LGV Nights, Overtime and Tramping Pay Explained 2026

Nights-out allowances: how tramping pay works

A tramper's week is measured in nights out as much as in hours. The pattern is familiar across general haulage: Monday to Friday on the road, the cab as bedroom, two to five nights away from home, parking up at motorway services, truck stops, laybys or customer sites. The bunk, the night heater, the kettle and the routine for showers and meals are the driver's own business — the employer's business is the nights-out allowance, a flat payment per night away that sits on the payslip as its own line.

The figure varies by employer — typically in the low tens of pounds per night — and that variation is worth real money over a year. Take £25 a night as the working example: two nights a week over 46 working weeks is £2,300 a year; three nights is £3,450; five nights is £5,750. Against the £31,200 baseline (the £16.00 ONS median at 37.5 hours), five nights out adds nearly a fifth to the gross. This is why tramping adverts that quote the basic salary are quoting the smallest part of the package.

There is a second, smaller payment to know about: the daily allowance or meal allowance some firms pay on top of the nights-out figure, meant to cover food while away. Where it is paid within HMRC's overnight subsistence limits it is not taxable; where an employer simply pays a flat extra with no subsistence basis, HMRC treats it as wages. The payslip should split the two. If it does not, the driver is the one who ends up sorting it out with the taxman.

How the allowance is taxed

The rule to carry in your head: the nights-out allowance is wages for tax purposes. Income tax applies, employee National Insurance applies, and auto-enrolment pension applies — all at the same rates as the basic pay. On the £31,200 baseline with a £3,450 allowance, the calculator works on £34,650 of gross and the annual take-home is £27,444.84 (£2,287.07 a month), against £25,085.04 (£2,090.42 a month) without the allowance. The allowance puts roughly £197 a month in the pocket after deductions — less than the £287.50 gross figure suggests, because the taxman takes his share.

That is exactly why the take-home calculator page asks for the allowance to be included in the gross: leaving it out understates both the pay and the deductions, and the error compounds — a driver who budgets from the basic salary while spending the allowance money discovers the shortfall at tax time or not at all. Put the full annual allowance in and the monthly figure is the one you can spend.

One boundary to keep straight: genuinely tax-free overnight subsistence, paid within HMRC limits for the cost of being away, stays out of the calculator. If an employer pays a £25 nights-out allowance and £10 of subsistence within the limits, the gross to enter is the £25 figure, not £35. Mixed payslips that fold everything into one line are common — ask payroll for the split before assuming.

Night-shift premiums: the trunking differential

Night trunking — the 10pm-to-6am depot-to-depot runs that keep the shelves stocked — is typically paid with a premium on the hourly rate: 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 across 48 working weeks. Against the £31,200 baseline that is a 15% uplift for working while the country sleeps — and it is the premium, not the basic rate, that makes night trunking the best-paid regular pattern in general haulage.

The premium is wages like any other: taxable, National Insurance-able, pensionable, and part of the gross on the take-home calculator. A night trunking driver on £16.00 plus a £2.50 premium is on an effective £18.50 an hour, £38,480 a year at 40 hours — and the monthly take-home on that figure is £2,505.38. That is the number to compare against a day rate, not the £16.00 headline.

The legal frame around night work matters too. For goods vehicles, night time is the 00:00 to 04:00 period, and the Working Time Regulations cap night work at 10 hours in any 24-hour period unless a workforce or collective agreement provides otherwise. A night shift cannot legally creep the way a day shift sometimes does — the ten-hour wall is the wall.

Overtime rates and what they are worth

Beyond contracted hours, the standard LGV structure is time and a half: £16.00 becomes £24.00. Some firms pay double time on Sundays and bank holidays; some pay a flat enhanced rate for any hours beyond 40; multidrop rounds that overrun sometimes pay a per-drop top-up instead of an hourly overtime rate. Whatever the shape, it is wages — taxed, NI'd and pensionable like the rest — and the annual figure goes into the take-home calculator as part of the gross.

The arithmetic is worth doing on any offer with a low basic and a high overtime promise. A 40-hour contract at £16.00 (£33,280) with 8 overtime hours a week at time and a half (£24.00 × 8 × 52 = £9,984) is £43,264 a year gross — £2,778.07 a month of take-home. That is a strong package, but notice what it depends on: the overtime actually existing, week in and week out, and the driver actually working 48 hours. An advert that quotes £43,264 as the salary for a '40-hour contract with overtime available' is quoting a hope, not a contract.

The question to ask the transport manager, then, is not the overtime rate but the overtime volume: how many hours does the average driver on this rota actually work? The rate is nearly always time and a half; the volume is what decides whether the package is £34,000 or £43,000.

The legal cap: how the law bounds overtime

Overtime in LGV work is bounded by law in a way office overtime is not, and the bounds are the two sets of rules every driver learns for the theory test. The assimilated drivers' hours rules cap driving: 9 hours a day, extendable to 10 hours twice a week; 56 hours in a week; 90 hours over any two consecutive weeks. The Working Time Regulations cap working time: a 48-hour average over the 17-week reference period (extendable to 26 by agreement), and a hard 60-hour maximum in any single week — with no opt-out for mobile workers, unlike office staff.

Between those two ceilings there is still room to earn. The 48-hour average is the binding constraint for most drivers: £16.00 an hour at 48 hours is £39,936 a year, £2,588.37 a month of take-home, before premiums and allowances. The 60-hour single week is the ceiling for peak weeks — Christmas, the spring retail push — not a rota to live on: 60-hour weeks have to be balanced by shorter weeks elsewhere in the reference period, or the average breaks.

What the law forbids is the 65- or 70-hour week some adverts imply. If an offer's salary only makes sense at hours past the 60-hour maximum, the offer is describing an illegal rota. The hours are not a detail of the pay package — they are the first thing to check on it.

The tachograph: how the hours are recorded

Every LGV over 3.5 tonnes in scope carries a tachograph — now the smart tachograph, recording automatically — and the driver card in the slot is the driver's personal record. Driving time, other work (loading, paperwork, vehicle checks), periods of availability (waiting at a bay with no set tasks), and rest are all logged second by second. The 45-minute break after 4.5 hours of driving, the 11-hour daily rest (reducible to 9 hours up to three times between weekly rests), the 45-hour weekly rest (24 hours every other week, with compensation owed): all of it is on the card.

For pay, the tacho does two jobs. First, it is the evidence the overtime was worked: agency drivers and drivers on hourly overtime are paid from tacho and timesheet records, and a dispute about hours is settled by the card, not by memory. Second, it is the employer's compliance record: infringements — missed breaks, shortened rests, driving past the daily limit — are visible on download, and the operator's licence depends on keeping them rare.

The practical habit: download the card regularly, keep the printouts, and check the payslip against the tacho, not the rota. Rotas say what should have happened; the card says what did. Drivers paid overtime from tacho records should reconcile the two every month — an hour a week of unrecorded 'other work' is £832 a year at the £16.00 rate.

Agency LGV work: the rate, the gaps and the tacho

Agency LGV driving pays a higher hourly figure than permanent work — that is the visible attraction, and it is real: agency rates sit above the £16.00 ONS median for employees. What the rate has to cover is everything permanent employment provides: paid holiday, paid sick leave beyond the statutory minimum, the employer's pension contribution, and the quiet weeks between placements when nothing is paid at all.

The maths that matters is the annualised one. An agency driver at £19 an hour across 46 paid weeks at 45 hours is £39,330 gross — comparable to a permanent driver's full package — but the same £19 an hour across 40 paid weeks is £30,400, which is below the £31,200 baseline despite the higher rate. The rate is only half the offer; the number of paid weeks is the other half, and the agency does not guarantee them.

Two agency-specific points for the tacho and the rules. First, the working-time average follows the driver, not the placement: hours across multiple agencies in the reference period count together toward the 48-hour average, and it is the driver's responsibility to make the hours known — agencies ask for the records, and drivers who withhold them are the ones who break the average. Second, umbrella-company arrangements deduct the employer's National Insurance and the apprenticeship levy from the assignment rate before the driver sees it: a quoted £19 an hour through an umbrella is not £19 an hour to the driver. Read the payslip line by line, every time.

Where the figures come from

The £16.00-an-hour base rate is the ONS ASHE 2025 provisional median for large goods vehicle drivers (SOC 8211), all employees, pay period April 2025. 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 consecutive weeks, 45-minute break after 4.5 hours, 11-hour daily rest, 45-hour weekly rest, tachograph mandatory. The working-time figures are the Road Transport Working Time Regulations 2005: 48-hour average over the reference period, 60-hour single-week maximum, no opt-out for mobile workers, night work (00:00–04:00) capped at 10 hours in 24.

Nights-out allowances in the low tens of pounds per night, night premiums of a few pounds an hour, and time-and-a-half overtime are typical market structures that vary by employer — not ONS data — and are labelled as such. Take-home figures in the examples are computed on the 2026/27 England tax model with auto-enrolment on.

Reviewed and updated

The legal position on drivers' hours, working time, the tax treatment of allowances, and the worked examples were last reviewed on 24 September 2026. The take-home calculator page turns any combination of rate, hours, allowance and overtime into the monthly figure — use it with the numbers from your own offer, not the typical ones here.