Published 4 November 2025, updated 3 August 2026

Carpentry splits into two working lives, and the licence question looks different in each. On the bench in a workshop, somebody else usually brings the timber to you and you finish at the same address every night. Fixing on site, the work moves and you move with it. Work out which of the two you are before you decide anything else, because it changes both how urgent this is and which week you can realistically take.

Bench or site: which one the missing licence is holding back

A bench joiner can get by without a licence for years. The workshop is a fixed address, the merchant delivers, and if the unit is on a bus route you manage. What you cannot do is take the fitting side of the work. The bespoke staircase, the run of wardrobes, the shopfit you machined yourself all have to be delivered and installed somewhere, and that half of the job is usually where the money and the interest sit. Handing your own fitting to somebody else because you cannot drive there is the point at which it starts costing you properly.

Site carpentry is more immediate. New build plots and refurbishment sites sit where the land was cheap, which normally means the edge of a town with no useful bus, and a half seven start is before the first one runs in any case. Relying on a lift from another chippy on the same job ties you to their jobs, their hours and their timekeeping. The week they move to a different site, your work either moves with them or stops.

There is a third pattern worth naming, the carpenter doing both, machining in a unit two or three days a week and fitting the rest. That is the most awkward version of all without a licence, because the whole arrangement depends on getting yourself and what you have made between the two addresses on your own schedule.

The tools are the reason, not the distance

Distance is the smaller half of the problem. It is the chop saw, the track saw and rail, the site box, a bag of cordless kit, and a stack of second fix mouldings that will not go in a car boot without the seats down and a window open. Getting yourself to a job is one thing. Getting yourself and the kit there every morning, then home again with it because nothing sensible gets left on site overnight, is what actually needs a vehicle.

Collection is the other half. Merchants deliver the bulk, but a working week is full of small pickups: ironmongery that came in wrong, another length of architrave, a blade, the handles the client changed their mind about on Tuesday. Each one is fifteen minutes with a van and half a lost afternoon without one.

Pick the week against fitting dates, not job starts

This is the decision carpenters get wrong most often. Machining can wait. A glue up can wait, a finish can wait, a batch of doors on the bench does not ring you up on Wednesday morning. A fitting date agreed with a client is a different thing entirely, because there is a kitchen with no worktops or a house with no internal doors at the end of it, and it usually sits inside somebody else’s programme.

So look for the gap after a fitting and before the next one starts, rather than the gap in your machining. If your work leans towards kitchens and interiors, the run up to Christmas is rarely free, because a lot of customers want it finished before then. Outdoor work, decking, gates, fascias and garden rooms, thins out in poor weather, which makes those same winter weeks a sensible time to be off the tools if that is where your work sits.

If you are an apprentice on day release, the college calendar hands you something most of the trade does not have: known weeks with no college in them, often when the site is quieter too. Those are the obvious dates to aim at, and an employer is far more likely to agree to a week that was already half accounted for.

How many hours, given what you can already do

Trades tend to underestimate this, because you are used to picking up practical skills quickly and driving is not quite the same category of skill. Being good with your hands helps with the controls and does very little for the parts that take the time, which are junctions, roundabouts, observation, and working out what other traffic is about to do before it does it.

Courses run from ten hours to fifty. Somebody who had lessons years ago and let them lapse can often work with a shorter block. Somebody whose only driving is moving a van round a yard should plan for the long end and treat anything less as a bonus. Booking too short costs more than booking right, because the extra hours get bought anyway. The recommendation tool is a better basis than a guess, with a 30 hour Silver course and a 50 hour Platinum course sitting either side of most people in the trade.

Manual, and why the trade keeps landing on it

Most work vans are manual, and a fair number of the ones you will drive belong to somebody else: borrowed for an afternoon, provided by the firm, or parked on site with the keys in the office. An automatic licence rules all of those out, which in a trade where you might be asked to shift a van, collect a delivery or run a colleague’s vehicle across town is a real restriction rather than a theoretical one. Manual takes longer to learn and keeps every vehicle on the job available to you. Decide before you book, because it affects who you are matched with and what the balance comes to.

What you pay, with the workshop standing still

A deposit holds your dates, from £180 for the shortest course to £900 for the longest, and it is not the price of the course. The balance is your instructor’s tuition fee, arranged with them after booking and due before training starts, varying by area and by manual or automatic. The price guide shows how the parts fit together. Separately again, the DVSA charges £23 for the theory test and £62 for a weekday practical.

Weigh that against a week where the bench produces nothing and, if you are self employed, nothing gets invoiced. The comparison that actually matters is not the deposit against zero. It is one contained week now against another year of turning down fitting work and paying somebody else to deliver what you made. Since 12 May 2026 the practical test booking is yours to make in your own account, so the test date can go where your own diary allows rather than wherever it falls.