Driving stints, mandatory breaks, daily limits - typed as one line, answered instantly.
Drive-time rules are unforgiving: stints, breaks, and daily limits all have to add up exactly. TCalc's logistics layout ships with EU driving limits and mandatory breaks as one-tap buttons, so checking a day plan takes seconds.
Dispatchers get the same win in reverse - start time plus stints and breaks gives the honest ETA.
Regulation (EC) No 561/2006 sets the driving limits that apply to most commercial road transport in the EU, and they interlock in a way that makes mental arithmetic risky. Continuous driving is capped before a break is due, daily driving is capped separately, and weekly and fortnightly totals cap the whole thing again. Exceeding any one of them is an offence in its own right, and the tachograph records all of them.
The figures below are the standard limits. Derogations exist for some operations and national rules can differ in detail, so treat your tachograph and your operator's instructions as the authority - but these are the numbers the arithmetic hangs off.
Daily driving left after one full driving period - exactly one more period.
Two driving periods with the mandatory break between them.
Weekly driving remaining after four days.
The two questions that matter on the road are both wall-clock questions, not duration questions. Adding the remaining continuous driving allowance to the current time gives the moment the break becomes mandatory. Adding the full route estimate, breaks included, to the current time gives a realistic arrival - realistic because it counts the 45 minutes you are legally required to stop for, which is precisely what optimistic estimates leave out.
A seven-hour drive is not a seven-hour job. It is four and a half hours, plus forty-five minutes stationary, plus two and a half hours, which is seven hours forty-five minutes before loading. Planning against the honest number is what keeps a delivery window from quietly becoming an infringement.
The wall-clock moment your mandatory break starts.
A seven-hour drive with its mandatory break included.
Estimated arrival with the break counted, not ignored.
A shift contains loading, securing, paperwork, waiting and driving, and only the last of those is capped by the driving limits. On a twelve-hour shift with nine hours of driving there are three hours of everything else, and two mandatory breaks eat an hour and a half of that. What is left is ninety minutes for the work that is not driving.
Seeing that number before the day starts is what stops the day running long. It also makes it obvious when a job simply does not fit, which is a much cheaper discovery to make in the yard than at the far end of a run.
Non-driving time inside a twelve-hour shift.
What remains after two mandatory breaks are taken out.
Two maximum stints plus the mandatory 45-minute break.
Night departure - arrival lands on the right day.
Net driving left after breaks taken so far.
Start time plus planned day = end of shift.
Two 4h 30m stints with a 45-minute break between them: 4h 30m + 45m + 4h 30m = 9h 45m of on-duty time. The logistics layout has these values as one-tap buttons.
Add the drive time to the departure: 22:00 + 8h shows 6:00 AM the next day - the date rollover is automatic.
Yes, chain them: 8h − 15m − 15m − 30m = 7h of driving still available.