How to apply for an operator licence

You need a goods vehicle operator licence to use a vehicle over 3.5 tonnes gross plated weight — or over 1,525 kg unladen — for business purposes on a road. If you carry goods for hire or reward outside the United Kingdom the threshold drops to 2.5 tonnes. For passengers, you need a PSV licence if the vehicle is built or adapted to carry nine or more people and payment is taken.

There are exemptions, and they are narrower than people hope. If you are close to a line, read the goods vehicle licensing guide or the passenger vehicle guide before assuming you fall outside it.

A licence belongs to a legal entity, not to a business name. A sole trader, a partnership and a limited company are three different holders, and moving between them means a fresh application rather than a change to the existing licence.

This catches people out most often when a growing business incorporates. The company is a new entity, so it needs its own licence, its own financial standing and its own operating centres — and until it has them, the vehicles are running on a licence held by somebody who no longer runs them.

1. 1

   Choose the licence type

   Restricted if you only ever carry your own goods. Standard national once you carry for anybody else within the UK. Standard international to do that beyond it. The choice sets whether you need a transport manager and how much money you have to show.
2. 2

   Put the money in place

   Financial standing has to be available to the entity applying, in its name, and held over a period rather than produced on the day. Sort this first: it takes months to build a three-month average and no time at all to lose an application on it.
3. 3

   Find and check the operating centre

   Somewhere with enough off-street parking for every vehicle you want authorised there, with road access those vehicles can actually use. Planning permission and the lease matter here too.
4. 4

   Name a transport manager

   Standard licences only. The person needs a Certificate of Professional Competence and has to be in genuine, continuous control of the fleet, with enough hours in the week to do it.
5. 5

   Advertise the operating centre

   In a newspaper circulating in the area, within the twenty-one days before or after you apply. Keep the page: a traffic commissioner will want to see it, and a wrong date means advertising again.
6. 6

   Apply and pay the fee

   Applications go to the traffic commissioner for the area the operating centre sits in. Pay the application fee up front; the fee to issue the licence falls due only if it is granted.
7. 7

   Wait out the objection period

   The application is published, and statutory bodies may object while people living or working near the centre may make a representation. Nothing can be granted until that window closes.
8. 8

   Ask for an interim licence if you need to start

   An interim gets vehicles moving before the full decision. It is not automatic, it can be refused, and it can be granted for fewer vehicles than you asked for.

Allow at least nine weeks for a straightforward application, and considerably longer if anybody objects, if the paperwork comes back for more information, or if the case is called to a public inquiry. That clock starts when a complete application arrives, not when you begin filling it in — an application missing evidence sits still.

For a standard licence: that you are of good repute, financially standing, and professionally competent through your transport manager. For every licence: that the operating centre is suitable, that the maintenance arrangements are real, and that you understand what you are promising. The undertakings on a licence — inspection intervals, drivers’ hours systems, keeping records — are enforceable, and breaking them is what brings operators back in front of a commissioner later.

Money that is in the wrong name, or was only there for a fortnight. An operating centre with no realistic parking, or one already the subject of complaints. A transport manager on paper who is nowhere near the vehicles. A previous licence, at the same address or under a related name, that ended badly and was not declared. Traffic commissioners see the whole picture, and an omission reads worse than the thing omitted.

You can also see how applications are actually going: every new application, grant and refusal published by the Traffic Commissioners is listed under applications and decisions.