1 September 2026 · 5 min read
What a category B licence actually lets you drive
A standard category B car licence covers vehicles up to 3,500kg maximum authorised mass with up to eight passenger seats. Every mainstream 3.5t panel van sits inside that — which is why the whole delivery sector is built around the limit.
Every driver you hire will have a category B licence. Most will never have thought about what it entitles them to, because for cars it never comes up. Put them in a van and it becomes the single constraint that shapes your fleet.
The core entitlement
Category B covers vehicles with a maximum authorised mass up to 3,500kg and no more than eight passenger seats in addition to the driver. Maximum authorised mass — MAM — is the same figure as gross vehicle weight: the vehicle plus fuel, driver, crew and load.
This is why the 3.5 tonne van is the backbone of UK parcel delivery. It is the largest vehicle an ordinary driver can be put into on their existing licence, with no additional training, no medical, and no separate test.
Trailers
Category B also carries a trailer entitlement, which has been relaxed in recent years. Broadly, a category B licence permits towing a trailer, with the specific limits depending on when the licence was issued and the combined weight involved. Rarely relevant to parcel work, but it comes up with removals and larger-item routes.
The pre-1997 grandfather rights
Drivers who passed their car test before 1 January 1997 were granted additional entitlements that newer licences do not carry, typically including C1 — vehicles between 3.5 and 7.5 tonnes.
If you have long-serving drivers, some of them can legally drive vehicles your newer drivers cannot. That is occasionally useful, but building an operation around it is a mistake: those entitlements are attached to individuals who will eventually retire, and C1 grandfather rights carry their own renewal and medical requirements from age 70.
What actually catches operators out
Not the licence itself. The overloading.
A driver with a valid category B licence in a 3,500kg van is legal. The same driver in the same van with 1,500kg of parcels in a vehicle rated for 1,200kg payload is committing an offence, and so potentially is the operator. Enforcement uses weighbridges and the penalties scale with the severity of the overload.
- Know the payload of every vehicle in your fleet, not just the gross weight
- Remember that payload includes the driver, fuel, and anything permanently fitted
- Brief drivers that a full load bay is not the same as a legal load
- Treat a heavily loaded van on a bulky round as a real risk, not a theoretical one
This is one of the reasons load volume and payload appear on every vehicle page on this site. They are not specification trivia — they are the operating envelope.