divide your gross pay (before tax) by that total. If it's below £12.71 — or £12.21 for weeks before 1 April 2026 — you're owed the difference.
Keep a note of your actual hours. The tachograph records driving time, and some other-work time. But the walkaround check, the yard admin time, the loading wait — those don't appear automatically on a tacho output. You need to note them yourself.
A mate of mine started keeping a running note in his phone. Day, start time, actual keys-in-cab time, waiting time at delivery points, finish. After a month he had enough data to show his agency he was owed three weeks of make-up pay. They paid. They weren't happy about it but they paid.
What happens if they don't pay
HMRC enforces the minimum wage. You can report underpayment without going to tribunal — the online form is on GOV.UK and it's confidential. HMRC can investigate, recover the arrears, and impose a penalty on the employer of up to 200% of the amount owed.
You can also raise it as an Employment Tribunal claim. Most don't get that far — agencies settle when HMRC come knocking, because the penalty on top of the arrears adds up fast on a fleet with forty drivers all slightly under the line.
The data they'll ask for: your payslips, your working hours records, any written contract. The tachograph records can support the hours calculation but aren't the whole picture for NMW because they only capture certain time categories. Your own records help.
Drivers on salary — does it still apply?
Yes. If you're on a fixed annual salary — say, £32,000 — divided across 52 weeks gives you roughly £615 a week. If you're regularly doing 50-hour weeks including overtime, waiting time, and driving, your effective hourly rate might sit around £12.30. Below the £12.71 line from April 2026.
It's less common to see this with employed drivers on direct contracts — pay scales in the industry have moved up — but for drivers on older salary agreements who've picked up more hours over time, it's worth checking.
The bigger issue with agency pay
The minimum wage is the floor, not the ceiling. HGV drivers with a full Class 1 have been averaging somewhere between £16 and £22 an hour depending on the work and the region for the last couple of years. The shortage hasn't gone away.
But some agency arrangements — particularly umbrella arrangements, particularly for drivers new to the industry or on shorter-term contracts — sit closer to the floor than they should. The NMW calculation is worth knowing not because it's where you want to end up, but because it tells you when you're being underpaid and you have a legal route to recover it.
If you're tired of trying to work out whether your pay adds up from a paper payslip, ShiftOwt tracks your hours and availability in one place — it won't do your payroll, but it gives you the hours log that makes the NMW calculation a five-minute job. £5.99 a month for drivers.