Digital waste tracking for receiving sites: you go first
Receiving sites are first into mandatory digital waste tracking, from 1 October 2026. Your deadline, the two-working-day rule, the £26 fee, and why paper carries on for now.
Digital waste tracking is arriving in phases, and receiving sites are in the first one. If you run a permitted or licensed site that takes waste in, a recycling centre, a transfer station or a treatment site, the new rules land on you before anyone else.
Your date is October 2026
You must use DEFRA's digital waste tracking service from 1 October 2026 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and from January 2027 in Scotland. Carriers, brokers and dealers come in the next phase, around October 2027. So the sites that take waste in are a full year ahead of the people who bring it.
What you have to do
For every load you take in, you record it on the service. The clock is tight. You have until the end of the second working day after the day the load arrives. Miss that window often enough and you are not tracking waste, you are explaining yourself.
The cost
Registering costs £26 a year. It is a flat charge for each legal entity that creates or edits records, not a fee for every load. That £26 goes to DEFRA for the service itself. Capturing and sending the data is a separate job, and that is where your own system does the work. There is more on the cost here.
Do not bin your paper yet
One thing to be clear on. Digital tracking does not replace your paperwork on day one. The Environment Agency has said you carry on with your consignment notes, consignee returns and transfer notes as normal, alongside the new service. For now, you do both. We covered this in digital waste tracking is live.
How to get ready
Register in good time. Then get your intake records out of paper and into something you can search, so hitting the two-working-day deadline is routine, not a scramble. The sites that find this easy will be the ones whose records are already digital.
Our digital waste tracking guide has the full picture, and if you also move waste, the carrier view is here.
Consigns keeps your records digital and in one searchable place, and it is built to plug into DEFRA's service, so the second-working-day deadline is one you keep without thinking about it.