Waste transfer note template, and how to fill every field

A waste transfer note, the WTN, is the record made when waste passes from one party to another. The duty of care code of practice describes the information that record must hold. It does not prescribe a layout. That is why there is no single stamped Environment Agency form to download, and why every skip firm's duplicate book looks slightly different while saying more or less the same thing.

A good template is therefore judged on one thing: does it have a box for every required detail, and is that box hard to leave empty. The required details are the description of the waste, its List of Waste code, how much of it there is, what it is in, where and when the transfer happened, who handed it over, who took it, the carrier's registration number, the permit or exemption the receiving site holds, a confirmation that the waste hierarchy was applied, and signatures from both sides.

That is the whole list. It fits on one side of A4. The table below sets it out field by field, with what actually goes in each one and where operators most often get caught out. Copy it into your book, your spreadsheet or your form software, whichever you use, and you have a compliant template.

Three warnings before the list. Hazardous waste does not travel on a transfer note, it travels on a consignment note, which is a different document with extra fields. A template is only half the job: the other half is that the person filling it in at the weighbridge, in the rain, with a lorry waiting, can do it in under a minute without guessing. And since 1 October 2026 the note is no longer the only record a permitted receiving site makes for a load, because each load also has to be reported to Defra's digital waste tracking service. That second record is dealt with further down, because it changes how you should design the first one.

This is the question behind most searches for a template, so it is worth answering flatly. The legislation and the duty of care code of practice set out the information a transfer note must record. They do not issue a single mandatory form that everyone must use. Trade bodies, waste firms and software vendors all publish layouts, and duplicate books bought from a stationer are a layout too. Any of them is fine if the fields are all there. The companion page on what information a waste transfer note must contain goes through the legal basis for each field.

That freedom is why templates drift. A book gets reprinted, someone trims a box that never seemed to get used, and two years later the SIC code field or the permit number field is missing from every note in the drawer. If you are auditing your own paperwork, do it against the field list above rather than against the last version of your own book.

The same logic applies when you move off paper. A spreadsheet, a form app or a purpose-built system is not more or less valid than a duplicate book. It is valid if it captures the same fields and you can produce the record when asked. What changes is how easy it is to leave a field blank, how legible the result is, and how long it takes to find one note out of four thousand.

One layout you genuinely cannot redesign is Defra's receipt of waste spreadsheet, which is a different document with its own column order. Your transfer note template is yours. That one is not.

The List of Waste code, still called the EWC code by almost everyone in the yard, is the field most likely to be wrong on a template that is otherwise complete. It is a six-digit code that classifies the waste by the process and sector that produced it, and it is the field that carries through to your quarterly return and your receipt report, so an error here is an error that repeats.

Some entries are absolute hazardous: the waste is hazardous whatever its concentration, and the code is written with an asterisk. Some are mirror entries, where the same material appears twice, once hazardous and once not, and you have to assess the load to decide which applies. And some are plainly non-hazardous. The government's guide to classifying waste walks through the assessment, and it is worth an hour of a technically competent manager's time rather than a guess at the gate. The companion pages on the EWC code list and on the asterisk go further into both.

Two practical points for anyone designing a template. First, leave the code field long enough for the asterisk and print it next to the description so the two are read together. A code separated from its description on the page gets copied without being checked. Second, do not pre-print a short list of codes with tick boxes unless you also leave a write-in line. Pre-printed lists are how a mixed load that needed a different code ends up filed under whatever was closest.

If you take the hazardous route, remember the paperwork changes shape. Consignment notes carry a consignment note code, the producer's details, extra carrier information and a longer retention period. A transfer note template will not stretch to cover it.

Where the same waste moves between the same two parties in the same way on a regular basis, one transfer note can cover a run of collections rather than a note per lift. The trade calls this a season ticket. It is the standard arrangement for a weekly trade collection or a repeating exchange on a long site, and the companion page on season tickets covers the mechanics.

A season ticket does not thin out the field list. The note still needs the full description, the code, the parties, the registrations, the permit and the declaration. What changes is the quantity and the frequency: the template has to describe the amount per collection and the pattern of collections, and it has to state the period it covers. The period is capped, so a season ticket is reviewed and reissued rather than left running indefinitely, and the review is the moment to check that the waste has not quietly changed.

The risk with season tickets is drift. A site that started producing clean soils starts adding broken plasterboard, and the note on file still says soils and stones. If you use them, put a diary note at the halfway point of the period to walk the site and confirm the description still matches what turns up. Where a customer's waste is unpredictable, a note per load is less work in the end than defending a season ticket that stopped being true in March. Note as well that a season ticket covers the transfer note, not the receipt report: each individual load you take in is still its own line to Defra.

Quantity is the field that follows you around. It appears on the transfer note, on the weighbridge ticket, in your tonnage totals by waste type, in the receipt you report to Defra, and in the quarterly return you send the Environment Agency. Those numbers have to agree, and they only agree if the first one was right.

Practical habits that keep them straight. Use one unit across the whole operation, kilogrammes or tonnes, and put the unit on the template rather than relying on people to write it. Copy the weighbridge figure exactly, including the thousands separator if that is how the ticket prints it, and never round a weighed load. Where you estimate rather than weigh, say so on the note and say what the estimate was based on, a full eight yard skip of mixed C&D for example, so the basis is on the record.

Duplicate entries are the other quantity problem, and they are worse than they look. A load written twice inflates the tonnage for that waste type, which inflates the quarter, which makes the return disagree with your weighbridge log. On paper this happens when a note is written at the gate and again in the office. On a tablet it happens when someone taps save twice because the screen did not react. Either way, the fix is procedural: one person owns the record for a load, and someone reconciles notes against weighbridge tickets before the quarter closes. Correcting a weight or a code once it has gone further than the yard is its own job, and the companion page on corrections before the quarter closes deals with it.

Both parties sign the note and both parties keep a copy. That is the point of a duplicate book, and it is the requirement a digital template has to reproduce in some form, whether that is a copy emailed to the customer or a printed slip handed over at the gate. The companion page on who signs a transfer note covers the positions and names that go beside the signatures.

Transfer notes have to be kept for at least two years, and consignment notes for hazardous waste for at least three. Those are minimums, and the companion page on how long to keep transfer notes sets out the detail. Most operators keep longer, because a permit review or a complaint about a site can reach back further than two years and the notes are the only evidence of what left the yard and where it went.

Think about retrieval as well as retention. The test is not whether the notes exist, it is whether you can produce the ones an officer asks for, by date, by customer or by waste type, while they are standing in your office. A folder of carbon copies passes that test slowly. A box of folders in a portacabin often does not pass it at all, because the copies have faded, the load that matters was written in biro on a damp page, and nobody can find the week in question.

This is the point at which most yards start looking at a digital record, and it is covered in depth on the companion page about swapping the duplicate book for a digital transfer note record, so it is not repeated here.

If you run a permitted or licensed site that receives waste in England, 1 October 2026 added a second record on top of the note. Every load you take in has to be reported to Defra's digital waste tracking service, and the guidance is explicit that the paper-based method initially continues to run alongside it: transfer notes, Annex VII forms and hazardous waste consignment notes still get completed, and permit-condition waste returns still get submitted.

The timing is the part that changes a yard's habits. The record has to be submitted within two working days, counting from the day after the waste arrives, and working days exclude weekends and bank holidays. A note written at the gate on Thursday and typed up whenever the office has a quiet afternoon no longer works as a system. The service itself costs £26 a year for each organisation on the account, with the first payment due by 31 January 2027.

There are two ways in. You download Defra's own receipt of waste spreadsheet template, fill in the mandatory columns and upload it, which is free but is a second round of typing and uses a layout you are not allowed to alter. Or your software connects to Defra's receipt of waste API and sends the data for you. Either way the receipt asks for things a classic transfer note template does not have a box for: the date and time the load was received, the receiver's own permit or authorisation details and contact, the form the waste is in and the containers it came in, POPs and hazard details, the carrier and the vehicle.

So the practical advice for a template in late 2026 is simple. Add those boxes to the record you already make at the weighbridge, rather than keeping a second list. One capture at the gate that carries both the duty of care fields and the receipt fields is the difference between one job and two, and it is the only version that survives a two-working-day clock.

If you are not starting from scratch, spend twenty minutes on this instead of redesigning anything. Pull ten notes at random from the last quarter, spread across different customers and different waste types, and mark them against the field table above.

Count the blanks rather than reading for a general impression. Blanks cluster: it is almost never a scatter of missing details, it is the same three fields empty on every note, usually the SIC code, the receiving site permit number and the time of transfer. That tells you the template is fine and the habit is the problem, or that your printed book genuinely lost a box at some point. The time of transfer is worth particular attention now, because the receipt report wants the time the load arrived and a blank there is a row that will bounce.

Then check the fields that are filled but wrong. Is the carrier registration number still in date. Does the description match the code. Are the weights in one unit. Is the transfer place the actual handover address. A note that is complete and inaccurate is harder to spot than a note with a gap in it, and it is the one that causes trouble, because it will be repeated across every load from that customer until someone notices.

Finally, look at what happens between the note and the records that come off it. If the answer involves retyping figures out of a folder into a spreadsheet in the last week of the quarter, or into Defra's template on the second working day, that step is where the numbers stop agreeing, and no improvement to the template will fix it.

Digital waste tracking is live rather than coming, and the direction of travel is that waste movements are recorded and shared digitally rather than on a carbon copy in a cab. The paper documents have not gone, and the dates and detail around the service have moved before, so check the current position on gov.uk rather than on anyone's marketing page, including this one.

What that means for a template is straightforward. The information does not change much: the same description, the same code, the same quantity, the same parties, the same permits, with the receipt fields added. What changes is the number of places the record has to appear and how quickly you have to be able to produce it. A yard that already captures the full field list cleanly, in one place, with consistent units and codes, has a short walk ahead of it. A yard with three duplicate books, a spreadsheet and a WhatsApp thread has a longer one.

If you came here for a template, take the field list, add the receipt fields, fix the gaps, and get the habit right first. The paperwork rules are not the hard part. Getting the same details recorded accurately on every load, on every gate, on every wet Tuesday, and reported before the clock runs out, is the hard part, and it is the part worth sorting out before anything else shifts underneath you.