A driver costs 9,420 zloty plus 313 zloty in contributions. Without a roster the lorry sits in the yard
On 27 August 2026 Infor.pl costed the hire of an international HGV driver. Average pay is 9,420 zloty gross, 747 more than a year earlier. The employer adds 313 zloty a month in social contributions. The same week TLP wrote that without a driver the lorry sits idle and the firm loses the contract.
On 27 August 2026 Infor.pl put a figure on the cost of hiring an international HGV driver. Average pay in international haulage is PLN 9,420 gross. That is PLN 747 more than a year earlier. Over four years the rate has risen by PLN 3,498.
Social-security contributions and the Labour Fund are calculated from that amount. The employer therefore pays PLN 313 more in ZUS each month for every driver on international work. Over five years the combined contribution cost is up by PLN 1,467 per person. The figures come from Eurowag, quoted by Infor.
In the same week the employers’ body Transport i Logistyka Polska wrote that the driver shortage is now structural. The effect in a haulage firm is blunt: a lorry without a driver sits still, a booked job does not leave, and the customer goes elsewhere.
For the operator those two texts meet on the same roster. A driver’s hour costs more than last year. An idle combination still carries the same lease and yard cost as before, only now with a higher social-security bill on top. Driver payroll in a haulage firm is no longer a monthly pay run. It is the question of whether every vehicle the company is paying people for actually moved.
What is known about driver cost and the lorry that does not leave
Polish firms account for 20 per cent of road freight work in the European Union, according to SpotData and TLP in their 2024/2025 road-transport report, cited by Infor. Poland also ranks high in cabotage and cross-trade. The minimum wage in the country the load travels through therefore sits inside the cost of almost every run west.
From the start of 2026 the German hourly minimum wage is €13.90. Next year it is due to be €14.60. That is nearly 14 per cent in two years and, according to Eurowag, the largest rise since those rules were introduced. The United Kingdom saw a 7 per cent increase; other countries 2–3 per cent. Germany remains the main destination for Polish hauliers.
Part of the fleet runs on drivers from outside Poland. GITD data for 2025, quoted by Infor, put 146,977 non-Polish workers in Polish haulage firms. When hiring a foreign national, labour offices increasingly refuse a statutory-minimum figure on the contract with the rest in bonuses. Bartłomiej Zgudziak of Eurowag says the employer must already guarantee at least PLN 7,000 gross on paper to have a chance of approval.
It is not a statutory rate for the whole occupation. A firm hits this requirement when it applies to hire a foreign driver. Wherever the workforce is mixed, the cheaper “minimum plus variables” model starts to seize up.
In August 2026 TLP submitted comments on draft bill UD396 on employing foreigners. This is not enacted law. TLP proposes two variants of a shortage-occupation list and a faster track for hauliers with at least 250 employees on an annual average. The Act of 20 March 2025 already allows such a list by regulation. The regulation has not been issued. The labour ministry told Puls Biznesu it is not currently working on it.
Earlier, on 11 August, Bankier.pl set out shortage estimates. Jan Buczek, president of ZMPD, speaks of about 100,000 missing professional drivers. Piotr Winiarski of Rohlig SUUS Logistics cites 120,000–150,000. IRU puts unfilled driver jobs in Poland at 15.4 per cent. Average age is over 50. People under 25 make up about 3 per cent of those in the job.
Job ads for international work most often show PLN 9,000–12,000 gross; some offers PLN 12,000–18,000. Buczek is direct: when drivers are missing, vehicles do not leave. Capacity falls, deadlines slip, and the cost of road freight rises.
A dozen combinations, a handful of vans and three lists for the same week
Picture a firm with a dozen tractor-trailer combinations on domestic and EU work, plus several vans up to 3.5 tonnes for shorter runs and top-up loads. The crew is a dozen or so drivers on employment contracts, some still waiting on a residence card, and two planners. This is an example, not a client.
In August two combinations sat still for two days each. In the first case the driver ran out of driving time at the warehouse, and the relief was supposed to arrive “by phone”. It arrived in the morning. In the second, the vehicle came back from the workshop but nobody took it off the “in service” list, so the job went to another haulier on the freight exchange. A van picked up a fine for being overweight. The driver signed the consignment note; there was no weighbridge on the bay.
The office keeps three lists for the same week. A spreadsheet roster. A chat thread with drivers. A folder of PDFs from the exchange and scanned CMR notes. None of them says which vehicle is earning that day and which is only burning the lease and the contribution. When average international pay is PLN 9,420, two empty days are not “poor planning”. They are a cost that never shows in the sales report until someone matches driver, vehicle and job.
At that scale a single week card would do: driver, vehicle, job, remaining driving time and vehicle status. Not a catalogue of features. Two fields that today do not live in one place — a free combination and a free person with hours left.
The contract, the foreign driver and the contribution a spreadsheet will not watch
An international driver’s pay comes in layers. The contractual rate. Bonuses. Subsistence and lump sums. A top-up to the minimum wage of the country the load travelled through. Each layer has a different base and a different deadline. Accounts usually receive this as a spreadsheet after the period closes.
With three drivers it can be done by hand. With a dozen, some of them from outside Poland, a mistake lands at both ends. Either someone is underpaid and leaves. Or the firm pays contributions on the wrong base and corrects it after an inspection.
A foreign national adds an official calendar. A visa with the right to work. EU professional driver qualifications. A residence card. Buczek tells Bankier.pl that in some voivodeships the card can take up to two years. Until then the driver may work domestically but cannot take international work. The EU-bound lorry sits without a crew, even though the person is already on the payroll.
A personnel record that keeps the guaranteed rate, variable elements, last-trip country and document expiry dates side by side will not replace the office. It stops the planner guessing who is even allowed to go. A reminder that a qualification card or a medical is running out is cheaper than a day of idle kit.
The same applies to the ZUS base. If the contribution is calculated from the rising average pay of international drivers, the office must know which payment is “international” and which is domestic. In a spreadsheet that label disappears after the second copied row.
The roster lives in a chat; the lorry sits in the yard
In a typical mid-sized firm the planner builds the week in a spreadsheet and patches shifts by message. The driver replies when there is a signal. The workshop rings another number. The customer asks whether the trailer will leave, and the answer depends on who last opened the thread.
At PLN 9,420 plus contributions, an idle vehicle is more expensive than it used to be, because the standing cost of the person has risen and the lease has not fallen. TLP calls this vehicle downtime and unused contracted work. In the office it looks smaller: the cell still says “free” from Monday, even though the driver has been on sick leave since Tuesday or has run out of hours.
A shared roster that shows driver, vehicle and job in one row does not plan the route for anyone. It shows a clash before the lorry is left in the yard. If the driver has two legal hours left and the loading bay is four hours away, the planner sees that before taking the load, not after a text from the car park.
With both vans and combinations, the same board has to distinguish vehicle type. A van will not take a trailer. A driver without a valid certificate will not take a foreign run. A “free” filter without those limits lies in the same way as the old spreadsheet.
A phone app in which the driver accepts the job and sets a status — at loading, en route, unloading — closes the loop that chat never closes. The planner does not ring to ask whether the vehicle is alive. The customer gets a status instead of a promised call-back.
Hours: the tachograph in the combination, and from July in the van as well
Driving-time rules have for years covered drivers of vehicles over 3.5 tonnes. From July 2026 the tachograph duty also covers vehicles from 2.5 to 3.5 tonnes on international work, as the Mobility Package is described by Infor, citing Eurowag. The rule is not limited to vehicles registered after 1 July. It covers every vehicle used for such journeys.
For the example firm that means vans that used to run “by feel” and a notebook now fall under the same regime as the combinations: limits, breaks, company and driver cards, and training for people who have not used a tachograph before. Plus the cost of buying and fitting the units.
Firms with fleets over 3.5 tonnes have already been replacing tachographs with smart models. Until 2 March 2026 they could apply for a refund. ARiMR data, cited by Infor, show about 15,000 businesses used it. Whether a similar path will open for vans is not in the Infor piece. For now the cost sits with the haulier.
A company application will not replace the official tachograph or the file-reading software an inspection requires. It can pull remaining driving time into the roster before the planner throws on another job. A handwritten rest sheet disappears in the cab. An import from the file, even once a day, shows who can still drive.
Here the PLN 313 contribution comes back. The firm pays for a full job and uses only the hours someone managed to write down. If time records live in one programme and jobs in another, nobody will count how many paid hours went on waiting at the bay.
The loading bay, the weight and a fine the job card never sees
On 26 August Prawo.pl described the scale of van checks on vehicles with a 3.5-tonne maximum weight. In 2024 GITD carried out 12,287 weighing inspections and issued 10,666 tickets. In 2025 — 11,558 inspections and 10,174 tickets. In the first half of 2026 there were already almost 7,000 stops and 6,215 tickets. On average, once an hour someone is fined for an overloaded van.
GITD does not keep statistics by cargo type and does not plan a general duty to put weighbridges in loading plants. Pomeranian police specialise in overloaded car transporters. Fines reach PLN 3,000. Longer stopping distances and poorer handling are the traffic argument, not only the tariff.
Article 43(2) of the Transport Law says the sender, the consignee or whoever does the loading must load so as not to exceed the permitted mass. In practice the driver often has no way to weigh the combination before leaving the plant. The Supreme Administrative Court, in a judgment of 16 October 2024 (II GSK 921/24), kept the line that the haulier does not shed administrative liability merely because it did not see how the load was stowed.
Gross or repeated breaches of maximum weight can end in the licence being withdrawn — Article 15(3)(2) of the Road Transport Act. Officers may hold the vehicle until the load is transferred. The fine is then the smaller problem beside a day of delay and a contractual penalty for lateness.
An app will not put a weighbridge on a bay that has none. It can, before departure, force a few things: declared mass from the document, the driver’s sign-off that the note was received, a photo of the CMR or delivery note, and a mark as to whether the plant had a scale. After a fine, the office has a trail rather than a memory from a chat. With a repeat shipper it becomes visible which customer regularly packs too much.
The exchange job, the commission and an invoice that does not know about idle time
A load enters the firm by phone, by email or from a freight exchange. The exchange takes a commission. A regular customer has a contract rate. A cancellation on Friday afternoon leaves the vehicle without work for the weekend, while the driver’s cost keeps running.
In many offices the job lives until someone raises an invoice. Driver, fuel, e-TOLL and commission are reconciled later, often in another sheet. Margin on the invoice then looks decent. Margin after idle time and after the contribution does not.
A single job card, from acceptance to invoice, need not be a full market TMS. It is enough that it holds the rate, the source (exchange or contract), vehicle, driver, dates and status. The exchange commission is a field, not a surprise on the transfer. A cancellation closes the job as empty, not as something that “somehow went away”.
A portal for a regular shipper, showing the loading window and status, cuts some of the calls. Not every customer wants it. With several warehouses of a retail chain, or a standing industrial loader, it saves the planner an afternoon.
The outgoing invoice should know which empty kilometres and which fine sit on that job, and which go to overhead. Without that, driver payroll and trip costing live next to each other and never meet.
The workshop, the inspection and the day the vehicle vanishes from the roster
In the example with a dozen combinations, one came back from service and still hung in the sheet as unavailable. The job walked. With an expensive driver that is the same kind of loss as a missing crew: an asset is not working and the payroll is.
A calendar of inspections, tyres, tachographs and motor insurance can live in a spreadsheet while there are a dozen dates. With a mix of combinations and vans, those dates start to collide with loadings. The planner hears about the workshop when the driver writes that the vehicle will not leave.
Putting the workshop into the same roster as jobs takes that day out of the “free vehicles” pool in advance. A visit report — what was replaced, whether the vehicle came back — closes the status. A broader account of that loop is in the piece on a field-service application: the job, the report, the parts. In a haulage firm it is the same idea, only instead of a crew on a roof it is a mechanic and a trailer.
A weight fine and a workshop day meet in wear. An overloaded van eats brakes and tyres faster. Prawo.pl quotes lawyer Marek Augustyn: besides the penalty, accident risk and running costs rise. Logging the fine against the vehicle, not in a drawer, shows which unit and which shipper generate those costs.
When a spreadsheet will do, when an off-the-shelf TMS will do, and when something of your own is justified
Three vehicles, the owner on the desk and one standing customer do not need an IT project. A spreadsheet, a document folder and an honest holiday list will do, for as long as all the numbers fit in one person’s head.
An off-the-shelf transport programme — a boxed TMS — makes sense when the flow is standard: job, vehicle, driver, invoice, sometimes an exchange and GPS. Several such systems are on the market. They are worth checking before anyone commissions a build from scratch. A wider comparison of “buy ready-made or build” is in off-the-shelf software or a custom application.
Integration pays when the firm already has GPS, an accounts package and tachograph readout, and only the flow hurts. The job should not be retyped. Hours should not go to payroll by email. Weight from the document should not vanish between a PDF and a sheet.
A custom application is justified when the process does not fit the box. A mix of vans under the tachograph and full combinations. A portal for a particular shipper. A weight confirmation that no TMS carries as standard. Several companies and one fleet. Or when the ready-made system will not join the roster to the ZUS base and the residence card.
A working accounts package is not ripped out, nor is the official tachograph. A second GITD is not built. What is built is a layer that gives those programmes one truth about who is driving, in what, and for how much.
What this means for an office already paying PLN 9,420
The figures from the last week of August add up to one bill. An international driver is PLN 747 a year more expensive on pay and PLN 313 a month more expensive on contributions. A foreign national is harder to hire cheaply, because the office wants about PLN 7,000 on the contract. From July, vans come under the tachograph. A fine for van weight lands on Polish roads about once an hour.
None of that waits for a “digital transformation” in the firm. They wait for a more modest join: a roster that knows remaining driving time, a job card that knows commission and idle time, and a driver-document list that knows an expiry date.
In the example firm, two empty days on two combinations and one van fine did not come from a missing statute. They came from service, driving time and weight living in three places. At that level of standing cost, that is enough for a month that looked decent on invoices to look worse in the bank.
GESOFT builds panels and applications around that flow when an off-the-shelf TMS does not cover the mix of fleet, people and documents the firm actually runs. The panel holds a shared roster, job status on the phone, a record of contracts and dates, and a load card with weight and invoice. It does not replace the tachograph or the accounts office.
Some of what joins vehicle, driver and document is also described in software for a haulage firm. A separate subject — traffic bans and exemptions that lie to the planner on a Friday — is in the piece on exemption records under the 12-tonne ban. What counts here is the cost of the person, and the hour in which the vehicle did not leave.
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