Speed limits for lorries are not the ones on the signs you half-remember from the car test. Goods vehicles have their own table, the numbers change with weight, Scotland plays by different rules, and vans get pulled into the goods vehicle table more often than drivers expect. Getting this wrong is not just a speeding ticket: for professional drivers it is points, for operators it is OCRS and repute.
On roads with street lights, the default limit is 30mph in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and 20mph in Wales, unless signs say otherwise. That applies to goods vehicles of every weight, including the biggest artics. Wales’s 20mph default is the one that still catches cross-border drivers: the truck doing 30 through a Welsh village is speeding by ten.
Away from built-up areas, the single carriageway limits are:
The Scottish 40 is the classic trap for trunking fleets heading north: the same truck, the same road type, ten miles per hour less at the border.
That articulated-or-trailing carve-out in the under-7.5-tonne row matters more than people think: a 6.5-tonne rigid pulling a drawbar trailer is limited to 60 on the motorway, not 70.
Most vans have a lower speed limit than cars and must follow the limits for goods vehicles of the same weight. So the 3.5-tonne panel van on a single carriageway is limited to 50, not 60, and to 60 on a dual carriageway, not 70. This is one of the most common speeding errors in the country, because the vehicle feels like a car.
The escape routes are narrow: vehicles no more than 2 tonnes laden may qualify as car-derived vans, and vehicles no more than 2.04 tonnes unladen may qualify as dual-purpose vehicles, and those keep car limits. A standard Transit or Sprinter is nowhere near either.
And a niche one for mixed fleets: motorhomes count as goods vehicles for speed limit purposes if they carry goods for exhibition and sale, or are used as a workshop or for storage.
Local councils can set their own limits, which must be clearly signed, and signs always win over the national table. A signed 40 on a dual carriageway caps the truck at 40 whatever its weight. The national table is the ceiling, never a target: the limit is the absolute maximum, not an instruction that it is safe to drive at that speed in all conditions.
Transport planners should schedule against the goods vehicle limits, not the car limits their sat nav assumes. A 200-mile single-carriageway run planned at 60mph average is fiction for a 44-tonner, which is capped at 50, and that fiction shows up downstream as missed delivery windows, pressured drivers and, eventually, drivers’ hours problems when the schedule can only be kept by cutting breaks. The same applies to van planners: routes built on car speeds are built on limits your drivers do not have. Honest scheduling uses 50 on single carriageways, 60 on dual carriageways and motorways for heavies, and drops to 40 and 50 respectively for heavy work into Scotland. If the contract only works at car speeds, the contract does not work.
Speeding convictions land on drivers’ records, feed the totting-up system, and sit in the background of every licence check an operator runs. Persistent speeding in the telematics data is also an OCRS and compliance issue: it tells DVSA the operation tolerates illegality, and it will come up at any DVSA visit or public inquiry. The operators who manage speed actively, through limiter settings, telematics alerts and genuine driver conversations, treat the table above as a floor for training, not trivia.
Print the table. Put it in the driver handbook. Then check your telematics against it.