Truckers are scarce, but the €1,000 CAP certificate puts candidates off

“We’re short of truckers” and the €1,000 CAP that scares off candidates

A driver with a C1 licence registered as unemployed and on several job websites goes to an interview. They ask for the CAP. He doesn’t have it. The company tells him to get it, that it’s only €1,000. He missed out on the job and the company missed out on a candidate.

The episode sums up the standoff in road transport: the sector insists it cannot find drivers and needs thousands, while in the thread people joke that it is now willing to pay “millions”. The candidate’s arithmetic tells a different story.

The €1,000 CAP that filters out candidates

The phrase that comes up most often among those who have tried to enter the sector is the certificate of professional competence. It is a mandatory requirement, renewed periodically, and costs around €1,000 out of your own pocket, although in some regions the training is subsidised by the public employment services, which completely changes the equation: where the course is paid for, candidates appear; where it isn’t, the candidate disappears.

Then there is the vehicle. In ads posted on public employment portals for the province of Zaragoza, employers ask for a C licence plus CAP and your own car to get to the workplace, with shifts from 05:00 until the end of the delivery round and pay according to the collective agreement. The combination—paying to work and funding your own travel—explains part of the problem on its own.

Some recall that this used to cost nothing: you could get your truck licence for free during military service. That entry route closed decades ago and no one has replaced it.

How much does a transport company really pay?

Here the figures used by the sector itself are anything but millionaire-level. On domestic routes, people speak of €2,300 to €2,700, and on international routes €400 or €500 more; other estimates put net international pay at €2,800 to €3,100. At the other extreme, there are drivers on €1,600 and ads for European routes paying €1,300 a month to workers from abroad.

The comparison that throws people off is an internal one: two jobs in the same field are cited, one at €1,282 gross and another at €2,500 net, and from there everyone draws their own conclusions about whether the problem is labour supply or the price of the job.

The most widespread argument is simple. If companies admit that the truck costs 30% more, that diesel has become more expensive and that the business is still profitable anyway, why aren’t wages going up? The answer from the other side is that there are more trucks than cargo: if transport were in surplus, haulage rates would rise and products would be missing from the shelves. That isn’t happening.

The shortage narrative and those who got out of trucking

The most repeated objection to the official line is not ideological but accounting-based. If drivers really were in short supply, wages would rise or companies would close; one or the other. What is observed is something else: 86,000 Spanish truckers with all their licences left the road, according to what was said on television, and the figure could exceed 100,000 counting those who moved into other trades.

That is the figure that breaks the narrative. It is not that there are no trained people: it is that trained people have left. And while people debate whether there is a labour shortage, companies turn to recruiting at source, with workers from countries such as Peru or Latin America willing to take on international routes for wages nobody here will accept any more.

What was paid in the 1990s for the same job

Nostalgia here is not literary. Drivers who started in the late 1990s recall 500,000 pesetas a month—around €3,000 at today’s exchange rate—without exceeding the hours stipulated by traffic rules. Others speak of 800,000 pesetas on international routes, €3,700 at the time, and routes such as Sweden-Poland-Ukraine, with 16,000 kilometres a month, which came close to €4,800 or €5,000 a month.

The nuance matters: back then people fiddled with tachograph discs and there were bonuses that went straight into their pocket. The net result, however, was that the sacrifice paid off. Today the sacrifice remains and the compensation has been diluted.

Tachograph, 45-hour rests and weeks away from home

The rules set nine hours of driving a day, extendable to ten twice a week, 56 hours a week and 90 hours over two consecutive weeks. On paper, neat. In practice, and as argued in the thread, someone driving internationally can legally spend 28 days away from home, and only one of the weekly rest periods must be taken at the company’s premises: the rest are taken wherever they fall, on an industrial estate or at a service area.

Add to that the unpaid work that surrounds the wheel: paperwork, opening and closing doors, refuelling, checking levels and tyre pressures, guarding the load and explaining things to the authorities when required. And the physical wear and tear of varicose veins, prostate problems and nights in the cab.

Who is willing to get behind a truck today?

The profile entering the industry is not that of a twenty-something eager for the road. It is people who train late, often with a subsidised licence, or foreign workers who arrive with the qualification already in hand. At the same time, the idea is growing that driving is a job for the last years of working life, not for starting a family.

And beneath all that, the uncomfortable realisation: the sector cannot compete on pay with other jobs that require fewer qualifications, less upfront investment and let you sleep at home every night.

There is one detail that frames the whole debate. There is talk of thousands of drivers needed, millions available and a profession that cannot fill vacancies. The only number that appears in no headline is how much is paid per hour actually worked. There, many domestic routes are around the minimum wage.