Temporary cover looks cheaper on the invoice and more expensive everywhere else. Here is an honest breakdown of what temporary driving really costs a fleet — and where it genuinely earns its place.
Almost every transport manager has the same instinct about temporary 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 an agency that does both — we recruit permanent drivers and we supply temporary ones — so we have no reason to sell you one over the other. The honest answer depends on the seat. So let us start with where temporary cover genuinely works.
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: temporary 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 plus 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 run a temporary driving desk and a permanent recruitment desk side by side and that is the point. An agency that only supplies temporary drivers has every reason to keep a seat temporary; a recruiter that only does permanent has no answer for the Monday-morning sickness call. Doing both means we can tell you which one a seat needs — cover for this week, or a permanent hire for a seat that keeps emptying — and supply either.
Either way, the screening is the same. Our temporary driving desk verifies licence categories, Driver CPC currency and right to work before a driver starts a shift. Our permanent driver recruitment desk does the same before anyone reaches your shortlist and talks properly about start times, night-out expectations and realistic commute before we introduce. Our haulage recruitment desk covers the operator-side roles, 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 temporary cover for absence and true peaks, then 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. If you need cover now, request temporary drivers. Candidates: if you would rather have a permanent contract, a fixed rota and a vehicle that is yours, upload your CV. If you want temporary work, register for driving work.
We place permanent drivers and supply temporary ones — verified, briefed and matched to your operation before they start.