LGV Driver Pay in the UK: 2026 Rates, Tramping and Take-Home

What the job is: Cat C, C+E and the work that comes with each

LGV driving is two jobs behind one word. A Cat C licence covers rigid lorries — Class 2 — the box trucks, refuse trucks, builders' merchants' wagons and drawbars that work towns and cities. A C+E licence covers articulated lorries — Class 1 — the tractor-and-trailer combinations up to 44 tonnes that do the long motorway hauls. The C+E test is the harder licence to get and the artics are the harder units to run, which is why Class 1 work tends to pay more and why the two HGV class pages on this site treat them separately.

The daily work splits three ways regardless of licence. Trunking is depot-to-depot movement: a trailer collected at one regional distribution centre, run up the motorway, and dropped at another. It is driving as pure driving — box swaps, tacho checks, keeping the schedule — and it is the shape of most supermarket and retail haulage. Multidrop is the opposite: a loaded rigid or drawbar, twenty to forty drops across a town, tail-lift work, handballing cages onto pavements, and the clock running on every drop. It is physically hard and the pay structure often recognises it.

Tramping is the third shape and the one that changes the money most. A tramper sleeps in the cab — typically two to five nights a week — parking up at services, laybys or customer sites, with a bunk, a night heater and a routine for meals and showers. Tramping work is paid as a day or week rate plus a flat nights-out allowance per night away, and because the allowance is typically in the low tens of pounds a night it can add up to a meaningful slice of the annual total. If you are choosing between offers, the pattern matters more than the headline rate: the same £16.00 an hour is a very different life as a home-every-night trunk run or as five nights out in the cab.

Why the advertised salary misleads

Start from the ONS anchor: £16.00 an hour median, all employees, pay period April 2025. At 37.5 hours that is £31,200 a year; at 48.8 hours — the week the £781.50 weekly median implies — it is £40,601.60 a year before any premium or allowance. That spread is the whole game. An advert quoting £38,000 a year sounds better than one quoting £16.00 an hour, but £38,000 on a 55-hour week is £13.29 an hour, and £16.00 an hour on a 45-hour week with a £25-a-night tramping allowance is a bigger annual total. Always divide the salary back to the hour before comparing.

The extras are where offers diverge. Nights-out allowances are taxable earnings and typically land in the low tens of pounds per night, varying by employer — at three nights a week that is roughly £3,900 a year of gross that never appears in the advertised salary but always appears in the pay packet. Night-shift premiums — a few pounds an hour extra for trunking nights — do the same. Overtime is the third lever: time and a half beyond contracted hours turns a 45-hour week into something meaningfully better than a 40-hour week at the same basic rate. Two adverts quoting the same £16.00 an hour can sit £5,000 a year apart once allowances, premiums and overtime are added.

The agency comparison is where the headline rate misleads hardest. Agency LGV work pays a higher hourly figure than permanent — that is the visible attraction — but the visible rate is not a salary: there is no pay between placements, no sick pay beyond the statutory minimum, and no employer's pension contribution building in the background. An agency rate of £18 an hour across a 40-hour week with two unpaid weeks a year is £36,000 gross; a permanent £16.00 an hour across 37.5 hours with paid holiday and pension is £31,200 gross but with benefits the agency rate has to buy for itself. Compare like with like: annualise everything, including the gaps.

The legal ceiling on hours — and what it does to pay

LGV hours are capped by law in a way almost no other private-sector job is, and the cap is what bounds every pay calculation. The assimilated drivers' hours rules for goods vehicles over 3.5 tonnes say a driver can drive 9 hours in a day — 10 hours twice a week — with a weekly maximum of 56 hours of driving and a hard 90-hour ceiling over any two consecutive weeks. A 45-minute break is required after 4.5 hours of driving, splittable as 15 plus 30 minutes. Daily rest is 11 hours, reducible to 9 hours up to three times between weekly rests; weekly rest is 45 hours, reducible to 24 hours every other week with compensation owed. The tachograph in the cab records all of it.

Layered on top is the Road Transport Working Time Regulations 2005: an average of 48 hours a week over the reference period (17 weeks, extendable to 26 by agreement), a maximum of 60 hours in any single week, and — unlike the general Working Time Regulations — no opt-out for mobile workers. Night work, defined for goods vehicles as the 00:00 to 04:00 period, is capped at 10 hours in any 24-hour period unless a workforce or collective agreement says otherwise. Breaks are mandatory: 30 minutes when the shift is 6 to 9 hours, 45 minutes when it is over 9 hours.

What this means for pay is straightforward: overtime is real but it is bounded by law. A driver averaging the full 48 hours against the £16.00 median is on £39,936 a year before premiums and allowances — which is roughly where the £781.50 ONS weekly median comes from (£16.00 × 48.8 hours, times 52, is £40,601.60). Nobody can legally earn their way past the ceiling by simply working more: the 60-hour single-week maximum and the 48-hour average draw the line. When an advert quotes a salary that implies 65-hour weeks, it is quoting an illegal rota, not a generous one.

Nights out, night shifts and the allowances that change the maths

The nights-out allowance is the most LGV-specific line on a driver's payslip. Tramping drivers receive a flat payment per night spent away from home — typically in the low tens of pounds per night, varying by employer — and that payment is taxable earnings: income tax, National Insurance and pension all apply to it, exactly as if it were wages. It is not expenses, it is not a bonus, and it is not tax-free. Overnight subsistence within HMRC limits is a separate thing and stays outside the calculator; the allowance itself goes in.

Run the scale of it: £25 a night, three nights a week, 46 working weeks is £3,450 a year of gross — over a tenth of the £31,200 baseline salary. Five nights a week is £5,750. That is why tramping offers look so strong on the advert and why the comparison that matters is the full annual gross — rate, hours, premium and allowance together — run through the take-home calculator, not the salary line on its own.

Night-shift premiums work differently but add up the same way. A trunking driver on nights — say 10pm to 6am between depots — is typically paid a premium of a few pounds an hour above the day rate, varying by employer. Eight hours at a £2.50 premium is £20 a night, £100 a week on five nights, £4,800 a year. Combined with the legal position that night work is capped at 10 hours in 24 without agreement, the night driver's arithmetic is: premium per hour plus the assurance that the shift cannot legally creep past ten.

Agency, employed and new-driver routes in

The employed permanent route is the default: a contracted weekly hours figure — 40, 45, sometimes 48 — overtime beyond it, a pension with employer contributions, and paid holiday. The agency route trades security for rate: a higher hourly figure, day or week placements, work that flexes with peaks and covers, and the gaps between placements unpaid. Which is better depends on what the driver's life needs: agency suits drivers who can absorb quiet weeks and want to choose their shifts; employed suits drivers who want the pension and the holiday pay to be someone else's problem.

New drivers come in through the licences. Cat C first is the common route: pass, take a rigid job — often multidrop — and earn the £16.00-an-hour median while building the clean licence and the tacho discipline that C+E employers want to see. C+E is the step up to artics and the tramping and trunking work, and it is where the higher pay bands sit. The new-driver page in the HGV section of this site walks through entry-level pay and what the first year costs and pays.

One thing that does not differ by route: Driver CPC. Thirty-five hours of periodic training every five years is mandatory for anyone driving professionally, and the cost and the time fall on the driver more often than they should. Factor it in as a cost of the job — roughly a day of training a year, paid or unpaid depending on the employer — because it is not optional and it is not free.

What the pay cluster adds up to

Take the anchor and build the real number from it. £16.00 an hour at 37.5 hours is £31,200 a year, taking home £25,085.04 — £2,090.42 a month — on the 2026/27 England model with auto-enrolment on. That is the baseline: the median driver on standard full-time hours. Everything above it is structure: the 48-hour average week takes gross to £39,936; three nights out a week adds around £3,450; a night premium adds around £4,800; overtime at time and a half beyond 40 hours adds the rest. The £781.50 ONS weekly median — £40,638 a year annualised — sits exactly where those layers land for the typical full-time driver working long weeks.

The practical sequence for comparing offers: convert everything to an hourly rate and an annual gross including allowances, then run that gross through the take-home calculator. An advert quoting £34,000 for a 48-hour tramping week is £13.62 an hour with the nights out; an advert quoting £16.50 an hour for a 40-hour day week is £34,320 with no allowance. The second pays more per hour and the driver sleeps at home. That is the kind of comparison this cluster is built to make easy.

How the medians were compiled

The LGV pay figures on this page come from the Office for National Statistics' Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) 2025 provisional release, pay period April 2025, all employees: large goods vehicle drivers (SOC 8211) at £16.00 an hour and £781.50 a week. The £31,200 annual baseline is £16.00 × 37.5 hours × 52. The caveat travels with the weekly figure: it blends part-time and full-time drivers together and reflects very long average working weeks — £781.50 at £16.00 an hour implies about 48.8 hours — so the hourly median is the only number to anchor comparisons on.

The drivers' hours figures are the assimilated rules for goods vehicles over 3.5 tonnes on GOV.UK (9 hours daily driving, 10 hours twice a week; 56 hours weekly; 90 hours over two weeks; 45-minute break after 4.5 hours; 11-hour daily rest, 45-hour weekly rest) and the Road Transport Working Time Regulations 2005 (48-hour average over 17 weeks extendable to 26; 60-hour single-week maximum; no opt-out for mobile workers; night work 00:00–04:00 capped at 10 hours in 24). Allowance and premium figures — nights-out payments in the low tens of pounds, night premiums of a few pounds an hour — are typical market ranges that vary by employer, not ONS data, and are labelled as such throughout.

How to use this hub

Start with the take-home calculator page: put any salary, rate or hours figure in and see the monthly number on the 2026/27 tax model, with tramping allowances included in the gross. Then read the nights, overtime and tramping guide for the full workings of the extras — how the allowances are taxed, how overtime rates interact with the legal hours cap, and how the tachograph records it all. The sister HGV section on this site covers Class 1 and Class 2 in depth with Road Haulage Association data — the two sections share no contradictions; they look at the same cabs from different datasets.