How Often Must Driver CPC Training Be Renewed?
Driver Certificate of Professional Competence (Driver CPC)
35 hours of periodic training every five years to keep driving lorries, buses or coaches professionally.
"You must do 35 hours of periodic training every 5 years to keep your Driver Certificate of Professional Competence (CPC) to drive a lorry, bus or coach."
Renewal, refreshers, and what a lapse means
- Who it applies to
- Professional drivers of lorries, buses and coaches in Great Britain who hold a Driver CPC.
- How it is renewed
- Complete 35 hours of approved periodic training within each five-year cycle. The hours can be spread across the five years; the deadline is the end of the cycle, not a single renewal course.
- When it lapses
- A driver who has not completed the 35 hours by the end of the cycle cannot drive professionally until they have. GOV.UK treats an expired Driver CPC card as a return-to-driving case with its own steps.
Renewal reminders for your calendar
Enter the date and this page builds a calendar file with the expiry date and reminders 365 days and 180 days and 90 days before it. Nothing leaves your browser; the file is generated here and opens in Outlook, Google Calendar or Apple Calendar.
What this does to the roster
Driver CPC is a cycle, not a certificate, and cycles fail differently. Nothing expires after year one or year four; the 35 hours can be done in any shape, which is why they so often are not done at all until the fifth year, when a fleet discovers that half its drivers need five days of training inside the same six months. The roster cost is not the lapse. It is the training days, five per driver, that all land in the same quarter because the cycle was ignored for four years.
A driver who misses the deadline cannot drive professionally from that day, which on a delivery operation is a vehicle without a driver, not a gap that someone else can absorb by standing closer. Fleets that run this well treat the 35 hours as seven per year, booked into the rota as a recurring training day, so that no driver is ever more than one day behind and no quarter ever carries the whole backlog.
The cycle is also per driver, on each driver's own dates, which makes it the hardest of the rules on this site to see across a team. A column on the rota showing hours completed this cycle and the cycle end date does more for compliance than any training system that is opened once a year, because the person planning next month's runs can see who needs a day out before the month is full.
Common questions
- How many hours of Driver CPC training are required?
- 35 hours of periodic training every five years, per GOV.UK, to keep the Driver CPC needed to drive a lorry, bus or coach professionally. The hours can be spread across the five-year cycle.
- Can the 35 hours be done all at once?
- They can be done in any pattern within the cycle, including in one block, but a fleet that leaves them to the last year ends up with every driver needing five training days in the same period. Spreading them at seven hours a year avoids that.
- What happens if a driver misses the five-year deadline?
- They cannot drive professionally until the training is complete. GOV.UK has separate guidance for returning to driving after a Driver CPC card has expired, which is worth reading before the date rather than after.
This page summarises the cited source as read on 2026-08-19. Rules change and needs assessments differ; check the source for your own case. Keeping each person's expiry date on the record that builds the rota is what the Skills tab in Soon is for.
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