Digital waste tracking rules 2026: what you will need to do
New rules are coming for digital waste tracking. The Digital Waste Tracking (England) Regulations 2026 are due in force on 1 October 2026. Here is what they will mean for permitted sites, in plain English.
The way the country tracks waste is changing, and there is a new rulebook behind it. It is called the Digital Waste Tracking (England) Regulations 2026. Here is what it will ask of you, without the legal jargon.
A quick word first. These rules are still going through Parliament, so the fine print can still move. The shape of them is clear though, and the date is set. They are due to come into force on 1 October 2026.
Who the rules are for
The first wave is for sites that take in waste under an environmental permit. If that is you, the rules land on your desk first. Carriers, brokers and dealers follow later, in 2027. We set out the order of play in digital waste tracking for receiving sites and digital waste tracking is live.
What you will have to do
From the start date, a permitted site has to record the waste it takes in on the government's digital service, not on paper alone. A record goes in for each load that arrives. This sits on top of the duties you already have. Consignment notes and waste transfer notes carry on as normal through the change-over.
There is one sensible exception. If you are what the rules call "digitally excluded", meaning you genuinely cannot use the online service, you can keep a written record instead. For most sites this will not apply, but it is there in black and white, in Part 3 of the regulations.
The rules also bring in a yearly charge to use the service, set at £26. It is small, but it is a new line in the budget. We break the cost down in digital waste tracking cost.
The easy way to stay on the right side of it
None of this is hard if your software does the recording for you. The job you already do, making the consignment note, can pass the record to the digital service in the background. That is the whole point of the service. We wrote about why a spreadsheet will not keep you compliant over the long run. For the bigger picture, our Digital Waste Tracking hub pulls it together, and you can see how digital consignment notes work.
The date is not going to move. The sites that sort their recording early will treat the start date as just another day. Leave it late and it becomes a scramble.