Upper tier and lower tier, explained
The short answer
The difference in one line
Upper tier lets a business carry waste that somebody else produced. Lower tier does not.
That is the whole distinction, and for anyone booking a house clearance it is the only part that matters. A firm coming to take things away from your home needs upper tier.
How to tell them apart
The registration number says which is which.
| Upper tier | Lower tier | |
|---|---|---|
| Number begins | CBDU | CBDL |
| Permits carrying | anybody’s waste | only your own |
| Costs | £191.02, then £130.25 to renew | free |
| Lasts | three years | indefinitely |
The renewal difference is the one that catches people out. A lower tier registration never expires, so it will still be showing as current on the register decades after the business stopped trading. An upper tier registration lapses every three years unless somebody renews it, which is why the expiry date is worth a glance and not just the fact of registration.
Why lower tier exists at all
Because most businesses that move waste are not in the waste business.
A joiner takes their own offcuts to the tip. A landscaper carries away the hedge they have just cut. A garage moves its own scrap. None of them is offering a service to anybody, and it would be disproportionate to charge them £191 every three years for it. So they register at lower tier, for free, once.
Charities and voluntary organisations are lower tier for the same reason.
There is one exception worth knowing, because it trips up builders more than anyone. Construction and demolition waste is upper tier even when it is your own. A builder taking their own rubble away needs a CBDU registration, not a CBDL one.
The Environment Agency states the limit on lower tier plainly: a lower tier carrier may not offer a waste management service to others. It is not a cheaper version of the same permission. It is a different permission.
Two thirds of the register is lower tier
When we read the public register on 3 August 2026 it held 417,115 current registrations:
| Tier | Registrations | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Lower | 271,540 | 65.1% |
| Upper | 145,575 | 34.9% |
So the majority of what is on that register would not permit the holder to take your rubbish away. That is not a scandal, it is what you would expect given who lower tier is for. But it does mean the obvious way to check a firm is the wrong way. Searching a name, finding a registration and stopping there tells you almost nothing, because the most likely registration to find is one that does not cover the work.
Every listing on this site shows the tier, and so does the checker.
Neither tier is a mark of quality
This needs saying because the language invites the opposite reading. “Upper” sounds like a rank. It is not one.
The tiers describe what kind of waste activity a business is registered for. They say nothing about how long it has been trading, whether it is insured, whether it turns up on time, or whether it will treat your mother’s house with any care at all. A firm can hold a perfectly valid upper tier registration and be dreadful.
What a registration does tell you is that the business exists as a legal entity, that it has registered with the regulator as the law requires, and that its details are a matter of public record. That is a floor, not a recommendation. We publish the register, and we do not rate, vet or endorse anybody on it.
Where this comes from
Every figure and rule on this page is from the source beside it. Where the law is quoted, it is quoted from the statute rather than summarised from somebody else's summary.
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Every firm named on this site is checked against the Environment Agency's public register, and you can check any other firm against the same data in about ten seconds.