Exempt school transport: what the German Freistellungs-Verordnung actually exempts

Under section 1 no. 4 of the Freistellungs-Verordnung, certain journeys by motor vehicle are exempt from the provisions of the Passenger Transport Act. Two letters matter for special-needs school transport. Letter d covers journeys by or for a Schulträger to and from lessons, letter g covers journeys by people with physical, intellectual or psychological disabilities to and from facilities that care for those groups. Both are subject to the same condition, namely that the people carried pay no fare.

Where the district as Schulträger pays, that condition is met. Where the passenger pays the operator directly, it is not.

What the exemption saves you is the licence under section 2 PBefG and everything attached to it. Road traffic law, driving licence law, working time law, accident prevention rules, procurement law and data protection remain fully applicable.

The difference from licensed transport lies neither in the vehicle nor in its size. What decides the case is who can access the service and who pays whom. Scheduled services under section 42 PBefG are regular connections established between defined start and end points, where passengers can board and alight at defined stops. Occasional services under section 46 PBefG, meaning taxis, private hire vehicles, excursion trips and pooled on-demand transport, are not route-bound but are paid for by the passenger. Exempt school transport is neither. The group of passengers is closed, and the responsible authority bears the cost.

Three test points settle the case. Where does the journey lead, who commissions and pays for it, and does the person carried pay anything to the transport operator. Only when all three answers line up does the exemption apply.

Borderline cases almost always turn on the purpose of the journey. A journey to a compulsory work placement forming part of schooling has to be judged differently from a journey to a voluntary afternoon programme run by a club that happens to use rooms in the school. Settle cases like these in writing with the school administration office before the contract is signed, not in October when the first reduced invoice comes back.

Mixed tours are where it gets delicate. If you carry someone who does not fall under section 1 no. 4 and who pays for the ride, the exemption is gone for that carriage, and the journey then requires a PBefG licence. The clean options are either keeping such journeys strictly separate or operating with your own private hire licence.

One widespread misconception holds that a minibus with fewer than nine seats is automatically exempt. That mixes up two independent thresholds. The exemption under section 1 no. 4 FrStllgV attaches to the purpose of the journey, the commissioning party and the fare, not to the number of seats. The nine-person line comes from section 4 (4) PBefG, separates a passenger car from a bus, and governs the additional conditions in section 1 sentence 2 FrStllgV, the driving licence category and the EU driving and rest times. A size-based exemption does exist, namely section 1 no. 3 FrStllgV for passenger cars carrying up to six people including the driver. But it only applies where no fare is paid for the carriage.

The exemption removes exactly one body of rules from the equation. Everything grounded outside the Passenger Transport Act applies unchanged:

• Driving licence law, meaning the right category for the vehicle in use, and D1 or D above eight passenger seats.
• Accident prevention rules, above all the daily check of the vehicle operating and safety equipment before the shift.
• Working time law for all driving staff, regardless of the PBefG question.
• Vehicle and restraint rules such as StVZO construction requirements, restraint systems and the securing of wheelchairs and mobility aids.
• Data protection, because names, addresses, pick-up times and often health data of children are personal data with a high need for protection.
• Contractual obligations, meaning everything the Schulträger has set out in the specification and the tender documents.

What genuinely falls away is the licensing authority as the supervising body. Its place is taken by the client through the contract, by the accident insurance institution, by the occupational safety inspectorate and by the data protection authority. On balance that is more bodies to answer to, not fewer.

Drivers: what falls away and what does not

One of the few genuine reliefs concerns the passenger transport driving permit. Under section 48 (1) FeV, it is needed by anyone who carries passengers and requires a licence under the Passenger Transport Act to do so, or who drives an ambulance. Neither applies to exempt school transport, so the P-Schein (passenger transport driving permit) is not required here. That is the whole of it. Licence checks, briefings and fitness assessments remain your job. Practically every municipal tender in special-needs school transport requires a current erweitertes Führungszeugnis (extended criminal record certificate) under section 30a BZRG before a driver first goes out, not because the PBefG demands it but because the contract does.

Pre-departure check before every shift

Under section 36 of DGUV Vorschrift 70, the German accident insurance rule on vehicles, the driver has to check that the operating and safety equipment works before each shift begins and to watch the condition of the vehicle for obvious defects during the shift. Defects must be reported to the supervisor, and on a driver changeover to the relieving driver as well. Where a defect endangers safety, operation has to stop. This duty does not hang on the PBefG, and after an accident the record of these checks is one of the first documents anyone asks for.

Working, driving and rest times

The EU driving and rest times in Regulation (EC) No 561/2006 only bite in passenger transport from vehicles designed for more than nine people including the driver. The typical minibus drops out, which regularly leads to the false conclusion that no limits exist there at all. The Arbeitszeitgesetz (German Working Time Act) applies regardless. Under section 3 ArbZG, daily working time may not exceed eight hours and may only be extended to ten hours where an average of eight hours per working day is maintained over six calendar months or 24 weeks. Split shifts between the morning and the afternoon tour make that calculation harder rather than easier. More on this in driving and rest times in passenger transport.

Who is liable for the individual journey

The responsible authority owes it to organise and guarantee school transport. The transport operator owes the safe performance of the individual journey, meaning the condition of the vehicle, the fitness and deployment of drivers, the securing of passengers and compliance with the contractual commitments. That responsibility does not shift simply because the contract comes from a public body.

Yes. Procurement law and passenger transport law are separate bodies of rules, and the exemption says nothing about how a public authority may buy. When a district commissions a company to carry pupils, that is a public service contract for consideration. It is handled under the general procurement rules, not under the special regime of Regulation (EC) No 1370/2007 for public passenger transport services.

So the estimated contract value decides the procedure. Section 106 GWB refers to the thresholds in the EU directives for that purpose. Since 1 January 2026, the threshold for supply and service contracts awarded by other contracting authorities, which includes districts and district-free cities, has stood at 216,000 euros net. Multi-year school transport lots regularly exceed that figure by a wide margin. What this means for your pricing is covered in our piece on the 2026 EU thresholds in passenger transport tenders.

A council paper from the district of Friesland shows how large such lots become. The district tendered exempt school transport for the school years 2023/24 to 2025/26, covering around 500 of roughly 5,000 pupils entitled to transport. For them, either no scheduled service is within reach or health reasons rule out using the service bus. The contract volume came to around 2.5 million euros per year, which is why it went out EU-wide. The award was made in March rather than June so that the taxi operators could plan before the school year started on 17 August 2023.

Whether an authority may instead treat the arrangement as an internal organisational measure was the subject of review proceedings early on. In its decision of 31 August 2005 (case no. VgK 35/05), the Vergabekammer Lüneburg (public procurement tribunal) dealt with a district-owned transport company and the in-house requirements developed by the Court of Justice of the EU. For practice, this means the exception exists, that it is narrow, and that it does not hold simply because the service happens to be exempt transport.

Federal law and state law have to be checked separately here. The Freistellungs-Verordnung is federal law and applies uniformly across Germany. Whether and to what extent a child has any entitlement to school transport at all is governed by the school acts of the federal states and by district by-laws, and minimum distances, parental contributions and responsibility for journeys to special-needs schools differ considerably.

Because no licensing authority sits above the service, oversight moves entirely into the contract. The case officer at the school administration office checks whether the agreed service was delivered and pays only for what is evidenced. Your journey records are therefore the basis of your payment.

They want to know which tour ran on which school day with which vehicle and which driver, which children were actually on board and who was cancelled, ill or not found at the pick-up point, which journeys were dropped and when they were told about it, how late the arrival was against the agreed time, and what incidents occurred on board.

A sick call at 6:40, ten minutes before pick-up, is routine in school transport. Whether it later appears on the invoice as a cancelled journey or as a disputed empty run depends on whether somebody recorded it the moment the phone rang.

In many operations this evidence runs through paper sheets that the driver hands in at the end of the day and that the office types up afterwards. That works as long as nobody asks. It fails in February, when the client wants to know why a tour was dropped on a Tuesday back in September. The sheet is missing, the time is a guess, or the driver note and the invoice contradict each other. If you run your dispatch digitally, the evidence falls out as a by-product: status changes in the driver app, the digital pre-departure check and timestamps produce the same record without a second round of data entry. How this works together with schools and Schulträger is set out on our page for school transport authorities.

Even without a licence, an operation should be able to answer questions at any time. These documents belong in a folder you can produce within the hour if it comes to that:

• Contract or award letter with the full specification of services
• Vehicle list with seat numbers, registration details and dates of the main technical inspection
• Driver file per person: licence category, licence checks, extended criminal record certificate under section 30a BZRG, records of briefings
• Records of the daily pre-departure check under section 36 DGUV Vorschrift 70
• Working time records for driving staff
• Daily records of the tours driven, including cancellations, delays and incidents
• Record of processing activities and data processing agreements covering the pupil data

These records contain personal data about minors, often relating to disability or health. Set down which record is kept for how long and when it is deleted. The contractual duty to evidence and the data protection duty to erase have to fit together, and for the information from the extended criminal record certificate, section 30a BZRG requires deletion no later than six months after the activity ends. What applies to health information is written up in health data under Article 9 GDPR in passenger transport.

Most of these points arise in day-to-day operations anyway. They just sit in different places and have to be gathered up when the need arises.