Driving times, posting and cabotage: what changes for LCV fleets in 2026

When 1 July 2026 comes up in conversations about vans, the focus almost always falls on tachograph installation. It is the visible part, but also the easiest to handle: book the workshop, pay the invoice, fit the device. The rules that actually change how routes are planned and how LCV fleets are run are three other ones: the driving and rest times of Regulation (EC) 561/2006, the driver posting declaration through IMI, and the constraints on cabotage.

For anyone running 2.5–3.5 t vans in international transport or cabotage, ignoring these three regulatory blocks exposes the company to penalties from €41 to €10,000 per single breach, administrative vehicle stoppages and loss of commercial routes. For the general framework of who is in scope we refer to the pillar article Tachograph mandatory on vans from 1 July 2026. Here we go into the operational substance: what it means in practice to manage a driver under Regulation 561, what the minute-by-minute limits look like and how to plan a route that respects them all.

The regulatory landscape in three lines

The rules entering into force on 1 July 2026 for 2.5–3.5 t vans in international transport or cabotage stem from three texts:

• Regulation (EC) 561/2006 (as amended by 2020/1054): driving and rest times.
• Regulation (EU) 165/2014 (as amended by 2020/1054): smart tachograph G2V2.
• Directive (EU) 2020/1057: posting of drivers in road transport and its national implementation.

Each of these texts is interpreted through ministerial circulars and European Commission documents that clarify the operational detail, such as derogations for exceptional circumstances, split breaks or the manual recording of border crossings. For vans, the main Italian operational reference is the April 2026 circular from MIT, the national transport ministry, a document worth keeping close at hand: it clarifies who falls within the extension and how to record trips that mix domestic and international legs.

The full driving and rest time schedule

Before the detail, the whole picture in one place. It applies to the 2.5–3.5 t vans brought into scope on 1 July 2026, and it applies identically to vehicles above 3.5 t, because the regulation is the same one.

The 15-hour rule, and the limit it gets confused with

The last two rows are the only figures that never appear as written numbers in Regulation 561: they are derived. The new daily rest has to be taken within 24 hours of the end of the previous one, so the span left for the driver to work in is whatever remains. With the regular 11-hour rest that leaves 13 hours. With the reduced 9-hour rest it leaves 15.

Hence the shorthand drivers use, “the 15-hour rule”. It needs to be kept apart from a limit it is constantly swapped with: the 15 hours depend on the reduced rest, so they are available three times at most between two weekly rests. The twice a week figure belongs to something else entirely, the extension of driving from 9 to 10 hours. Two independent flexibilities, two separate counters, and nothing stops a driver using both in the same shift.

One more thing about what fills that span: it is not driving time, it is every hour in which the driver is not resting. Loading, unloading, waiting on paperwork and manoeuvring eat into it exactly as kilometres do.

Daily driving times: the 9-and-10 rule

The base rule is easy to memorise: 9 hours of driving per day, extendable to 10 hours no more than twice a week. It sounds generous, but in practice for cross-border LCV operations it has precise implications.

The “day” under Regulation 561 does not coincide with the calendar day: it is the 24-hour window starting at the end of the last daily or weekly rest. A driver who begins a shift at 14:00 on Monday after 11 hours of rest can drive up to 9 hours of effective driving time within the 24 hours that follow (until 14:00 Tuesday), distributed as they prefer, provided breaks and the next rest are respected.

The 10-hour extended drive is a strictly limited flexibility: maximum twice between two weekly rest periods. It is not “rotating freely”, it is not “if needed”. If a driver uses it on Monday and Thursday, they cannot use it again on Wednesday or Friday, even if the delivery schedule would call for it.

Practical example: Bologna–Lyon route

A driver leaves Bologna at 06:00, unloads in Lyon and returns. The leg distance is 750 km. At an average 70 km/h on motorway, total driving time for the round trip is 10–11 hours, loading and unloading excluded. To stay within the 9-hour standard limit, the round trip cannot be done in a single day: it requires an intermediate stop, an overnight outside, and an 11-hour daily rest before driving back. If the company planned the route as “one working day”, it got it wrong. With the G2V2 tachograph the breach is recorded automatically.

Breaks: after 4h30 of cumulative driving

Regulation 561 requires a break of at least 45 minutes after every cumulative driving period above 4 hours and 30 minutes. The break can be split into two parts:

• First part: at least 15 minutes.
• Second part: at least 30 minutes.

In that order. It is not allowed, for example, to do 30 + 15. The first of the two must be the shorter.

During the break, the driver cannot perform “other work activities” (loading, unloading, document waiting). It must be an actual break, recorded on the tachograph as rest time. This is one of the most disputed enforcement points at the roadside: the G2V2, by recording vehicle position and movement, makes it far harder to report as a break what was in fact operational time.

The difference between “break” and “other work”

The tachograph distinguishes four time categories:

Only time recorded as “rest/break” counts toward the 45-minute mandatory break and toward daily/weekly rest. “Other work” is not driving for the purposes of the 4h30 calculation, but is part of working time and counts toward other limits.

Daily rest: 11 hours by default, 9 hours by exception

Between two work periods there must be a daily rest of at least 11 consecutive hours. It is the main rule and the one that forces precise planning when routes span more than a day.

The rule allows for three flexibilities:

• Split daily rest: 3 hours + 9 hours continuous (for a 12-hour total, not 11), within 24 hours.
• Reduced daily rest of 9 hours: allowed at most 3 times between two consecutive weekly rests.
• Rest in the vehicle: allowed if the vehicle has suitable sleeping accommodation and is stationary.

The 9-hour reduced daily rest is a useful tool, but the “maximum 3 times between two weekly rests” cap is strict: if a driver uses it on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, they cannot use it on Friday or Saturday. Here too the tachograph records it automatically.

Weekly rest: the most underestimated rule

The weekly rest rules are the ones that impact most on driver rotation and multi-week planning. They work like this:

• Regular weekly rest: at least 45 consecutive hours.
• Reduced weekly rest: at least 24 consecutive hours, with mandatory compensation: the missing hours compared to 45 must be recovered by the end of the third following week, attached to another rest of at least 9 hours.

The Mobility Package added two more constraints:

• In every two consecutive weeks, at least one regular weekly rest (≥45 hours).
• Regular weekly rest and compensated reduced rest cannot be taken in the vehicle if 45 hours long.
• For drivers in international transport, the employer must organise work so they can return to their place of residence or operating centre every four weeks.

The last point—the obligation to return home every four weeks—is one of the most debated rules in the Mobility Package: it redesigns long-distance routes and weighs on driver availability, in a context already tight from the driver shortage of 22,000 vacancies in Italy.

Weekly and fortnightly limits: 56 and 90

Above the daily limits sit two aggregated ceilings:

• Weekly driving time: maximum 56 hours.
• Driving time over two consecutive weeks: maximum 90 hours.

The 90-hour ceiling over two weeks is what stops abuse: a driver cannot do 56 hours of driving two weeks in a row. If they drive 56 hours in week A, they can drive at most 34 hours in week B.

These ceilings, combined with daily driving and rest limits, define the planning space available to a fleet manager. A driver running at the legal maximum delivers about 220–240 hours of driving per month. That sounds like a lot, but for long-haul work it is not always enough: the waste from unoptimised planning can saturate the limit well before month-end, forcing vehicle stops or driver substitutions.

Driver posting: the IMI procedure

When a driver based in one Member State performs a transport operation in another EU country that does not fall within mere transit or pure bilateral transport, a transnational posting is triggered. The main obligation is the posting declaration, to be submitted via the IMI (Internal Market Information) system before the operation starts.

What goes into the declaration

• Operator identity, at least the Community licence number.
• Contact details of a transport manager or other contact person in the Member State of establishment.
• Driver identity, address of residence and driving licence number.
• Start date of the employment contract and the law applicable to it.
• Envisaged start and end dates of the posting.
• Registration plates of the vehicles.
• Type of service: goods or passengers, international carriage or cabotage.

The declaration is filed online on the European Commission’s portal (Road Transport Posting Declaration): one per driver and per host country, covering a period from one day to six months, to be updated if the data change. On board the driver must have a copy of the declaration, evidence of the transport operation, such as the electronic consignment note (eCMR), and the tachograph records. The employment contract, payslips and time sheets do not travel with the driver: they are sent via IMI after the posting, within eight weeks, if the host country asks for them (Directive (EU) 2020/1057, Art. 1(11)).

What to guarantee the driver

Beyond the formal declaration, the employer must ensure the driver enjoys the working and pay conditions of the host country for the posting period. This includes:

• Hourly minimum wage (e.g. SMIC in France, Mindestlohn in Germany).
• Travel allowances under local collective agreements.
• Holiday and rest rights of the host country.

For SMEs, especially those operating low-margin niche transport, this is the aspect that most concretely changes the hourly cost of the driver during postings, meaning cabotage and cross-trade, and feeds into customer contracts.

Penalties for missed declaration

Penalties are set by the country where the driver is posted, so for an Italian operator they are foreign ones. In Germany a missed declaration costs up to €30,000 (AEntG, § 23); in France up to €4,000 per driver, €8,000 if repeated within two years (Code du travail, Art. L. 1264-3).

The Italian decree (Legislative Decree 136/2016, Arts. 12-sexies and 12-septies, added by Legislative Decree 27/2023) applies to operators posting drivers to Italy:

• €2,500–10,000 for a declaration not submitted, and the same if the driver does not have the required documents on board;
• €1,000–4,000 for incomplete or incorrect data, or data not updated within five days, and for documents not sent within eight weeks of a request;
• €150–600 for a driver who does not produce the documents, with the vehicle held until they are produced, for no more than thirty days.

The same €2,500–10,000 range applies to an Italian principal who did not check a foreign carrier’s declaration, when it is missing (Art. 12-sexies(9)). Serious posting infringements also count against the operator’s good repute (Regulation (EC) No 1071/2009, Art. 6): if repeated they can cost it its good repute, and with it the Community licence.

New cabotage rules

Cabotage is a transport operation performed inside a Member State other than the one of establishment, after an inbound international transport. EU Regulation 1072/2009 (as amended) sets the following limits:

• Maximum 3 cabotage operations within 7 days of the inbound international transport.
• The last cabotage operation must be completed within 7 days of the unloading of the inbound leg.
• After completing cabotage in a country, 4-day cooling-off before re-entering the same country for a new cabotage round with the same vehicle.

Example: a van based in Milan unloads in Stuttgart on Monday 6 July. From that moment it has 7 days to do at most 3 cabotage operations in Germany before leaving. The four-day cooling-off starts from the end of cabotage, not from the unloading in Stuttgart: if the last cabotage unloading is on 10 July, the van cannot do any more cabotage in Germany for the following four days.

For vans over 2.5 t for hire or reward these constraints have applied since 21 May 2022, when they started to need a Community licence, and since 1 July the G2V2 makes them checkable. The model of “load in Italy, deliver in Germany, pick up whatever I find locally and come back in ten days” was exactly the service model of many operators, and it has to be rethought in a structured way.

Cabotage and the G2V2 tachograph

The novelty is that the G2V2 automatically records every border crossing and every loading/unloading operation declared by the driver. These data are used by enforcement authorities to verify in real time whether the three-operation cap has been respected. It is no longer the regime of “I stop you, I ask for documents, I believe you if they add up”: it is a regime of objective proof recorded on the device.

Penalties: the details that matter

The most frequent infringements, according to records by European enforcement bodies, are four: exceeding daily driving times, reducing daily rest, incorrect use of the driver card, missed posting declaration. Italian orders of magnitude:

Values are indicative and follow the Italian Highway Code. Penalties applied by other EU countries can be more severe: Germany, for example, fines tachograph tampering up to €30,000 per vehicle, and France applies prison sentences of up to two years for serious cases.

Automated planning as the only scalable answer

At this point it is clear that planning delivery rounds by hand, on Excel or with generic mapping tools, does not survive the new constraints. There are too many parameters to cross at the same time:

• Driving constraints (9h, 10h, 4h30 break).
• Rest constraints (11h, 9h, weekly 45h or 24h).
• Rotation constraints (max 56h weekly, 90h fortnightly).
• Cabotage constraints (3 ops / 7 days, 4-day cooling-off).
• Posting constraints (countries where cabotage or cross-trade takes place, host-country wage thresholds).
• Operational constraints (customer time windows, load capacity, urban ZTL/LEZ).
• Fleet constraints (available vehicles, available drivers, electric vehicles and charging constraints).

A route optimization software that knows Regulation 561 solves the problem structurally: it generates delivery rounds already compliant with all constraints and flags in advance the cases where a customer is asking for a time window that would push the driver into breach. It is exactly what we describe in the article on moving from Excel to automated route planning: the paradigm shift from end-of-day batch planning to real-time planning informed by operational data.

Tachograph data feed the next-day planning cycle: every driver starts with a different residual-hour budget than the colleague, calculated on the actual driving hours of the current week. For those running the numbers on the ROI of route optimization software, the Mobility Package context accelerates payback: the cost of manual planning that recurrently produces 561 breaches is high, predictable and cumulative.

Over the medium term, the convergence of tachograph data, next-generation telematics data, CSRD reporting and algorithmic optimisation becomes the main competitive asset. More precisely: those who consolidate all these data into a single platform gain a unified operational picture that enables faster, better decisions; those who keep them fragmented across systems keep playing catch-up.

Bottom line

• 9 hours of daily driving, extendable to 10 hours twice a week. 56 hours maximum weekly, 90 hours maximum over two consecutive weeks.
• 45 minutes of break after 4h30 cumulative driving (splittable into 15 + 30, in that order).
• 11 hours of daily rest, reducible to 9 hours at most 3 times between two weekly rests.
• 13 hours of maximum daily span with the regular rest, 15 hours when the reduced one is used. That span is not driving time: it is every hour the driver is not resting.
• 45 hours of regular weekly rest, 24 hours of reduced rest with compensation within three weeks.
• IMI posting declaration before the operation starts; if it is missing, the host country’s penalty applies (up to €30,000 in Germany).
• Maximum 3 cabotage operations in 7 days, 4-day cooling-off.
• Manual planning does not scale: software that knows Regulation 561 is no longer a nice-to-have, it is the minimum condition to operate in compliance.

To navigate the next months, download our Mobility Package 2026 Compliance Checklist or read the pillar Tachograph mandatory on vans from 1 July 2026 for the full picture. To see how Optivo handles 561 constraints when generating delivery rounds, book a free demo.