New Tachograph Rules 2026 for Vans, Buses and Light Trucks

Main changes in new tachograph rules

In the middle of the new tachograph rules is a relatively simple expansion of scope with far-reaching practical implications. According to the European Labour Authority’s “Light vehicles. Big changes” campaign, from 1 July 2026 the following will apply:

• the EU rules on driving times, breaks and rest periods will apply to light commercial vehicles with a maximum permissible mass (MAM) greater than 2.5 tonnes and up to 3.5 tonnes,
• only when these vehicles are used for international carriage of goods or cabotage for hire or reward,
• these vehicles will have to be equipped with second-generation smart tachographs (G2V2) and used in line with the general tachograph regulation.

Source: https://www.ela.europa.eu/assets/lcv2026/index.html

Up to now, the full tachograph regulation and social rules have in practice been limited to heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) above 3.5 tonnes, with LCVs largely subject only to national working-time rules or simpler domestic regimes. The 2026 extension removes the 3.5-tonne threshold as the hard boundary between “fully regulated” and “light” international freight.

Legal basis and implementation timeline of the 2026 extension

The new tachograph rules are not standing alone; they are (hopefully or not) the final phase of a broader reform launched with Mobility Package I in 2020. What built that are:

• Regulation (EC) No 561/2006 on driving times, breaks and rest periods for professional drivers, available in consolidated form on EUR-Lex.
• Regulation (EU) No 165/2014 on tachographs in road transport, which defines the construction, installation and use of tachographs.
• Regulation (EU) 2020/1054, which amended both 561/2006 and 165/2014 to introduce the phased roll-out of smart tachographs and to extend the social rules and tachograph obligation to vehicles between 2.5 and 3.5 tonnes in international transport and cabotage from 1 July 2026.

Smart tachograph requirements for light commercial vehicles

When a vehicle falls under the new tachograph rules for vans, it actually stops being “just a van” in the eyes of the law and is treated like any other fully regulated vehicle. From the hardware side this means one clear thing: in-scope LCVs need to be fitted with a second-generation smart tachograph (G2V2) and that device has to be able to talk to the outside world in a very specific way. More specifically:

From 1 July 2026 every affected LCV should have a G2V2 unit that can at least:

1. use an integrated GNSS receiver to log the vehicle’s position at key points in the shift and after set amounts of driving time,
2. automatically record border crossings so the driver no longer has to remember to enter country codes by hand,
3. communicate via DSRC so that inspectors can run quick remote checks and decide which vehicles are worth stopping,
4. work with a tamper-resistant motion sensor and a secure link between sensor and head unit, making classic “magnet tricks” and other manipulations much harder,
5. share data through an ITS/Bluetooth-type interface, so tachograph information can be pulled straight into telematics and fleet-management systems instead of living in a separate silo.

And here is the problem. Many vans simply were not designed with a tachograph slot, wiring or sensor mounting points in mind, so retrofits often mean extra adapters or cutting into dashboards. From an operator’s point of view, that makes forward planning crucial…

From our (Arealcontrol’s) point of view, the fact that G2V2 is no longer “nice to have” but simply mandatory changes how fleets will work with data… From some point of view it became a baseline requirement that applies to every in-scope van, every day, which means dispatchers, planners and drivers all need to rely on tachograph data in the same way they already do for trucks, and fleet management software needs clear dashboards, alerts and reports as standard.

Tachograph data for vans, retention and access obligations for operators

The data generated by G2V2 devices is really big part of the new tachograph rules 2026. The legislation requires that tachographs record and store, at a minimum:

• driving time, periods of availability, breaks and rest;
• locations at start and end of daily working periods and at intervals of accumulated driving;
• border-crossing events and, where applicable, loading and unloading points;
• manual entries by drivers and any recorded events or faults.

With the Mobility Package changes, the look-back period for which drivers in international transport must be able to produce records has been extended from 28 to 56 days, which directly affects the volume of data that has to be downloaded, archived and made available to control officers on request.

Operators are therefore under a dual obligation:

• to download and retain both driver-card and vehicle-unit data at intervals consistent with EU and national requirements;
• to store this data securely for the legally prescribed retention period and to provide it to enforcement authorities whenever requested.

For LCV fleets that have not previously worked with tachograph data, this requires setting up or extending existing IT and process infrastructure: centralised archive systems, access controls, internal auditing of infringements and integration with planning, HR and payroll systems. As we mentioned, and it’s very important, from the perspective of a telematics provider, it also means that tachograph integration is no longer a “heavy-fleet” feature only, but will increasingly be a core requirement for mixed HGV/LCV customers.

Driving and rest time rules applicable to LCV drivers from 2026

The new tachograph rules 2026 in the van segment means that an LCV driver is subject to the same limits on mobile time recording, breaks and rest as an HGV driver.

More practically, this means:

• daily driving may not normally exceed 9 hours, with the possibility of extending to 10 hours no more than twice during a week;
• weekly driving time may not exceed 56 hours, and the cumulative driving time over any two consecutive weeks may not exceed 90 hours;
• after no more than 4.5 hours of driving, the driver must take an uninterrupted break of at least 45 minutes, which may be split into two parts (minimum 15 minutes followed by at least 30 minutes) under the conditions specified in the regulation;
• within each 24-hour period after the end of the previous daily or weekly rest period, the driver must take a daily rest of at least 11 hours (with limited possibilities to reduce this to 9 hours under specific conditions and frequency limits);
• over two consecutive weeks, the driver must take the required pattern of weekly rest periods (regular and, where allowed, reduced rests with proper compensation), subject to the additional constraints introduced by the Mobility Package for international transport, such as the ban on taking regular weekly rests in the vehicle and the obligation for undertakings to organise work so that drivers can return home regularly.

These provisions, taken together, impose a rigid temporal structure on operations that have traditionally relied on a high degree of flexibility and on extended working days. For LCV fleets entering the tachograph regulations in 2026, aligning route planning, customer commitments and internal vehicle tracking policies with the hard limits of 561/2006 Regulation will be at least as important as the purely technical task of installing G2V2 devices.