How Long You Wait for a Tachograph Card in Serbia

The question usually comes up at a bad moment: the card has expired, it is lost, or a driver has just started the job and the vehicle needs to head out. The short answer is that the legal deadline is 30 days, but in practice the wait is much shorter. Below is also what people usually find out too late, such as the rule that renewal can only be requested 60 days before expiry.

Where to submit the application

This is the first reason time gets lost. Although tachograph cards are issued by the Road Traffic Safety Agency, the application is not submitted to the Agency directly. It is submitted at equipped Dunav osiguranje and Dunav auto locations across Serbia, and the list of those locations is published on the Agency's website.

The cards themselves have been produced and personalized since 2020 at the Institute for Manufacturing Banknotes and Coins of the National Bank of Serbia, so part of the waiting time is for production, not for processing the application.

How much it costs

The costs are paid through three separate payments, into three different accounts. This confuses people who expect a single amount, and the most common reason for a rejected application is a missing third payment slip.

The driver card is paid for personally by the driver. The company cannot pay for it on their behalf, because the card is tied to the driver as an individual. The carrier card is a different matter, and the company pays for that one.

Renewal: the 60-day window that is easy to miss

The driver card is valid for five years. An application for renewal can be submitted no earlier than 60 days before the expiry date, which means two things.

First: it cannot be done any earlier, so there is no benefit to submitting the application ahead of time whenever you happen to remember. Second: that 60-day window is the entire available space. If it is missed and the application is submitted only after the card has expired, the driver is left without a valid card until the new one arrives.

A useful rule: when renewing, the old card is not surrendered, it stays with the driver. This matters, because data can still be downloaded from it.

Lost, stolen or damaged card

Here the deadlines are shorter and stricter, and this is also the information people look for most often.

Driving without a card during that period is allowed with proof that the card cannot be used, and the deadline is extended if more time is needed to return the vehicle to the carrier's headquarters. This is not a blank permit: the driver still has to provide a record of their working time.

For a lost or stolen card, there is also a step that often gets overlooked. The card must be declared invalid in the "Official Gazette", and proof that the notice was received must be attached to the application. Without it, the application is not complete, so the deadline does not start running.

For a damaged or faulty card, the card itself is submitted along with the application.

A replacement card does not get a new five years

This surprises almost everyone. If a card is lost six months before it expires, the replacement card will be valid for those remaining six months, not five years. The validity period carries over from the previous card.

The practical consequence: if a card is near the end of its term, it is worth checking whether regular renewal is closer than a replacement.

A few rules people find out along the way

• One valid card per driver. If a driver already holds a valid card issued in another country that is a party to the AETR agreement, they must report it, and they surrender the old card when they pick up the new Serbian one.
• A foreign card can be used in Serbia and does not need to be replaced, just as a Serbian card is valid abroad.
• A change of address or driver's license number does not require a card replacement. A replacement is possible, but at the applicant's expense.
• Another person can pick up the card, but for the driver card and the workshop card, a certified power of attorney is required.
• Keep the card even after it expires. The driver is required to retain it for at least 28 days and show it on request to a supervisory authority.

What a carrier can do so this does not keep happening

With three drivers, deadlines are easy to remember. With twenty drivers, who come and go, cards expire in different months and nobody tracks which one is next. The result is a vehicle sitting idle because the driver has no valid card, even though both the vehicle and the job are ready.

Two things reduce the risk. First, card expiry dates should sit in the same place as the vehicle's other deadlines, instead of in someone's notebook. Second, data from the cards should be downloaded regularly, because then the system already sees when each card was last used and when it expires.

We wrote separately about download deadlines, in the article Deadlines for tachograph data download. If vehicles rarely come back to base, remote tachograph data download helps there, and storing and processing the files can be left to the Tachograph data hotel service. An overview of the whole toolset is on the Tachograph page.

Frequently asked questions