Spent three months running nights out of a distribution centre near Stafford — trunking work, mostly M6 north to Carlisle and back, start times around 11pm, back in the yard by 0700. Long shifts, decent money, and absolutely no one at the agency mentioned that there was a specific Working Time Directive provision that applied to my working pattern.
The 48-hour average week gets explained to most drivers, eventually. The night work limit mostly doesn't. And if you're agency doing regular nights, or a tramping driver whose natural running window puts you through the small hours, it's worth knowing the rule exists.
What counts as night time for HGV drivers
Under the Working Time Regulations 1998 as they apply to mobile workers — which includes HGV drivers — night time for goods vehicle drivers is specifically defined as the period between midnight and 04:00. That's narrower than the general employment law definition of night time (which runs from 11pm to 6am). For goods vehicles, it's midnight to 04:00.
This matters because the night work restriction only applies if your working period includes some time within that window. If you start at 11pm and finish at 3am, your shift crosses into the midnight-04:00 period. If you start at 4am and finish at 1pm, you haven't worked any night time, and the night work limit doesn't apply to that shift.
The 10-hour limit
If you perform night work — if any part of your working time falls within the midnight-04:00 window — your total working time must not exceed 10 hours in any 24-hour period. That's the rule.
Not 10 hours of driving. Ten hours of total working time. Under the Working Time Directive, working time for HGV drivers includes driving, loading, unloading, maintenance, administration, waiting time where you're required to be at the vehicle or available. It's a broader category than driving time.
On a typical trunk night run: load check and depart at 23:30, driving through to 03:45, a break, continue driving to 06:30, trailer swap, admin and debrief, finish at 07:15. Total working time: roughly 7 hours 45 minutes if you strip out the rest break. Doesn't hit 10 hours. Fine.
Now add a loading delay. The trailer isn't ready until 00:30. You're waiting, required to be available, from 23:30. Total working time now includes that hour of availability before you started driving. Depending on how the rest of the shift runs, you might be pushing toward 9.5 or 10 hours of total working time.
Not a breach, necessarily. But closer than you'd think. And if there's a second loading delay at the destination, or an unplanned diversion, you can tip over 10 hours before you've noticed.
There's no opt-out from this rule
For drivers working under assimilated EU rules (the 561/2006 framework that applies to most HGV drivers in GB), there is no individual opt-out from the night work limit. The 48-hour average working week has an opt-out mechanism for workers under domestic employment law — but not for mobile workers under the assimilated rules framework.
GB domestic rules — which apply to some vehicles not subject to 561/2006 — do allow a 48-hour opt-out. But most drivers reading this are on EU-derived rules, and for those drivers, no signed form, no contract clause, and no collective agreement can allow you to exceed 10 hours of working time in a night-work period.
I mention this because I've met drivers who've been handed something to sign that they're told is a WTD opt-out. For an HGV driver on assimilated rules, that form doesn't do what the agency thinks it does. The night work limit doesn't opt out.
Reference periods and averaging
The 48-hour weekly average under the WTD is calculated over a 17-week reference period (extendable to 26 weeks under a workforce or collective agreement). The night work limit works differently — it applies to each 24-hour period that includes night time. It's not averaged. It's a per-period cap.
Which means you can't have a quiet patch of nights and then bank the hours toward a longer night later. Every 24-hour period that includes any time between midnight and 04:00 is individually capped at 10 hours of working time. Last Tuesday's 8-hour night doesn't create headroom for a 12-hour night this Thursday.
Health assessments for night workers
Under the Working Time Regulations, workers who perform night work — and who are classified as night workers — are entitled to free health assessments from their employer before beginning regular night work, and periodically thereafter. For most agency work, this obligation sits with the agency as the employer, not the haulier as the end-user of the driver's services.
In practice, the health assessment provision for night workers in road transport is not well enforced and not well understood. I've worked night patterns for three separate agencies over eight years and been offered a health assessment exactly once — and that was because the agency had recently had an HR audit. The entitlement exists. Whether you'll be proactively offered it is a different question.
If you do regular nights on agency and you've never been offered a health assessment, you're entitled to ask for one. Most agencies will sort it if asked directly. It's not a onerous process — typically a questionnaire and a GP letter if anything flags. But the entitlement is real.
How the 10-hour limit interacts with 561/2006
The 561 rules and the WTD rules run in parallel and independently. A shift can comply with 561 — you've taken your breaks at the right points, your driving time is within limits — while breaching the WTD night work limit, if the total working time in that 24-hour period that included night time came to more than 10 hours.
This is why I said earlier that both rules bite independently. I covered the break interaction between WTD and 561 in the WTD breaks post. The night work cap is a separate provision again — it applies to total working time in night-touch periods, regardless of how the driving breaks fell.
At a DVSA roadside check, an officer can look at both your tachograph record and your working time record. The tacho covers 561. The WTD records — which are typically kept by the employer rather than on the tacho card — cover the WTD obligations including the night work limit. If there's a question about night work compliance, the officer may request working time records from the operator. Most tachograph analysis software will flag WTD breaches alongside 561 infringements if it's been set up to do so, but not all operators have this configured correctly.
What good practice looks like
If you're doing regular night work, track your start and finish times per 24-hour period and add up your total working time — driving plus waiting plus other work. Keep it under 10 hours on any night-touch shift. If a delay or extra loading task is going to push you toward 9.5 hours, flag it to the dispatcher before it happens rather than after.
For operators running night distribution work: make sure your tachograph analysis software is set up to flag WTD night work breaches, not just 561 driving time. They're different flags. Some older systems only output 561 analysis. If yours does, you've got a blind spot on night work compliance.
The 17-week average for the 48-hour week is usually tracked. The per-period 10-hour night work cap is often not. That's the one that's more likely to cause problems in a targeted DVSA working time inspection — particularly for operators running distribution centres on overnight trunk operations.
A note on the agency information gap
When you're working nights for an agency across multiple hauliers, the total working time calculation for any given week needs to include hours worked across all the bookings. If you did 40 hours in nights for Operator A and 12 hours in nights for Operator B in the same reference week, your WTD total is 52 hours — not 40, not 12.
The agency, as employer, is supposed to aggregate your hours across all bookings for working time purposes. Many do this poorly, or not at all. Which means the compliance obligation for monitoring night work hours often falls, in practice, to the driver to track themselves.
Tedious? Yes. But less tedious than a WTD breach on your record and an operator who shrugs and says they didn't know you were also working for someone else.
If you want working time compliance tracked automatically across bookings rather than in a notebook, ShiftOwt handles 561/WTD monitoring in one place — £5.99/mo for drivers, agency pricing on request.
For the full picture on how the Working Time Directive's 48-hour average applies to HGV drivers, the WTD 48-hour post covers the reference periods, the opt-out situation, and the rules for agency pools. And if you want the interaction between WTD break rules and 561 break rules, the WTD breaks post goes into both clocks simultaneously.