How to submit your DEFRA receipts for free

Since 1 October 2026, every permitted site in England and Wales that receives waste has had to report each load to DEFRA's digital waste tracking service. Plenty of people assume that means buying software. It does not. You can do it for nothing, and this is how.

What you have to do, in one paragraph

If you hold an environmental permit to receive waste, you report every load you take in through DEFRA's Report receipt of waste service. That applies from October 2026 in England and Wales and from January 2027 in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Each load has to be on the system by the end of the second working day after the day it arrived, so a load in on Monday is due by midnight on Wednesday, with weekends and bank holidays left out of the count. Sites running only on registered exemptions are not in this first phase.

The one cost nobody avoids is DEFRA's own: £26 a year for each organisation on your account, covering all of that organisation's sites. The first payment is due by 31 January 2027. Everything below is about what you pay on top of that, and both routes here add nothing.

Free route 1: DEFRA's spreadsheet

If you have no software, GOV.UK's guidance lets you send your loads on a template spreadsheet instead. It works like this:

1. 01Sign in to the Report receipt of waste service with your organisation's Government Gateway or GOV.UK One Login account, not a personal one.
2. 02Download DEFRA's spreadsheet template.
3. 03Fill in the mandatory fields for each load. You can put several loads, and several of your sites, on one spreadsheet.
4. 04Upload it. For your next batch, start again on a fresh copy of the template.

There are a few rules worth knowing before you start. You cannot use your own spreadsheet or change the format of DEFRA's. Each organisation you run needs its own spreadsheet. And because the two working day clock runs per load, a weekly upload is not enough: busy sites will be uploading every day or two.

Free route 2: LoadSnap's free plan

LoadSnap's Starter plan costs nothing and files straight to DEFRA through its API, the same way our paid plans do. It covers 10 loads a month, which suits a small site or a firm that only takes in the odd load. You paste in your organisation's DEFRA code once, press Test Connection to check DEFRA recognises it, and from then on each receipt you confirm can be sent with one press. There is no spreadsheet to download, no template to keep straight and nothing to upload.

Starter also includes signed waste transfer notes and hazardous consignment notes as PDFs, EWC code search, up to 5 vehicles and 2 drivers, and a basic compliance dashboard. Drivers and weighbridge staff sign in on their own phones without using up your office login.

Side by side

Where the time actually goes

Free in money is not free in time. With the spreadsheet, every load is typed twice: once on the transfer note or weighbridge ticket, and again into DEFRA's template. Somebody has to remember to upload before each load's deadline, and a mistake in a typed row is yours to spot. Your own record of what you sent is whatever copy of the spreadsheet you kept.

In LoadSnap the receipt, the transfer note and the DEFRA submission are one record. Whatever the driver or the weighbridge operative captured at the gate is what goes to DEFRA, so nothing is retyped in the office.

Peace of mind, not just a submission

Getting a load onto DEFRA's system is the minimum. These are the things that stop you worrying about it afterwards, and they are in every LoadSnap plan, the free one included:

• A deadline on every receipt. Each unfiled receipt shows when its two working days run out, with bank holidays taken out of the count.
• A safety net. Every 15 minutes LoadSnap looks for anything you have received but not yet sent, and files it for you. A load you forgot about does not quietly miss its deadline.
• A record of what was sent. The DEFRA Submissions page lists every movement that went, with the tracking reference DEFRA gave back, so you can answer an inspector in seconds.
• Corrections on the record. If something was wrong, you correct the receipt and the correction stays with it rather than living in a separate file.
• Carriers with no software. When a load turns up on a paper note, you record the carrier's registration and the producer's details once, at the gate, and the whole chain is filed together.
• Exempt sites handled. A site running on an exemption is marked as one, and its receipts are kept for your records instead of being sent to DEFRA, where they would be refused.

When to pay, and what for

If you take in more than 10 loads a month, or you want the rest of the business on the same system, the paid plans add the things a working yard needs: scheduling, route planning, invoicing with Sage, Xero and QuickBooks exports, unlimited AI waste classification, and more office logins. Prices are on our pricing page, and every plan includes DEFRA submission rather than selling it as an extra.

If the spreadsheet suits you today, use it. It is a legitimate route and DEFRA built it for exactly that. When the typing starts to cost more than the software, or DEFRA withdraws the template, LoadSnap's free plan is there, and moving across takes one code and one test press.

LoadSnap team

UK waste compliance

Written by the team building LoadSnap, the UK waste compliance platform for carriers and receivers.