Updated Heavy Vehicle Load Restraint Guide (2025)

In 2025, regulators are not reinventing load restraint. They are doubling down on it.

The release of the NHVR Load Restraint Guide 2025, alongside refreshed education materials from Safe Work Australia, makes one thing clear. Accurate, adequate load restraint remains a frontline control in heavy vehicle safety, and regulators are still seeing the same failures play out on Australian roads.

Despite decades of guidance, load shift, load loss, and inadequate restraint continue to feature in serious incidents, enforcement action, and prosecutions. The updated guidance does not introduce radical new concepts. It tightens expectations, clarifies ambiguities, and reinforces what duty holders should already be doing.

Adequate load restraint is important for road safety and heavy vehicle compliance.

**At the time of writing, to my WA and NT readers, your state and territory have yet to adopt the Heavy Vehicle National Law; however, duties exist to ensure heavy vehicle operators are safe on the roads, including adequate load restraint.

What changes have been made in the Load Restraint Guide 2025?

The Load Restraint Guide 2025, released by the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator, builds on previous editions but sharpens the focus on practical compliance and verification.

The most significant update is clarity. The guide more clearly distinguishes between containment and restraint, an issue that continues to trip up operators who use curtains, side gates, or headboards as if they were restraint systems. Unless rated and designed as an engineered restraint, they are not to be relied upon to secure loads.

The guide also reinforces expectations around restraint calculations, not assumptions. The rated capacity of chains, webbing, binders, anchor points, and vehicle structures must be understood and matched to the load's mass and the forces likely to be encountered during normal driving, braking, cornering, and emergency manoeuvres.

The guide places greater emphasis on solutions specific to the load. Generic restraint approaches are increasingly called out as insufficient for irregular, high-risk, or dynamic loads such as steel products, machinery, concrete elements, or mixed freight. Importantly, the guide continues to align closely with Chain of Responsibility obligations. Responsibility does not sit solely with the driver. Consignors, loaders, packers, schedulers, and operators all have enforceable duties to ensure loads are restrained so they will not shift or fall from the vehicle.

The message is familiar, but the tolerance for getting it wrong is shrinking.

Regulatory focus

While working as an inspector with WorkSafe Victoria, I was fortunate to get to know some members of Victoria Police's Heavy Vehicle Unit, including conducting joint roadside inspections of heavy vehicles. One notable difference between the two agencies' approach to regulation and enforcement was that WorkSafe focuses on the risk of something happening, while the HVU crew focuses more on direct compliance. WorkSafe Victoria uses the direct compliance model when applying the regulations, but not necessarily when applying the OHS Act by itself (greater play with the articulation of risk).

From an enforcement standpoint, load restraint remains straightforward. It is visible, measurable, and well-documented.

Regulators and police continue to issue infringement notices and improvement notices and, in serious cases, pursue prosecutions where inadequate restraint exposes road users to risk. The long-established guidance benefits both parties. This approach eliminates any potential justifications.

In accordance with the then-current 2004 Load Restraint Guide, my first encounter with load restraint revealed insufficient straps applied to B-double loads. Let’s just say I learned quickly how to de-escalate highly opinionated, change-averse operational staff (workers and managers). Regrettably, it required a roadside inspection to confirm what was already known: a shortage of nearly 20 straps, evidence of a load shift, and a harrowing recovery along the Hume Highway in NSW. I received a good deal of funding for load restraint equipment and training after that breach...

Load restraint failures are also increasingly viewed through a systems lens. Investigations are less focused on whether the driver threw enough straps and more on whether the business provided suitable equipment, training, loading instructions, and time to do the job properly.

In short, paperwork will not restrain a load. Physics does not care about policies.

Safe Work Australia reinforces this message.

Safe Work Australia echoes the same theme. In 2025, Safe Work Australia released updated educational materials and a webinar on effective load restraint in transport operations.

The emphasis is not on novel controls but on understanding risk. The resource walks through how loads behave during movement, how restraint systems fail when misused, and how poor upstream loading decisions create downstream risks for drivers and the public.

This material is particularly useful for PCBUs outside traditional transport businesses, including manufacturers, warehouses, and construction sites that load vehicles but do not operate them. The duty to manage risk does not end at the loading dock.

The video from Safe Work Australia is below:

Safe Work Australia’s Effective Load Restraint Video

Practical resources worth bookmarking

For duty holders serious about compliance, the following resources should already be part of your toolkit.

The NHVR Load Restraint Guide 2025 is the primary reference document for heavy vehicle load restraint in Australia and is available at nhvr.gov.au.

Safe Work Australia’s transport and load restraint resources, including webinars and explanatory material on effective load restraint, are available at safeworkaustralia.gov.au.

The National Road Safety Partnership Program (NRSPP) has a volume of guides on road safety, including Load Restraint Basics.

Operators should also refer to manufacturer specifications for restraint equipment, vehicle bodies, and anchor points, and ensure that site-specific loading instructions reflect the guidance in the national guide and other knowledge out there (e.g. Load Excluzion Zone (LUEZ) Guidelines)

If your load restraint approach relies on “how we’ve always done it”, that should be a warning sign, not a comfort.

And no, it doesn’t matter if you’re only travelling around the corner or down the road...

Thanks for moving our country forward safely.

Without Trucks, Australia Stops!