Speeding fines

If your case is dealt with out of court, the answer is a single figure and it does not move: the fixed penalty for speeding is £100, with 3 penalty points endorsed on your licence. It is set by order as a flat amount. It does not rise with your speed, it does not fall if you pay quickly, and it takes no account whatever of what you earn. Paying it discharges your liability for the offence, and no conviction ever occurs.

If the case goes before a court instead, the arithmetic changes completely. The court works out which of three bands your recorded speed falls into at the posted limit, and each band is expressed as a percentage of relevant weekly income — a starting point with a range around it, capped by the statutory maximum for the offence you were actually charged with. That is why an honest answer for the court route is a range and not a number, and why any site quoting you one figure for it is quoting something the guideline does not say.

You do not choose which route you are on. It follows from what was sent to you, from the speed recorded, and from decisions that are not yours to make. The calculator below asks you which one you are in rather than guessing, and it asks for a weekly income that you are entirely free to withhold — if you do, it uses the figure a court itself assumes when it has no information, and it says so under every answer.

What people call a speeding ticket is, here, one of three named instruments: a fixed penalty notice, a conditional offer, or a notice of intended prosecution. Each one names itself on its own face, and that name is the most useful thing on it. So the answer to “is a speeding ticket a fixed penalty notice” is that it may well be one — and it may equally be either of the other two, which are separate instruments running on their own periods.

That distinction is the boundary the rest of this page is built around. A fixed penalty notice is an offer of the opportunity to discharge liability to conviction by paying a fixed penalty: pay it, and the out-of-court answer above — the flat amount and the endorsement that comes with it — is the whole of it, and no conviction ever occurs. A conditional offer is a different instrument on a longer clock. A notice of intended prosecution comes before either, and the period on it governs whether the matter can be pursued at all. Read the name on your own document first, then read the tier it puts you in.

The two things most often asked about a ticket are each answered once on this page rather than twice over. What a speeding ticket costs and how many points a speeding ticket carries both take the shape the section above sets out — one flat figure out of court, a range in court — and the licence side of it is given band by band in what each band does to your licence. If what you want is how long it takes to arrive, or how long you have to pay, those are questions about the periods printed on the paperwork, and they are laid out in full further down this page and on the fixed penalty notice page’s deadlines rail.

Endorsement is obligatory for this offence — the schedule says so — so “a fine but no points” is not among the outcomes. What varies with the band is the number of points and whether the court disqualifies instead of endorsing them.

In the two upper bands the entry reads as a genuine either/or: a disqualification for a period within a stated range, or a points figure. A page that reports only the points arm has quietly deleted the more serious half of the answer, and a page that reports only the disqualification has done the reverse. The table keeps both.

Maximum fines in road traffic law are almost never written as amounts. They are written as a level on the standard scale, and a separate table says what each level is worth. The offence carries the level; the scale carries the money; and on a high enough income the scale, not the percentage, is what actually decides the answer. When that happens the calculator says so rather than letting the number look like arithmetic.

The scale is not identical everywhere. In England and Wales it is date-banded — which column applies depends on when the offence was committed, not on today’s date — while Scotland has a single flat table. At the current column the two agree for the levels speeding uses, so nothing on this page changes between them, and the catalogue page shows both tables in full rather than averaging them away.

The period printed on a fixed penalty notice — 21 days from the date of the notice, or longer if the notice says so — is a suspended enforcement period. Proceedings may not be brought while it runs, and paying within it bars them permanently. It is not a discount window: the amount is the same on the last day as on the first, and there is no early-payment rate in Great Britain at all.

A conditional offer is a different instrument on a longer clock — 28 days — and the two must never be merged. Before either of them, a separate and much shorter period governs whether the matter can be pursued at all: a notice of intended prosecution has 14 days from the commission of the offence. And if you are asked in writing who was driving, that request has its own 28 days and its own separate offence for failing to answer it.

If a fixed penalty goes unpaid, the statute provides that a sum equal to the penalty plus one half of it — £150 where the penalty is £100 — may be registered for enforcement as a fine. The permissive word is the Act’s own and is preserved here rather than tightened into a threat. The same Act supplies the counterweight: someone who was wrongly served may make a statutory declaration within 21 days of notice of the registration, which voids it.

Wales first, because the question is asked often and the answer is short: the offences, the fixed penalty, the standard scale and the sentencing guideline used in Wales are the England and Wales ones. Nothing on this page changes at the Welsh border, and there is no separate Welsh speeding fine to look up.

Scotland is a different legal system operating largely under the same Westminster statute. The offences are the same, the fixed penalty is the same, and the standard scale resolves to the same amounts at the levels speeding uses — but the scale itself is built differently, as a single flat table rather than the date-banded one used in England and Wales. The clearest procedural difference is who makes a conditional offer: in England and Wales it comes from a constable or a vehicle examiner, and in Scotland the procurator fiscal has that role. The most consequential difference of all is not about speeding at all — Scotland’s prescribed alcohol limits are lower, deliberately so, and a driver crossing the border is subject to the limit where the driving happens.

The one thing this site does not answer for is Northern Ireland. The Road Traffic Offenders Act 1988 does not extend there, Northern Ireland runs its own separate regime, and none of it is among our sources. Saying so is more useful than quietly presenting Great Britain figures as United Kingdom ones.