Earned Recognition Drivers' Hours KPIs Explained
The DVSA Earned Recognition drivers' hours KPIs — the four infringement bands, their thresholds and the aggregate limits — and how to hit them every period.
The DVSA Earned Recognition drivers' hours KPIs are infringement-rate measures drawn from your tachograph analysis. DVSA sorts every drivers' hours infringement into one of four severity bands, each with its own threshold as a percentage of tachograph days, and on top of the bands sit two aggregate limits: all infringements combined, and working time infringements. They're reported to DVSA every four weeks alongside the maintenance KPIs.
This guide takes the driver side of the Earned Recognition KPIs and goes deep: the band system, the exact thresholds, the download-and-analysis cadence that decides whether an infringement ever becomes a miss, and how the numbers work for very small operations. It assumes you know the underlying UK drivers' hours and working time rules — the KPIs measure breaches of those rules, they don't replace them.
The band system
To read the driver KPIs you need the bands. DVSA sorts every infringement into one of four bands by severity: Band 1 is the least serious, Band 4 the most serious. An example of a serious, high-band infringement is a driver leaving their card in the tachograph overnight set to "other work", which reads as a major daily-rest breach plus a working-time breach.
Each band has its own KPI threshold, expressed as a percentage of tachograph days, and the key point is that the threshold tightens as severity rises. You're allowed proportionally fewer serious infringements than trivial ones. Per DVSA's published scheme guidance:
| Band | Severity | KPI threshold (% of tachograph days) |
|---|---|---|
| Band 1 | Least serious | 1.3% |
| Band 2 | — | 1.2% |
| Band 3 | — | 0.8% |
| Band 4 | Most serious | 0.7% |
On top of the band measures sit two aggregate KPIs, both set at 4%: all infringements combined, and working time infringements.
How very small operations are measured
Very small operations produce so few tachograph days that a single lapse could blow a percentage threshold. The scheme measures the smallest operators against a maximum number of offences per period rather than a percentage — for operators reporting fewer than 25 tachograph days, the KPI is no more than one offence in the period. If you run a small fleet, read this alongside the size-based allowances in Earned Recognition for small fleets.
The KPIs are a cadence problem, not a policy problem
Here's what actually decides these numbers: infringements happen at the wheel, but they become KPI misses when tachograph data isn't downloaded and analysed fast enough to catch and debrief them inside the period. The HGV audit standards already demand a specific cadence:
- Driver cards downloaded at least every 14 days
- Vehicle units downloaded at least every 42 days
- Analysis completed within 7 days of download
- Drivers debriefed on infringements within 28 days
Meet that cadence and the KPIs largely take care of themselves, because problems get caught and corrected inside the four-week period rather than accumulating undetected. Batch your tachograph analysis into a monthly or quarterly catch-up and you fail on both counts: the infringements pile up over the threshold, and you can't evidence that you were managing them — which is one of the classic audit failures.
When a miss escalates
Missing a single KPI in a single period is not, by itself, a crisis — the scheme is designed to tolerate the occasional, small, explained-and-corrected miss and to react to persistent or serious ones. DVSA grades misses by how far and how often you fall short, and larger or repeated misses escalate to DVSA's attention.
The design intent is worth internalising even without the exact triggers: nobody is thrown out for one late debrief in an otherwise clean year. Operators lose their place for the same KPI failing month after month — the signal of a broken system rather than a bad day.
How to hit the drivers' hours KPIs
Treat them as an analysis-cadence discipline:
- Download and analyse on the audit cadence — 14/42/7/28 — so infringements are caught inside the period, not discovered a quarter later.
- Debrief drivers promptly and keep the record of the debrief; the evidence matters as much as the correction.
- Manage repeat offenders before a one-off becomes a pattern — the thing the scheme actually reacts to.
Set these numbers back in context with the full KPI breakdown and the complete audit guide, and see how the driver and maintenance duties connect on our fleet compliance hub.