Cabotage, driver return and posting in one place

A Romanian truck unloads an international load in Poznań on Monday. Under Regulation 1072/2009 it may then do up to three cabotage operations in Poland, and the last one must be unloaded by the following Monday. After the last of them the truck stays out of Polish cabotage for four days, counted from the next day. If the fourth day is a Saturday, Sunday or Polish public holiday, the ban runs to the next working day, so a last unloading on a Tuesday keeps the truck out until Monday. Druma keeps this count for every truck from the orders you plan, and shows the planner where each truck stands before the next load is booked.

The count, per truck and per country

Druma counts the way Article 8 does: per truck and per host country, never in the operator's home country. On the same day a truck can stand at two of three in Poland and at none in Austria, and the list shows both rows.

Three operations is the lawful maximum and shows amber. A fourth turns the row red, and an exceeded row stays visible for 90 days so it can be reviewed afterwards.

Open a row and the evidence pane names the orders behind the count, the window dates and the truck's stops in other host countries. If Druma has no evidence of a truck's visits to its base country, the row shows a data gap. It never shows as compliant.

Planned work is counted before it happens. An order already on the plan that would add an operation shows on the row as "+N planned". Drop a load on a truck that it would push over the limit, or into a country where the truck is cooling off, and a warning opens first. The planner can still confirm, and the override is logged.

Drivers see the cabotage status of their own truck in the driver app, and fleet roles get one alert a day when a truck reaches a limit.

How the days are counted

Druma counts the way the European Commission's Q&A on cabotage does. Each period starts at 00:00 on the day after the event: seven days from the international unloading, three from an empty entry, four from the last cabotage unloading.

Question 11 of the Q&A applies Regulation 1182/71 to all three. A last day on a Saturday, Sunday or public holiday of the host country runs to the end of the next working day, and a period holds at least two working days.

Druma counts the host country's public holidays for the countries and years it has a list for. With no list it counts weekends alone and shows a note next to the date, because the real end can be later.

Running empty into a second country

Article 8(2) has a second route. After the international delivery, a truck that enters another member state empty may do one cabotage operation there, within three days of entering.

This stays inside the same limits. The truck still has three operations in total, across the first host country and every country it entered empty. All of them must end within the seven days after the international unloading. And in a country entered empty, the truck may do only one.

A Hungarian truck delivers in Slovakia on Monday and runs empty into Austria. Druma does not know when it crossed the border, so it assumes a Monday entry, the day of the unloading in Slovakia and the earliest the truck could have entered Austria. That keeps the count on the safe side. The Austrian job has to be unloaded by Thursday, or by Friday if that Thursday is a public holiday in Austria. Druma counts it against Austria and against the three. On the board the warning is amber for that one allowed job, and red for a second Austrian job, a job that would end too late or one past the shared three. A job that ends after the three days is flagged, because nothing proves the truck entered Austria in time. The driver app shows 1 of 1 for Austria.

Driver return and posting

The driver return in Article 8(8a) of Regulation 561/2006 still applies. Druma keeps a days-remaining clock per driver, built from the stops on orders, names the stop that proves the driver's last visit to the base country, and flags planned orders that leave no way home inside the window.

The window is 28 days, or 21 when the driver's last two weekly rests in the tachograph records were reduced. With no weekly-rest records Druma uses 28 and says so on the driver's pane.

On 4 October 2024 the Court of Justice annulled the rule that the truck itself must return every eight weeks (joined cases C-541/20 to C-555/20). It upheld the cooling-off, the driver return and the posting rules. Druma still shows a truck's last visit to its base country, as a planning aid with no deadline and no alert.

Posting declarations under Directive 2020/1057 sit in a register with their validity dates, at most six months each. By default a warning comes 30 days before one ends, with a link to the EU declaration site.