Speed awareness courses
The speed awareness course is the single most-searched thing in this market and the least pinned-down. Legislation permits it, allows a fee to be charged for it and bars a repeat course inside the period it states — but no Act and no statutory instrument sets the fee itself or the speed thresholds that decide who is offered a place. Those are force practice, and this page labels every one of them.
Scheme and statute
What a speed awareness course actually is
A course run by police forces and providers under UKROEd, offered instead of prosecution. It is not a sentence and not a conviction. Legislation permits it, allows a fee to be charged for it and bars a repeat course inside the period it states — but no legislation sets the price itself or the speed thresholds that decide who is offered one.
Parliament permits the course but does not price it. The power to offer one instead of prosecuting sits in an Act (Road Traffic Offenders Act 1988 s.90G), and a statutory instrument prescribes which courses qualify and bars a second one inside three years. What no Act and no statutory instrument does is set the fee, the speed thresholds that get you offered a place, or any entitlement to be offered one at all. Those are decided by police forces and course providers, force by force. That distinction is not a small caveat to put at the bottom — it is the single most important thing to know before reading anything else about the course, here or anywhere.
The practical consequence is that the confident-sounding answers you will find elsewhere — the exact speed that qualifies, the national fee, the length of the session — are somebody’s summary of local practice, not law, and they change from force to force and over time. Our own research pipeline tried to pin several of them down and came back with disputes and blanks. Those disputes and blanks are reproduced below with the labels our research gave them, rather than tidied into a clean paragraph.
What can be said with reasonable confidence is the shape of the thing. Where a course is offered and completed, the driver does not receive the fixed penalty and penalty points that would otherwise have followed — no endorsement is made, because the disposal that would have carried it never happened. Attendance is instead recorded on the scheme’s own database, and it is that record, not your driving licence, which decides whether you can be offered another one later.
Speed awareness courses are run by police forces and course providers under UKROEd. Part of the scheme is on the statute book: RTOA 1988 ss.90G–90I put the charging regime on a statutory basis, and S.I. 2025/238 prescribes the qualifying courses and bars a repeat course inside the period it states. What no Act and no statutory instrument sets is the FEE or the speed thresholds that decide who is offered a place — those are force practice, and they vary by force. Each claim below carries the label our own research gave it, unchanged.
Attributed to force guidance — not to legislation.
Eligibility
Am I going to be offered one?
The honest answer is that we cannot tell you, and neither can any site that does not know which force stopped you.
There is a widely repeated arithmetic rule for the speed at which a course stops being available. Our research pipeline agreed on its shape across independent runs and then demoted it to disputed, because the guidance pages it should have been citable to could not be retrieved, and the corroboration that was available came from a single force restating it rather than from the source itself. So this site does not print it as a number, and it certainly does not present it as a tolerance you are entitled to.
Two things about it are worth understanding even without the figure. First, it is force practice, not law: a force may operate it differently, change it, or decline to offer a course for reasons that have nothing to do with speed. Second, it is not a threshold you can rely on in advance — nothing in it creates a right to be offered a course, and no page anywhere can turn local practice into an entitlement.
The one firm rule here is not force practice at all. S.I. 2025/238 reg.7 forbids a chief officer to offer a fee-charging course to a driver who has satisfactorily completed a similar approved course for an earlier offence inside the period that regulation states. Our research had it corroborated independently and without dispute as a scheme rule; it has been binding law since those regulations came into force. Whether it bites is checked on the scheme’s own record rather than on your licence.
Part statute, part scheme — legislation provides the charging regime and the repeat-course bar (S.I. 2025/238 reg.7), but fixes no fee and no speed threshold. Each claim below wears its own label.
Attributed to force guidance — not to legislation.
The process
What happens, in order
Three steps, and the document you were sent controls all three.
- A notice arrives, and it is the notice that decidesWhat you were sent — and the force that sent it — determines whether a course is offered at all. Nothing on this site can tell you whether yours was.
- If a course is offered, it is an offerAn offer of a course is exactly that: a conditional alternative the force puts in front of you, not a disposal you can elect and not something you can apply for. Accepting it means booking and completing a course with the provider named to you, and paying that provider’s fee yourself. Declining it, or failing to complete, leaves the statutory route the notice described — the fixed penalty, or a court — running as it otherwise would. The offer document sets out what accepting commits you to and by when; it is the authority on both, and it is more specific than any general description can be.
- You book with the provider named on your own letterThe provider sets the fee and the dates. That letter is the only authority on both, and it is why this page quotes neither.
Missing the deadline is not neutral
On the day
How long it takes, where it is, and whether it can be done online
Three of the most-asked questions in this market, and three that our sources do not answer. This is what that means rather than a plausible filling-in.
Course length, session times, venues and delivery method are all set by the provider running the course you were offered, in the area you were offered it. They are not in legislation, they are not published as a single national standard that our research could retrieve, and they differ between providers. A number here would be somebody’s local experience presented as a general rule, and this market has enough of those already.
The good news is that the answer is genuinely easy to get, and from an authority rather than from a website: the booking page named on your own offer shows the length, the available dates, the location or the delivery method, and the fee, for the specific course being offered to you. That is one click, and it is right.
Not in this site’s sources. Set by the provider, per course.
What it counts as
Is it a conviction, and does it affect my insurance?
Two different questions with two very different levels of evidence behind the answers, and the difference is stated rather than smoothed over.
The first question has a reasonably clean answer. A course is not a court disposal and not a conviction. Nor is the fixed penalty it replaces — that is an out-of-court disposal which discharges liability to conviction by payment, so no conviction occurs on that route either. Where a course is completed, the fixed penalty and its penalty points are not issued, so nothing is endorsed on the licence. What exists afterwards is a record of attendance on the scheme’s own database, held for a stated period, which is a different record in a different place from your driving record.
The second question is where this site stops. Whether attendance must be disclosed to an insurer, and what an insurer does with it if disclosed, is disputed in our sources: the material we could retrieve on it is the scheme’s own, which is not an authority on insurance law, and our verification stage flagged exactly that. So we will not tell you what you must declare, and we will not tell you what it will cost you. Ask the insurer the question directly, ask it before you book if the answer would change your decision, and keep the reply in writing.
Part statute, part scheme — legislation provides the charging regime and the repeat-course bar (S.I. 2025/238 reg.7), but fixes no fee and no speed threshold. Each claim below wears its own label.
Ask your insurer directly, and keep the answer in writing.
Northern Ireland
A separate scheme, and a separate legal regime
Real traffic arrives on this question, and answering it with Great Britain material would be answering it wrongly.
Northern Ireland runs its own arrangements, operated by its own police service, and it is not part of the scheme described on this page. That is not an accident of coverage: the statute the rest of this site is built on does not extend to Northern Ireland at all, and Northern Ireland has a separate road traffic offenders regime that is not among our sources.
So if you were stopped in Northern Ireland, nothing on this page is the answer for you — not the eligibility rules, not the recording arrangements, and not the fee. Our research did surface a fee figure attributed to the Northern Ireland service, and it could not be verified against that service’s own published material, so it is not reproduced here. The correspondence you were sent, and the service named on it, are the authority.
Where this applies. This site answers for England and Wales and for Scotland. It does not answer for Northern Ireland: the Road Traffic Offenders Act 1988 does not extend there (s.99(7)), and Northern Ireland runs a separate Road Traffic (Northern Ireland) Order regime that is not among this site’s sources. Figures here are Great Britain figures, not UK-wide ones.
The fee
What it costs is not a national figure
This is the deep-resolution answer, and it is the honest one.
Deep resolution returned Unknown — the scheme publishes no national figure.
Where this sits