The Silvertown and Blackwall tunnels began charging in 2025, and TfL publishes a quarterly fact sheet on how the charge is paid and how many liable journeys are settled on time.
Its figures for the final quarter of 2025 tell a consistent story: most charges are paid automatically, compliance stays high, and tens of thousands of penalty notices still go out every month.
PCNs issued
Compliance rate
What this measures: Auto Pay / Fleet accounted for 84.88%, 84.81% and 83.70% of paid charges across October, November and December 2025. Compliance counts customers liable to pay the charge, and excludes exempt and fully discounted journeys. The two monthly measures use separate scales, so they are shown as two charts rather than one.
Source: TfL Tunnel User Charging Fact Sheet, October to December 2025
The headline is how ordinary this has become: more than 8 in 10 paid charges go through Auto Pay or a Fleet account, which means a card on file and an automatic deduction.
Auto Pay suits people who are happy with that arrangement. But it means linking your card and letting a company charge you, and for anyone who would rather not, a single missed charge is the thing that becomes a penalty. Even with compliance near 89%, TfL still issued between 77,000 and 87,000 notices every month.
One note on the compliance figure: it counts customers liable to pay, and leaves out journeys that are exempt or fully discounted, so it is narrower than a simple "nearly 9 in 10 drivers" reading suggests.