Temporary cover looks cheaper on the invoice and more expensive everywhere else. Here is an honest breakdown of what agency driving really costs a fleet — and where it still genuinely earns its place.
Almost every transport manager we speak to has the same instinct about agency drivers: it is a necessary evil that has quietly become a habit. What began as short-term cover for a holiday or a sickness spike ends up running for eleven months of the year, on a rolling basis, at a rate nobody has re-examined since it was agreed. The invoice is visible. The costs sitting underneath it are not.
This article sets out that comparison properly. It is written by a consultancy that places permanent drivers only — we do not supply temporary, contract or agency workers, and never have — so we should be upfront about the bias. But an argument for permanent hiring is worth nothing if it refuses to admit where temporary cover genuinely works. So let us start there.
Temporary cover exists because operations are not smooth. There are weeks when demand genuinely outruns your establishment, and no amount of good planning changes that.
Those are legitimate uses. Our argument is narrower and, we think, harder to dispute: agency cover is the wrong default for your core fleet. The moment a temporary seat becomes a permanent feature of the rota, the economics invert.
Start with the number everyone already knows. Agency day rates carry a margin on top of the driver's pay — they have to, because the supplier is carrying payroll, insurance, compliance and recruitment cost, and needs a return. That premium is not unreasonable. It is simply expensive to pay every single working day, indefinitely, for a seat you were always going to need.
The premium also behaves badly under pressure. When Class 1 supply tightens across a region, the day rate moves — and it moves against you at exactly the moment you can least absorb it. A permanent salary, by contrast, is a known and budgetable number that you renegotiate once a year on your own terms. Fleets that run heavily on temporary cover have effectively taken a floating-rate position on their single largest operational input.
This is where the real gap lives, and it is the part that finance rarely sees.
The right question is not “what does an agency day cost versus a salaried day?” It is “what does a filled seat cost me over twelve months, including everything that seat causes?”
Model both sides on the same basis over a full year. On the temporary side, take the day rate across the days you actually cover, then add induction hours, the office time spent arranging cover, damage and re-run costs attributable to unfamiliar drivers, and any service credits or lost work from missed windows. On the permanent side, take salary plus employer NI, pension, holiday, training and the one-off cost of recruiting well.
In our view of this market, the comparison rarely favours indefinite temporary cover on a core route — and where it does, it usually reveals a planning problem rather than a hiring one. To build the permanent side of that model, our UK logistics salary checker is a reasonable starting point, and the salary guide explains what moves the numbers.
We could run a temp desk. Most transport recruitment agencies do, because it produces predictable weekly revenue. We deliberately do not, and the reason is alignment. A supplier who earns from every day a seat stays temporary has no commercial reason to help you stop needing them. Our model is built around the opposite incentive: we only earn when a driver joins your payroll and stays. That forces us to care about fit, about the shift pattern, about the domestic situation behind the application — because a driver who leaves in eight weeks is our problem, not just yours.
It also changes what we screen for. Our specialist driving desk verifies licence categories, Driver CPC currency and right to work before anyone reaches your shortlist, and we talk properly about start times, night-out expectations and realistic commute before we introduce. Alongside it, our driver recruitment and haulage recruitment desks cover HGV Class 1 and Class 2, multi-drop and specialist operations across the UK, with transport manager recruitment for the CPC-holding roles above them.
Do not swing from one extreme to the other. Work out how many seats are genuinely permanent — the ones filled, one way or another, every week for the last year. Convert those first, keep an honest buffer of cover for absence and true peaks, and fix the pay band before you go to market rather than after a candidate declines. A structured hiring brief takes about ten minutes and gives us enough to advise on realistic pay, supply and timescales in your region rather than in general.
Employers: if you are covering core routes on a rotating temporary basis and want to move those seats onto your own payroll, submit your vacancy and a specialist consultant will come back with a realistic view of pay, supply and timescale in your area. Candidates: if you are driving on agency and would rather have a permanent contract, a fixed rota and a vehicle that is yours, upload your CV and we will be straight with you about what is achievable.
We place permanent drivers — verified, briefed and matched to your operation before they ever reach your shortlist.