Trucks and buses

This is the figure the page exists for. Inside built-up areas a car first meets a standard driving ban in the 31 to 40 km/h band. A lorry or a bus meets one already at 26 to 30 km/h, and a vehicle carrying dangerous goods or a bus carrying passengers at 21 to 25 km/h — at an excess that costs a car driver in the same street money and points and nothing else.

Outside built-up areas everything shifts later but the order holds: lorries and buses from 31 to 40 km/h, dangerous goods and occupied buses from 26 to 30 km/h. The length rises with the band — up to 3 months for lorries and buses, and up to 3 months for dangerous goods and occupied buses.

The top of these ladders is built differently too, which is easy to miss. Their open-ended top band opens at over 60 km/h; the car table's only at over 70 km/h. At a very large excess a lorry is therefore already in the top row while a car is still one rung below it.

The amounts follow the same order. For lorries and buses the ladder runs from 40 € to 800 € inside built-up areas and from 30 € to 700 € outside them; for dangerous goods and occupied buses from 70 € to 950 € inside, and from 60 € to 900 € outside.

Separately from all three tables, the repeat rule in § 4(2) BKatV still applies: two separate excesses of at least 26 km/h each, the second within 12 months of the first decision becoming final, brings a standard ban of 1 month. That rule knows no vehicle class — it keys on the km/h figure and on persistence, never on which letter of the table you were in.

As on every catalogue page, the points do not come from the fine catalogue but from an annex to the driving-licence ordinance, which lists offences by their catalogue number. For these two heavy tables the join is unusually fine-grained: the annex qualifies individual catalogue numbers as applying "only inside" or "only outside" built-up areas, so the same excess scores differently by location.

In one place that produces a row which looks like a mistake in the table and is not.

This page is about speeding, and only speeding. German law carries plenty more offences for commercial goods and passenger transport, and two of the most searched-for are not in this annex at all — they live in other instruments, with a different mechanism. We name them rather than leave them out silently.

And one row from the tables themselves is deliberately not shown as a band.