I found out about eighteen months into an agency run — depots around Birmingham, a couple of Dover runs, regular nights at Stafford Services waiting for a collection window — that I'd been underpaid on holiday for the entire time. Not by a huge amount each week. But it had stacked up. A driver I knew mentioned it in passing while we were both fuelling at DIRFT Rugby. I checked my payslips. He was right. I'd been getting basic rate for holiday pay when I should have been getting something closer to my actual average earnings.
That's the thing about WTD annual leave for HGV drivers. The entitlement is clear enough on paper. The practice of paying it correctly? Different story entirely — especially if you're agency.
The 5.6 weeks you're actually entitled to
Every mobile worker — and that includes HGV drivers working under EU 561/2006 or GB domestic drivers' hours rules — is entitled to 5.6 weeks of paid annual leave. Full stop. This comes from the Working Time Regulations 1998, and it's not discretionary.
The 5.6 weeks breaks down as: 4 weeks under Regulation 13 (the original EU-derived entitlement) plus 1.6 weeks under Regulation 13A (the UK domestic top-up). In practice they're the same pot of leave. But the two elements have slightly different rules around carryover and contractual enhancement, so it's worth knowing both regulations exist if you ever need to push back on something.
For drivers working a standard five-day week, 5.6 weeks equals 28 days — it's 5.6 multiplied by 5 working days. Not everyone works five days. Six days a week? 5.6 × 6 = 33.6 days. Four days? 5.6 × 4 = 22.4 days. The entitlement scales proportionally to the working week, not to a fixed number.
Variable days and shift patterns
A lot of HGV drivers — and agency drivers especially — don't work a neat Monday-to-Friday pattern. Four days one week, six the next, a slow fortnight in January. For those drivers, entitlement is calculated proportionally based on the days or shifts actually worked. It's not a flat 28 days for everyone.
Why does this matter? Because an agency paying you as though you're a fixed-hours worker when you're not — or treating you as a shorter-week worker than you actually are — is shortchanging you before they've even got to the pay rate. Both the number of leave days and the rate you're paid for them need to be right. Getting one wrong while the other's correct still means you're being underpaid.
Why agency drivers keep getting short-changed
Look, I'm not naming agencies. But the pattern is consistent enough that it's worth saying plainly: agency drivers are disproportionately likely to be underpaid on holiday. There are a few reasons for this.
The structure of the arrangement makes it easy to lose track. When you're working through an agency, the obligation to pay your statutory holiday entitlement sits with the employment business — the agency — not the end-user haulier. The agency may not be factoring your full entitlement into the rate. The haulier you're actually driving for has no visibility of it. And you — doing 55 hours a week and trying to sleep in a car park near Carlisle — are not sitting there checking whether your holiday accrual calculation is correct.
Second thing: the Agency Workers Regulations 2010. Since 2010, agency workers who've completed a 12-week qualifying period with the same hirer are entitled to the same basic working and employment conditions as comparable direct employees. And for statutory leave entitlement — the WTR 1998 minimum — agency workers get that from day one. No qualifying period for the statutory 5.6 weeks. Day one.
If the permanent drivers at the depot you're covering are on 28 days plus bank holidays, you're entitled to the same terms after 12 weeks in the same role with the same hirer. That's the law. Not always applied. Not always explained. But that's the position.
The rate matters as much as the days
Getting the right number of leave days is only half of it. Here's the thing most agency drivers don't know until they look it up: holiday pay should be calculated on normal remuneration. Not just basic hourly rate.
If you regularly work overtime — and I mean regularly, as a normal feature of your working pattern, not the odd extra shift — that overtime should feed into your holiday pay calculation. Same goes for regular night-out allowances, regular London or distance supplements, any payment that's a consistent part of your normal earnings. The principle, following UK case law, is that holiday pay should reflect what you'd actually earn in a normal week — not a stripped-back basic rate that nobody actually takes home.
Most agencies pay holiday at basic rate only. If your normal earnings include regular additional payments that are stripped out when holiday is calculated, that's unlawful. The gap adds up quickly. Over eighteen months of tramping and agency work, mine ran into several hundred pounds — which I had to pursue separately because it wasn't going to appear on a payslip by itself.
Rolled-up holiday pay — still being used, still generally wrong
Rolled-up holiday pay is where the agency adds a percentage — typically 12.07% — to each payment you receive, instead of paying you separately when you actually take leave. The idea: your holiday pay is baked into every week's wages, so when you take time off there's nothing extra to pay.
For workers without fixed hours, rolled-up holiday pay is generally unlawful under UK employment law. The issue isn't the arithmetic — it's that when leave is rolled into your regular pay, there's a financial disincentive to actually take it. You've already been paid for it. Taking the week off feels like losing money. The law doesn't allow employers to use that structure to discourage workers from taking actual leave.
Leave should be paid when it's taken. The only legitimate situation where leave entitlement can be replaced with a cash payment is on termination of employment. During the engagement itself, you're entitled to take leave and be paid for it at the time. If you're currently getting rolled-up pay and you're not certain what your actual leave balance is, get a payslip breakdown in writing — and ask the agency to confirm your accrued days.
The working time limits — while we're here
Working time and annual leave both fall under the WTD framework, so it's worth covering the hours limits that apply to mobile workers under the Road Transport Working Time Regulations 2005.
The average working time limit is 48 hours per week, calculated over a 17-week reference period. Single weeks can run higher — up to a maximum of 60 hours in any one week — as long as the average pulls back to 48 over the full reference period. The 17-week period is standard. It can be extended to 26 weeks by collective agreement, but that requires something formal to be in place — it's not automatic.
Night work has a separate hard limit: 10 hours in any 24-hour period. For road transport, night is defined as the period from midnight to 04:00. If you're regularly doing nights into Immingham, running through to Dover for an early slot, or tramping overnight between Birmingham and Carlisle — your employer needs to be tracking your night hours separately from the overall average. It's not an average. It's a ceiling per period, and it applies regardless of what your weekly average looks like.
Employment agencies have their own obligation here too. If the mobile worker is paid by or through the agency, the agency must keep working time records. Not optional. If you're an agency driver and nobody has ever asked about your hours from other hirers — that's a compliance gap on their side. Worth knowing, because the agency can't verify your compliance without records, and if something goes wrong, the absence of records doesn't help anyone.
Self-employed drivers
If you're genuinely self-employed — limited company, no employment relationship, operating independently — the 48-hour average working time limit under the Road Transport Working Time Regulations 2005 still applies to you. The hours limits don't disappear because you hold an operator's licence.
But the Working Time Regulations 1998 annual leave entitlement may not apply in the same way. The WTR 1998 applies to workers and employees. If you're genuinely self-employed in the legal sense — not a worker under an arrangement that creates worker status in practice — then the WTR annual leave entitlement may not cover you. I say may, because worker status is a legal question and it's been litigated extensively. Plenty of people operating through limited companies have been found to be workers in practice.
If you're not certain where you stand, it's worth getting proper advice. Because the protections that come with worker status — including the 5.6 weeks — aren't trivial, and assumptions about status have caught a lot of people out.
Carryover — when you can't take your leave
If you've been unable to take annual leave because of sickness, leave that couldn't be taken can carry over into the next leave year. Employers can't simply forfeit it.
There's a broader principle too. If an employer has failed to actively facilitate leave — not told workers clearly that they can take it, made booking leave effectively impossible — they may be required to allow that leave to carry over rather than treating it as lost at year end. It's not a straightforward use-it-or-lose-it situation where the employer did nothing and the worker loses out.
For agency drivers who've been bounced between assignments and never found a window to actually book leave — if the agency is telling you unbooked leave from last year has just expired, that answer might not be legally correct. It's worth pushing back, in writing.
What to do if you think you've been underpaid
Start by getting your records together. Payslips for the last 52 weeks if you have them. Calculate your average weekly earnings over a representative period — including overtime and allowances — and compare that to what you've actually been paid for any leave taken. If there's a consistent gap between your average earnings and your holiday pay rate, that's the basis of a claim.
Put it in writing to the agency or employer. State clearly what you believe the correct calculation should be and what you've actually received. Keep copies of everything. If it's not resolved, a claim for unlawful deduction from wages through an Employment Tribunal is the route — and there's a two-year backstop on how far back you can claim, so don't leave it to drift.
I know that feels like a lot when you've just come off a run from Birmingham to Dover and back. But the entitlement is real, the law is clear, and the claim process isn't as involved as it sounds once you've got your numbers together.
If you're tired of writing tacho infringements into a notebook, ShiftOwt tracks 561/WTD compliance automatically — £5.99/mo for drivers, agency pricing on request.