Driving and Rest Times for Professional Drivers: Why Did the EU Set These Limits?

The European Union imposes strict limits on truck and coach drivers regarding driving hours, mandatory breaks, and daily and weekly rest periods.

Fatigue at the wheel is one of the most underestimated causes of accidents in road freight transport. Unlike speed or a vehicle’s technical condition, it cannot be seen from a distance and leaves no obvious signs before a crash. That is why the EU chose to regulate it in very concrete terms, through limits that must be verified by tachograph.

Regulation (EC) No 561/2006 and Directive 2002/15/EC did not come out of nowhere, however. Behind the rules on the 45-minute break, the 11-hour daily rest and the 45-hour weekly rest lies a well-documented physiological problem, consistently confirmed by research — from the classic studies of the 1990s to the official European Commission report published in February 2025. In this article, we briefly review the European legal framework and focus in particular on what the latest data reveal about fatigue among professional drivers in the EU.

Driving and Rest Time Rules under Regulation (EC) No 561/2006

Driving times

• The extension to 10 hours is allowed no more than twice per calendar week — the regulation defines the “week” as the period from Monday 00:00 to Sunday 24:00, not any 7-day period of one’s choosing. Unlike reduced rest, the 10-hour extension does not have to be “made up” later; it is simply capped at a maximum of 2 days in that calendar week.
• The weekly limit (56 hours) and the two-week limit (90 hours) apply at the same time, not one instead of the other. So if a driver has driven the maximum of 56 hours in one week, they can drive no more than 34 hours the following week, so as not to exceed the 90-hour ceiling across the two weeks combined — even if 34 hours seems well below the “normal” limit of 56.
• In practice, all three limits (daily, weekly and two-weekly) must be respected simultaneously, not one at a time: a driver can stay within the daily limit every day of the week and still exceed the weekly or two-weekly limit if trip planning does not take all three into account at once.

Rest times

How the 24 Hours of a Day Are Actually Divided

The simplest way to understand the link between driving and rest is to look at both within the same 24-hour day, rather than as two separate rules. The basic rule: within every 24-hour period counted from the end of the previous rest, the driver must have completed a new daily rest in full. It is not enough for the rest to begin before the 24 hours expire — it must also end within that period.

In the example above, the driver takes a regular daily rest of at least 11 hours. The regulation also allows a reduced daily rest: the driver may take a minimum of 9 consecutive hours (instead of 11), but no more than 3 times between two weekly rest periods. In other words, “reduced” does not mean an arbitrary cut — it is a shorter alternative allowed only a limited number of times, not a rule that applies automatically every day.

In practice, the 24 hours are not split into two fixed halves, but into two complementary blocks: an “active” block, which includes driving (max. 9–10 hours) plus breaks and other work activities, and an uninterrupted rest block (at least 11 hours in the regular version, or at least 9 hours in the reduced version), which must be fully completed before 24 hours have passed since the last rest. The same logic — active block + mandatory rest block — then repeats at weekly level (56 hours of driving and at least one weekly rest of 45 or 24 hours) and at two-week level (90 hours of driving).

How does compensation for a reduced weekly rest work in practice? The rule is simple: every hour “missing” compared with the regular 45-hour rest must be attached, en bloc, to another rest period of at least 9 hours, within 3 weeks of the week in which the reduced rest was taken. Here is a concrete case, step by step:

• Week 1 — the driver takes a reduced weekly rest of 30 hours (above the legal minimum of 24 hours). 15 hours remain to be compensated (45 − 30).
• Week 2 — regular rest of 45 hours. The compensation balance remains unchanged: 15 hours.
• Week 3 — again a regular rest of 45 hours. The balance is still 15 hours, and the compensation deadline (3 weeks) is approaching.
• Week 4 — the driver takes their regular 45-hour rest, to which the 15 outstanding hours are attached en bloc, for a total of 60 hours of uninterrupted rest. The compensation balance reaches 0, and the legal deadline has been met.

The reduction in week 1 does not simply “disappear” — it remains recorded as an hours debt until it is fully settled, just like an account that must be brought back to zero before the deadline expires.

When Reduced Rest Is Allowed and When It Must Be Regular

The table above shows the duration of the two weekly rest options, but not when one or the other may be chosen — and here the regulation is quite strict:

• The basic rule, for any type of transport: in any two consecutive weeks, the driver must take either two regular weekly rests (45 hours each), or one regular and one reduced rest (at least 24 hours, with mandatory compensation, as shown above). Two reduced rests in a row are therefore not allowed as a general rule — at most one in two may be reduced.
• The exception, valid only in international freight transport: by way of derogation, a driver may take two consecutive reduced weekly rests, but only if, in any four consecutive weeks, they still take at least 4 weekly rests, of which at least 2 are regular. In practice, the exception “borrows” a regular rest from the following pair of weeks to offset the two consecutive reductions — it does not remove the obligation to have enough regular rests overall.
• In national transport (without leaving the country), this derogation does not apply — only the basic rule remains: no more than one reduced rest every two weeks.

The choice between regular and reduced rest is therefore primarily a matter of trip planning over two and four weeks, not a preference of the driver or dispatcher on any given day.

In this case, each of the drivers on board must have a daily rest of at least 9 hours, taken within any 30-hour period from the end of the previous rest — a more flexible window than the standard one, precisely because the presence of a second driver makes it possible to alternate at the wheel.

What “Multi-Manning” Actually Means

A common misconception arises here: many assume that with two drivers, the truck can run practically non-stop, with one driving while the other “sleeps” in the bunk, and that this sleep counts as daily rest. That is not quite the case. The rule stays the same as for a solo driver when it comes to driving — each driver at the wheel must, in turn, observe the 45-minute break after no more than 4.5 hours of driving — but the regulation offers only one real flexibility: each driver must have at least 9 hours of daily rest within a 30-hour period from the end of the previous rest (compared with the standard 24-hour window for a solo driver). In addition, the 45-minute break may be taken in the moving vehicle, provided that the driver on break does not assist the one driving in any way.

The real advantage of multi-manning is not that it removes the need for rest, but that the vehicle can accumulate more hours of actual driving per stage of the journey, because the two drivers can alternate their driving and rest periods within that wider 30-hour window. Each driver’s daily rest, however, remains just as mandatory as for a solo driver.

The European Legal Framework

The rules on driving and rest times for professional drivers in the EU are based on three complementary legal acts:

• Regulation (EC) No 561/2006 is the core act: it sets the daily, weekly and two-weekly driving limits, mandatory breaks and minimum daily and weekly rest periods. As a general rule, it applies to road freight transport by vehicles over 3.5 tonnes and to passenger transport by vehicles with more than 9 seats, uniformly across all EU Member States, whether the transport is domestic or international. Important for 2026: from 1 July 2026, the scope was extended — the same driving and rest time rules (and the tachograph obligation) also apply to commercial vehicles of 2.5–3.5 tonnes when carrying out international freight transport or cabotage, a category previously excluded.
• Directive 2002/15/EC complements the regulation with limits on total working time (not just actual driving) — including the 48-hour weekly average and the rules for night work.
• Regulation (EU) 2020/1054, part of Mobility Package I, introduced three concrete changes to the original form of the regulation:
• regular return home — the employer must organise work so that the driver can return to the company’s base or to their place of residence at least once every 4 consecutive weeks (or every 3 weeks, if they have taken two consecutive reduced weekly rests), in order to spend a regular weekly rest there. This is a planning obligation placed on the employer, not a rule forcing the driver to spend every rest period at home;
• ban on spending regular rest in the cab — the regular weekly rest of at least 45 hours, as well as any rest of more than 45 hours taken as compensation for a previous reduced rest, can no longer be spent in the vehicle, regardless of its equipment; the employer must cover suitable accommodation with a bed and sanitary facilities. Reduced rest (24–45 hours) is still allowed in the cab, provided the vehicle is properly parked;
• two consecutive reduced rests, only in international transport — allowed provided that, in any 4-week period, the driver still takes at least 4 weekly rests, of which at least 2 are regular; compensation for the two reductions is attached, en bloc, before the next regular rest.

Compliance with these rules is verified by tachograph. Beyond the control mechanism, however, the question worth answering is a different one: why exactly these thresholds and not others? The answer lies in the data on drivers’ real fatigue on European roads.

What the Latest European Commission Report Shows

In February 2025, the European Road Safety Observatory (ERSO), part of the European Commission, published a thematic report dedicated exclusively to professional truck and coach drivers, based on 2023 data. Several findings are essential for any transport company in the EU:

• in 2023, crashes involving heavy goods vehicles caused 829 deaths, or 14% of all road deaths in the EU, even though trucks account for only a small fraction of the vehicle fleet;
• almost 9 out of 10 victims of crashes involving HGVs are not truck drivers, but other road users: pedestrians, cyclists and occupants of other vehicles;
• more than a quarter of truck drivers report feeling tired on at least one in every four trips, and among coach drivers the proportion rises to one third;
• crash risk rises significantly after 8–9 hours of driving — a range close to the legal limit of 9–10 hours, which shows that the regulatory ceiling does not leave a very large safety margin;
• the report also highlights a rarely discussed factor: the quality of sleep in the cab. Drivers who sleep in the vehicle, exposed to heat, vibration and noise, get less restorative sleep even when the number of hours looks sufficient on paper. This is why the Mobility Package banned spending the regular weekly rest in the cab.

Added to this is a public health aspect flagged by the same report: the prevalence of obesity among professional drivers is more than three times higher than in the general population (27.2% vs. 8.8%), and this is associated with a 55% higher crash risk. The obesity figures come from a systematic review (Njiro et al., 2024) cited in the ERSO report, focused on professional drivers in low- and middle-income countries, including several European states, rather than from a representative sample for the entire EU. Nevertheless, the trend remains a relevant signal of the indirect effects of long hours at the wheel and insufficient rest on drivers’ health.

The Phenomenon Is Not New — Driver Fatigue Is Predictable and Measurable

Fatigue at the wheel is not a recent discovery. As early as 1997, a landmark study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which electrophysiologically monitored 80 professional drivers over five days, showed that they slept on average almost 2 hours less than they themselves considered necessary, and that 56% had had at least one observable episode of drowsiness while driving, especially at night and in the early morning. What has changed since then is the volume of research and statistics available at European level: syntheses such as the 2025 ERSO report, which compile studies and official crash data from across the EU, confirm on a European scale exactly what the early laboratory studies showed — fatigue at the wheel is predictable, measurable and, more importantly, manageable.

The Direct Link to EU Rules

The data above essentially explain the logic behind every figure in Regulation 561/2006 and the Mobility Package:

• the 9–10-hour daily driving threshold corresponds almost exactly to the point after which crash risk begins to rise visibly, according to ERSO data;
• the ban on spending the regular weekly rest in the cab responds directly to the finding that poor-quality sleep (heat, vibration, noise) reduces the effectiveness of rest, even if the raw number of hours seems sufficient;
• the 45-minute break every 4.5 hours targets the window in which fatigue accumulated during the day begins to affect reaction time, before it becomes visible at the wheel;
• the regulations’ emphasis on realistic trip planning responds directly to ERSO’s finding that more than a quarter of truck drivers in the EU feel tired on at least one in every four trips. This signals that, in practice, schedule pressure frequently exceeds the limits considered safe.

In other words, the limits in the regulation were not designed as a minimum “legal” threshold, but as a response to a measurable phenomenon: fatigue at the wheel impairs reaction time and decision-making, and the consequences are borne not only by the driver but, in the overwhelming majority of cases, by other road users.

What This Means for Transport Companies

For a dispatcher or fleet manager, the practical conclusion is simple: complying with driving and rest times is not just a race against fines, but the only real lever through which a company can control a risk that the driver often does not perceive correctly in real time — especially towards the end of a long shift or on night routes. And, as the ERSO report shows, the risk does not stop at the company’s own fleet: 9 out of 10 victims of truck crashes are other road users, which turns compliance into a responsibility that extends beyond the company’s boundaries.

Tachograph Data: From Compliance to Prevention

Real visibility over driving times, breaks and rest periods across a fleet depends, in practice, on integration with tachograph data — simple GPS tracking, without tachograph reading, cannot on its own confirm compliance with these rules. With the tachograph reader and the easyTRACK platform, driver activity data can be centralised and monitored more easily: the fleet manager can check driving times, breaks and rest periods, allowing for more careful trip planning and early identification of situations that need checking — for example, shifts approaching the critical 8–9-hour driving threshold, or repeated night trips without compensatory rest.

Monitoring does not replace compliance with the regulation or the driver’s responsibility, but it gives the company the data it needs for prevention, organisation and control.

Contact the TELL Security Systems team to discuss how we can help you turn your fleet’s tachograph data into a real prevention tool, not just a reporting one.

Sources: European Road Safety Observatory (European Commission), “Thematic Report – Professional Drivers of HGVs and Buses”, February 2025 (2023 data), also citing Njiro et al. (2024) for the obesity data; Mitler MM, Miller JC, Lipsitz JJ, Walsh JK, Wylie CD, “The Sleep of Long-Haul Truck Drivers”, N Engl J Med, 1997;337(11):755–761. Legal framework: Regulation (EC) No 561/2006 (consolidated text, EUR-Lex), Directive 2002/15/EC, Regulation (EU) 2020/1054 (Mobility Package I).