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Autumn started today, or three weeks ago. October starts on Thursday week.

Wednesday 23 September, and it is the first day of autumn. Or it was three weeks ago. The Met Office keeps two calendars and will not choose between them, and the yard keeps a third, which is the day the heater goes on in the office. There is one date this month nobody is arguing about. Thursday week is 1 October, and from that morning every load through the gate in England and Wales is a legal record with a clock on it.

Two autumns and one October

The Met Office says meteorological autumn "always begins on 1 September and ends on 30 November", and astronomical autumn "begins with the autumn equinox, usually around 22 or 23 September". Usually around. Winter gets the same treatment, 1 December on one calendar and the shortest day on the other. Two starts for every season, and a government department content to leave it there.

The regulations are not built that way. Regulation 4(8) of the Digital Waste Tracking (England) Regulations 2026 gives one deadline: "the end of the second working day after the day on which the load of controlled waste or hazardous controlled waste is received". And a working day is defined as a day which is not "a Saturday or a Sunday", "Christmas Day", "Good Friday", or "a bank holiday in England". No usually, no around. A car in on Monday is due by the end of Wednesday, and that is the whole rule.

Winter is where that rule earns its keep, because winter is when the working days thin out and the daylight goes at four. So here is the calendar, worked out once so nobody has to do it on the gate with a glove in their teeth.

The winter calendar

Every date between now and Easter that changes what the gate has to do, worked from regulation 4(8) and the GOV.UK bank holidays for England and Wales
Date What happens What it means at the gate
Thursday 1 October Digital waste tracking is mandatory in England and Wales The first car through the gate is a legal record. Six working days from today to put a practice car through first.
Monday 5 October The deadline for that first car End of the second working day after Thursday. Friday is one, Monday is two. The weekend does not count and does not help.
Sunday 25 October, 2am The clocks go back Nothing. A Sunday is not a working day, and the deadline is the end of a day, not a time on the wall. The only hour of the year the gate gets for free.
Thursday 24 December The last full working day before Christmas A car in on Christmas Eve is due by the end of Wednesday 30 December. Christmas Day, the weekend and the Boxing Day substitute on Monday 28 do not count. The regulations know it is Christmas and still want it by the Wednesday.
Thursday 31 December New Year’s Eve A car in on the 31st is due by the end of Tuesday 5 January. New Year’s Day is a bank holiday, and the lad on the gate will have his own view on 2 January, which is a Saturday and does not count either.
January 2027 Northern Ireland and Scotland join Same system, same two working days. If your carriers cross the border, the yard at the other end is now on the same clock as you.
Sunday 31 January The first £26 payment is due GOV.UK gives the date. An organisation that has not paid cannot file receipts, and the two working days do not pause for an unpaid invoice.
Friday 26 March Good Friday Named in the regulations as not a working day, along with Easter Monday on the 29th as a bank holiday. A car in on Thursday 25 March is due by the end of Wednesday 31 March. That is the longest ordinary breather in the whole calendar, and it is six days.
Sunday 28 March, 1am The clocks go forward Spring. The tablet has spent a winter in the cab and the queue has filed every receipt it was given. That is the plan, anyway.

Two things the table cannot show. The deadline is the end of the day, and Defra’s own worked example puts that at 11:59pm, so a car that comes in at five on the second day is still due that night, not the next morning. And the day of arrival never counts, which is the one bit of generosity in the whole regulation and worth knowing before you tell the lad he has missed it.

What the cold does to the tablet

A tablet left in the cab overnight in January comes out with a battery that reads forty percent and means twelve. Gloves do not work on the screen, and the screen does not work in the rain, and the first truck of the day arrives while it is still dark and both of those things are true at once. None of this is in the regulations. All of it is on the gate from November to March.

What the regulations do have is the outage rule, and a winter storm that takes the road and the broadband with it is exactly the kind of thing regulation 6 was written for. It still asks for a written record within the two working days and the entry within seven days of the line coming back. We went through what counts and what does not on Monday, and the short version is that the weather counts and a flat battery does not.

What BreakerHQ does about winter

The queue is built for the dark months. The receipt is stored on the tablet the second the gate taps confirm, with the time, the reg, the weight and the carrier, and it files itself the moment there is signal, in the office or in the cab on the way home. The deadline guard works the calendar above for you: it counts working days, not days, and it emails you the legal due date the moment a receipt fails, so Christmas Eve does not need a sum. What we cannot do is charge the tablet, find it a warm pocket, or put a car through before Thursday week. Those three are yours, and there are six working days left for the last one.

Set up your yard now

Autumn started on the first, or on the twenty-second, or today, and you can pick. October starts on Thursday week, and you cannot.

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