UK Road Freight: Domestic and International Statistics

It is the canonical statistical record of British road haulage: a single Department for Transport collection that binds four surveys into one set of numbered tables. The Continuing Survey of Road Goods Transport (CSRGT) tracks domestic activity of GB-registered HGVs; an international road haulage series covers UK-registered vehicles moving goods to and from Europe; roll-on roll-off statistics are supplied by ferry operators and Eurotunnel for the main GB-Europe routes; and an HGV driver vacancies series rounds out the labour picture. The tables are numbered RFS01 for domestic activity, RFS02 for international haulage, RFS03 for driver vacancies, plus a separate RORO set - roughly 40 tables in total.

The numbers are accredited official statistics, confirmed as such by the UK Statistics Authority in December 2016, and they are current: RFS0101 reports 2025 at 162 billion tonne-kilometres, 1,532 million tonnes lifted and 18,975 million vehicle-kilometres for GB-registered HGVs. If you size markets, benchmark carriers or model UK freight demand, these are the figures everyone else will quote at you. Get a sample of this dataset and we will return rows shaped exactly like the dictionary below.

Every table hangs off the same three-measure spine - goods moved, goods lifted, vehicle distance - so once one table parses, the whole set parses. Here is the headline table exactly as published:

# RFS0101_Annual -- domestic road freight activity, GB-registered HGVs
year    goods_moved_bn_tonne_km   goods_lifted_mn_tonnes   vehicle_distance_mn_km
2025    162                       1532                     18975
2024    168                       1586                     19392
2023    167                       1552                     18985

# movement 2024 -> 2025
goods moved -4%   goods lifted -3%   vehicle distance -2%

# every workbook in the set ships the same frame
Cover_sheet | Table_of_contents | RFS0101_Quarterly | RFS0101_Annual | RFS0101_Notes

Those are the collection's own published values, not projections. Slots marked as a shape preview fill in per record once we cut your sample. The deeper tables keep the identical spine and add their cut dimension: RFS0103-RFS0107 append a commodity group, RFS0108-RFS0113 append vehicle type and gross weight band, RFS0121-RFS0123 append ITL2 regions of origin and destination, and further tables append mode of working, dangerous goods class, mode of appearance and empty running. Each workbook carries a Cover_sheet, a Table_of_contents and a Notes sheet alongside its data sheets, so provenance travels with every extract.

Eight fields anchor the dictionary, and each definition below comes straight from what the tables actually measure; the example column shows where the field sits in the published scale.

Additional fields on request: dangerous goods class, mode of appearance, empty-running splits, the international haulage detail in RFS02 (partner country, route and foreign-registered HGV activity within the UK), the RORO route tables, and the HGV driver vacancies series in RFS03. Deeper columns are confirmed against live records when we prepare your sample - which is also where column-level naming gets locked down for your pipeline.

Three chips summarize the footprint:

• Geography: the United Kingdom as seen through GB-registered HGVs, with regional and ITL2 origin-destination breakdowns. The international half adds movements to and from European countries by UK-registered vehicles and foreign-registered HGV activity inside the UK, plus route-level RORO crossings.
• Time frame: annual and quarterly observation windows. The latest domestic release covers April 2025 to March 2026, and the tables retain history back to 2012, which makes decade-scale trend work possible without stitching archives together.
• Granularity: national, regional (ITL2) and route-level aggregates, each cuttable by commodity group, vehicle type and gross weight band, mode of working and distance band.

Set against the wider Datadory catalog - where the average quality score across all 1,744 datasets is 7.81 - this slice scores 9/10, a band shared by only 534 datasets, and by just three of the ten cargo ground transportation slices we catalog. Verified field definitions and formal accreditation carry the score.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

You choose the channel and the cadence; the field dictionary above travels unchanged across all three. Structured payloads suit event-driven dashboards, bulk files suit overnight warehouse loads, and spreadsheet-, CSV- and SQL-friendly extracts suit analysts who live in a BI tool. Cadence changes are a settings conversation, not a re-integration project - tell us which tables you need and how often, and the feed follows.

Ranked by how directly the collection answers their day job:

1. Market researchers & consultants. Goods moved and lifted by commodity and ITL2 region quantify the GB haulage market region by region - sizing inputs that already carry official accreditation, so clients argue with the model, not the numbers.
2. Journalists, academics & students. A citable national series on what British lorries carried, quarter by quarter, back to 2012 - the reference point whenever freight, fuel or post-Brexit trade stories need hard figures.
3. Data scientists & ML engineers. Quarterly domestic series joined to commodity and vehicle-type cuts give supervised models a clean target; see what else fits in these data scientists use cases.
4. Developers & builders. One consistent table grammar across roughly 40 workbooks makes scripted ingestion a configuration exercise rather than a project; recipes live in these developers builders use cases.
5. Investors & quant researchers. HGV activity tracks the physical economy closely enough to serve as a GDP-adjacent indicator, and the driver vacancies series adds a labour-market angle most freight datasets lack.
6. Competitive intelligence teams. International tables reveal which corridors UK-registered fleets serve - useful background when profiling haulage operators and logistics rollups.

For contrast inside the same industry: Eurostat's Road Freight Transport Statistics Explained covers the EU27 plus Norway and Switzerland, so the two pair naturally for GB-versus-EU benchmarking - while US readers want the Commodity Flow Survey and FAF5 for shipment-level depth.

Notes that pair well with this page:

• Cargo ground transportation data hub - the full pooled view of the industry, from this UK collection to US commodity flows and truck-rate trackers.
• vs Eurostat Road Freight Transport Statistics Explained - the British national picture against the EU27 series, on one comparison page.
• Best cargo ground transportation datasets - where this slice ranks in the industry and why the 9/10 band matters.
• Persona pages - what market-researcher, data-science, developer and journalist teams each do with this slice, industry by industry.