Continuing Training for Taxi and Private-Hire Drivers: Fourteen Hours Every Five Years

It is the appointment that shapes the French taxi and private-hire training market, and the least discussed: the fourteen-hour continuing-training course that every driver performing private passenger-transport services must complete every five years.

For the driver, it is a periodic obligation. For a training centre, it is the sector’s only segment that is both recurring and reserved.

The arrangements, precisely

The course comprises fourteen hours of training. They may be split into four periods of three and a half hours, over a maximum span of two months.

It is delivered in person, at a training centre approved under article R. 3120-9 of the French transport code. The arrangements for this continuing training, like those for the taxi drivers’ mobility course, were set by an order of 11 August 2017.

The content is organised into compulsory deepening modules, covering in particular the law of private passenger transport and the regulations specific to the activity performed — taxi or private hire, depending on the trainee’s profession. The stated aim is to refresh the knowledge essential to practising the trade.

Completion of the obligation is evidenced by a certificate valid for five years.

Why this segment is different

Three features clearly set it apart from T3P exam preparation.

It is mandatory. Where initial training remains optional — the exam run by the chambers of trades and crafts is open to independent candidates — the continuing-training course applies to every working driver.

It is recurring. Each driver returns after five years. A centre established for several years therefore holds a portfolio whose deadlines it knows, which changes the predictability of its business entirely.

It is reserved. The wording “in person, at an approved centre” simultaneously excludes unapproved providers and fully online offers. It is an explicit barrier to entry, and it is what economically justifies seeking approval, as described in our guide to opening a taxi or private-hire training centre.

A fourth, narrower block completes the picture: mobility training. A taxi driver holding a valid professional card who wishes to continue working in another département must take a fourteen-hour course, delivered at an approved centre located in the département where they intend to operate. That territoriality makes mobility a local market, not a national one.

A word of caution on vocabulary: the “VTC-to-taxi bridge”, a common marketing phrase, does not refer to this mobility course. Mobility training concerns taxi drivers changing département, not moving from one profession to the other. Selling one as the other exposes the centre to a dispute.

What the centre must maintain

Three practical obligations frame the organisation of sessions.

Respecting the format. Fourteen hours, in person, splitting limited to four sequences over two months. A pathway that stretches beyond that, or that shifts partly online, no longer meets the prescribed arrangements — with a direct risk to the trainee, whose certificate loses its value.

Issuing and tracing the certificate. This is the approved centre’s main output. Attendance sheets, session register, copies of certificates issued: together they make it possible to answer an inspection without reconstructing the history under pressure.

Matching the module to the trainee’s profession. The specific regulations taught differ for a taxi driver and a private-hire driver. Mixing audiences in a single sequence on that module strips the course of its purpose.

Fourteen hours to what end?

A substantive question deserves asking, including by centres themselves: does a two-day periodic course change anything?

The literature counsels clear-headedness on one point. The Cochrane systematic review by Katharine Ker, Ian Roberts, Timothy Collier and colleagues, on driver education after licensing, finds no evidence that such programmes prevent road traffic crashes or injuries; given the very large number of participants pooled in the meta-analysis, the authors rule out even modest benefits with reasonable precision (see the study). Post-licence training designed as a generic driving refresher therefore has little chance of producing measurable effects on crash rates.

That finding does not invalidate the French scheme — whose compulsory modules are about law and regulation, not driving — but it does indicate where to place the teaching effort.

A second body of work suggests a more promising angle. The systematic review by Saeed Jaydarifard, Krishna Behara, Douglas Baker and Alexander Paz, published in 2024 in Transport Reviews and devoted to fatigue among taxi and ride-hailing drivers, identifies eight contributing factors — among them long working hours, short rest breaks, poor sleep, demand pressure and algorithmic management — and concludes that fatigue there is as serious as, or more serious than, in other transport sectors (see the study).

In other words: the regulated contact time exists, it is guaranteed, and it is one of the rare moments when a room full of otherwise isolated professionals is available. A centre that turns it into concrete regulatory updating — changes in the applicable rules, organising working time, managing fatigue, dealing with platforms — gets more out of it than a centre running a generic slide deck.

Managing your portfolio’s deadlines

For an established centre, the management routine is short.

A register of deadlines by name, fed after each session: name, profession, course date, certificate expiry. Built once, then maintained.

A reminder six months before expiry, backed by one at three. Independent drivers have no training department to think of it for them, and an expired certificate puts them in immediate difficulty.

Grouping into waves, which fills sessions and avoids three-trainee groups — a compulsory classroom format only pays when the room is full.

Take action

If you run an approved centre, pull out your session history and build the deadline register: it is the most immediate source of business you have. If you are preparing to open, size your project on this segment rather than on exam preparation. The T3P training-centre approval page lists the courses reserved to approved centres, and our article on the qualifications required of trainers deals with the most common sticking point in application files.