Can I Opt Out of the 48-Hour Working Week?
No — mobile workers under the Road Transport Working Time Regulations have no individual opt-out, unlike the general Working Time Regulations.
No — you cannot opt out of the 48-hour working week. Mobile workers covered by the Road Transport (Working Time) Regulations 2005 have no individual opt-out. This is different from the general Working Time Regulations 1998 that cover most other jobs, where a worker can sign away the 48-hour limit — that option simply doesn't exist for drivers.
What the rules say
GOV.UK's working time rules for drivers are blunt about it: the rules "limit the amount of time that can be worked and there is no opt-out available." So a mobile worker cannot agree to work an average of more than 48 hours a week the way, say, an office worker under the 1998 Regulations can. The limit is built into the road-transport regime and can't be individually waived.
Why drivers are treated differently
The reason is the purpose behind the rules. The road transport working time regime exists to manage driver fatigue as a road-safety matter, not just as an employment protection. An opt-out that let a tired driver agree to longer average hours would undercut that aim, so the mobile-worker rules deliberately leave it out. If you've come from a job where you signed a 48-hour opt-out, it's an easy assumption to carry over — but it doesn't apply behind the wheel.
It's an average, not a weekly wall
Worth being precise: the 48 hours is an average over a 17-week reference period, extendable to a maximum of 26 weeks by a collective or workforce agreement, with an absolute 60-hour ceiling in any single week. So a busy 60-hour week is allowed as long as the average across the reference period stays within 48. You can't opt out of the average, but you're not held to exactly 48 every single week either. POA is excluded from the sum, and the separate 10-hour night-work cap can only be lifted by a workforce agreement, not by an individual.
What to do
Don't plan around an opt-out that doesn't exist — manage your working time so the 17-week average lands within 48 hours and no single week tops 60. That means watching all your working time, not just driving. The free drivers' hours calculator tracks your working time against the average and the ceiling, and the drivers' working time rules explain the working-time regime in full. For operators managing the reference-period average across a whole fleet, that's exactly the kind of tracking our per-vehicle plans are built to make routine.