Wheel Nut Torque Chart

Full chart

Wheel nut and bolt torque for 30 UK vehicles

Newton metres, with the socket size and thread where we could source them. Every row says where its figure came from: 3 were read out of a manufacturer’s own handbook text, and 27come from UK trade sources, mostly a tyre fitter’s published database. Vehicles that publish more than one figure get a row each.

Some vehicles are missing deliberately. The Mercedes-Benz Sprinter, the Vauxhall Corsa F from 2019, the Land Rover Discovery, the Mini and the Kia Sportage before 2016 all have sources that conflict badly enough that we would rather publish nothing than publish a guess. Read their figure out of the handbook.

If your vehicle is not listed: torque by thread size

A fallback, not a substitute for the handbook. Stay at the low end of the range for alloy wheels, and have a workshop check any stud or bolt that has been over-tightened before. It does not work for trailers: there the maker sets the figure, not the thread.

The procedure, in order

1. Your vehicle's own handbook beats every table on this page. Look for the figure in the owner's handbook, on the tyre placard, or from the dealer or van builder first, and only fall back to a table if you cannot find one. Everything on this page is a cross-check, not a substitute: it is here so you can tell whether a number you have been handed is roughly right. A generic figure cannot know what wheels are fitted, what the hub is, or how the seats are shaped.
2. Two generation traps on this page will put you a fifth or more out. The Vauxhall Astra is the worst. The G and H are 110 Nm and the J, K and L are 140 Nm, so an Astra H owner who uses the newer figure is 27 per cent over, and a J owner who uses the older one is 21 per cent under. The BMW step is the same size but it has a cause you can check by hand: 120 Nm on the older M12 x 1.5 wheel bolt and 140 Nm on the M14 x 1.25 bolt BMW moved to from around 2011. On a BMW, pick the figure off the bolt rather than the model year, because a car that has had replacement bolts or aftermarket wheels can be either. The same 120 to 140 Nm step appears on the Mk8 Golf and the Audi A3 8Y from 2020. Over-torquing stretches the fastener permanently and warps discs; under-torquing lets the wheel work loose. Neither error announces itself until something goes wrong.
3. Half the cars here use bolts, not nuts, and the job is different. Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Vauxhall hold the wheel on with bolts that thread straight into the hub. There is no stud to hang the wheel on while you start the first fastener, so take the weight on the jack or screw a guide pin into one hole, start every bolt by hand and feel it pick up the thread, and never let a wheel hang on a part-started bolt. Cross-threading a stud costs you a stud. Cross-threading a hub costs you a hub. The Japanese and Korean cars on this page, and the Fords, use nuts on studs instead.
4. Tighten in a star or criss-cross pattern, never around the clock. Go across the wheel, not around it. Number the holes clockwise from the top before you start, then work the sequence for your count. Four: 1, 3, 2, 4. Five: 1, 3, 5, 2, 4, skipping one each time. Six: 1, 4, 2, 5, 3, 6, so every one is followed by the one opposite it. Count before you assume: several cars on this page are four stud, including the Fiesta, the Mk1 Focus, the Mk3 Polo and the Yaris. Going around the clock pulls the wheel off centre and leaves you with uneven clamp and a shudder.
5. Tighten in stages, and do the final torque with the wheel on the ground. Fit every fastener by hand first so you know none are cross threaded. Snug them up in the star pattern. Lower the vehicle so the tyre takes the weight, then do the final pass with the torque wrench in the same star pattern, in two goes: roughly half the figure, then the full figure. Torquing with the wheel in the air lets it shift on the studs and gives you a false reading.
6. Clean the hub face and the seats first, or the torque is a lie. Continental's explanation of re-torquing is the useful part of the whole subject: the fasteners and the mating faces bed in as the wheel is used, and dirt, rust or grit between the faces creates a false torque, where the wrench clicks without ever developing real clamp load. Rust scale, mud or a stone trapped between wheel and hub compresses in the first few miles and the fasteners go slack. That is the single most common reason a correctly torqued wheel comes loose on the way home.
7. Re-check after 25 to 50 miles, and take the shortest interval you have been given. UK bodies genuinely differ and their numbers must not be averaged. The NTTA, the trailer trade body, says 25 miles and is the most conservative. Continental says 30 miles. IOTA says 50 km. The Caravan and Motorhome Club says 20 to 30 miles, the Camping and Caravanning Club says 50. These are advisory conventions rather than one standard, so take the shortest one that applies to you, and on a caravan or trailer check again before every journey. Put a reminder in your phone before you drive off.
8. Never oil, grease or copper slip the threads. Volkswagen's handbook says it without conditions for wheel bolts, and every published torque figure on this page assumes clean dry threads. The wheel stud engineering report behind the thread ceilings is explicit that lubricant or anti-seize invalidates the torque figure. Put oil, grease or copper slip on a thread and the same reading on the wrench produces far more clamp load, which stretches the fastener. If your threads are seizing, clean them with a wire brush or replace them. Do not guess a reduced torque to compensate: no manufacturer publishes a de-rating factor for wheels, and a click wrench cannot read a lubricated joint reliably enough to build a procedure on.
9. One smooth pull to one click, then stop. Pull the wrench smoothly and steadily, and stop the moment it clicks. Do not jerk it, and do not click it again on a fastener that has already clicked, because each extra click adds torque on top of what is already there. Going round a second time to check is fine only if you stop at the first click each time. This is the most common way a careful person over-tightens: they do the sequence twice for peace of mind and end up 20 per cent over. We could not find a published UK document that spells this out, so treat it as workshop practice rather than a manufacturer instruction, although it is consistent with every torque wrench manual we have read.
10. Where a maker states it, the figure covers steel and alloy wheels alike. This is worth saying because it is the opposite of what people expect. Volkswagen states 120 Nm for steel and alloy wheels alike on the Golf and the Polo. Toyota gives 103 Nm whether steel or factory aluminium alloy. Kia and Hyundai give their 108 to 127 Nm range for steel and aluminium alloy wheels alike. Where a split is claimed we could not certify it: the Mercedes-Benz Sprinter is reported at 240 Nm on steel and 180 Nm on alloy, which would be the largest split anywhere in this data at 33 per cent, but the only source that explains it is the American manual, so the Sprinter is not on this page at all. The AL-KO caravan hub is the same story and is flagged on its row. If your car is on aftermarket wheels rather than factory ones, none of this applies and the wheel supplier's figure governs.
11. Published figures assume the factory fastener, the factory seat and the factory rim. Change any of those and the number may no longer apply. Conical 60 degree taper seats, ball seats and flat seats are not interchangeable. Fit the wrong seat and the fastener only touches the wheel on an edge, and it will come loose whatever torque you used. With closed-end nuts, run the nut down the full length of the stud before fitting the wheel to make sure it does not bottom out before it clamps: a nut that bottoms out feels tight on the wrench and is holding nothing. And do not buy replacement nuts or bolts against a thread size listed on any website, this one included. M12 x 1.5 and M12 x 1.25 are both common here and look identical in your hand. Take an existing one off your own vehicle and match it at the counter.
12. There is no legal torque figure for a private car in the UK, but there is liability. No MOT test item covers wheel nut torque. The MOT checks for fasteners that are missing, loose or damaged, not for a number, so nobody should tell you a private car has a legal torque requirement. Where it does bite is afterwards. IOTA's point is that for anyone running vehicles commercially, wheel loss threatens the operator's licence, torque records belong in the maintenance file, and the defence that the tyre fitter did them up does not stand. IOTA also refers to a DVSA wheel torque guide, which we could not locate as a document and therefore cannot cite.
13. On a trailer, ask whose running gear it is before you ask what the thread is. This is the one place where the usual advice to work from the thread size is actively dangerous. The NTTA's table gives three different figures for the same 1/2 inch UNF nut: Indespension 76 Nm, Avonride 88 Nm and Peak Trailers 109 Nm, a 43 per cent spread. Those are not conflicting reports of one number, they are three manufacturers' different specifications. The same happens on M14, where AL-KO says 146 Nm and Indespension says 81. Look for the maker's plate on the axle or the chassis, or ask the dealer, before you set the wrench, and if you cannot identify the running gear, do not pick a middle value. A second UK supplier publishes a different set again, including 90 Nm for a 1/2 inch UNF nut, which is a reminder that these tables are trade guidance and your own running gear maker's figure wins. BPW is deliberately not covered here: its figures are set by axle load rather than by thread and we could not verify them.
14. A torque stick is a ceiling, not a setting. A torque stick is a deliberately springy 1/2 inch drive extension that sits between an impact wrench and the socket. It twists and soaks up the hammer blows once the fastener reaches roughly its rated torque, so the gun stops driving past that point. Much of UK fast-fit works this way rather than with a calibrated click wrench, which is exactly why the advice to re-check your own wheels exists. Colour coding is not an industry standard: it varies by brand, and a set sold here may use a colour for a rating another brand uses for something else. Read the Nm or lb-ft rating stamped on the stick in your hand, never the colour. As one example of how arbitrary it is, one American brand's set runs green 65 lb-ft, black 75, yellow 80, red 90, blue 100, orange 110, grey 120, brown 130, white 140 and aqua 150, and it does not claim to be a standard. Whatever the colour, a stick stops a shop over-tightening. It does not tell you the fastener reached the number. You still finish with a torque wrench.
15. If the vehicle is not listed, fall back on the thread, carefully. Use the vehicle manufacturer's specification, and only if none is available fall back to the thread size table. When you do fall back, take the low end of the range rather than the high end, and get the real number from the handbook, the placard or a dealer as soon as you can. Two hard limits on that fallback. It does not work for trailers, where the maker sets the number and not the thread. And a general metric bolt torque chart is not a substitute: those charts assume a different joint and a different purpose and give far higher numbers. Under-torqued fasteners come loose and over-torqued ones snap, and a generic table cannot tell which risk your vehicle is closer to.

What the impact wrench is actually for

• ▸An impact wrench loosens, a torque wrench tightens. That is the whole rule. Use the gun to crack the fasteners and to run them back down until they are snug, then put the gun away and do the final pass with a calibrated torque wrench in a star pattern, with the wheel on the ground. Tightening by feel with an impact wrench risks over-tightening, which stretches studs and cracks alloy wheels, or under-tightening, which lets the wheel loosen in service, and you have no way of knowing which one you did.
• ▸What the nut-busting number on the box actually means. It is a breakaway figure, measured in reverse on a stiff test joint under ideal conditions, and brands do not all measure it the same way, so two guns quoting 900 Nm are not necessarily comparable. Many guns also quote a lower fastening torque, and that figure is just as much a test bench number. What your gun puts into a fastener on the way in depends on battery charge or air pressure, hose length, how long you hold the trigger, the socket and extension on it, and whether the threads are dry. None of that is repeatable and none of it is measured, which is why the trailer trade body's guidance is that the final torque is set with a wrench and not a gun. A high nut-busting rating buys you the ability to get a seized fastener off. It buys you nothing at all on the way back in.
• ▸How much nut-busting torque you actually need. The vehicle figures on this page run from 90 Nm on a Mk1 Focus to 200 Nm on a Transit, with most cars between 110 and 140 Nm. Breaking one loose takes considerably more than it took to tighten it, because of rust, road salt, the seat bedding in, and the fact that plenty of cars were last done up by a gun on full noise. A 1/2 inch impact wrench with 400 to 600 Nm of breakaway is enough for normal car wheel fasteners, and 600 to 800 Nm gives you margin on corroded or over-tightened ones. Buy on the nut-busting figure, not the fastening figure, because the fastening figure is a number you must not use.
• ▸For fasteners that have not moved in years, or a van that lives on salted winter roads, go higher again. A pneumatic 1/2 inch wrench at 1000 Nm or more is the tool that handles commercial vehicle wheels and genuinely stubborn rusted fasteners. If you are buying one tool for a workshop that sees Transits and caravans as well as cars, the 1000 Nm class is the one that will not leave you leaning on a breaker bar at the roadside.
• ▸Do not use an impact driver for this job. An impact driver is the 1/4 inch hex tool for screws. Its hex chuck and bits are not built for the side load of a wheel fastener, and the bit or the chuck is what gives way. Output is typically under about 200 Nm and often well under, which is frequently not enough to break loose a properly torqued or corroded wheel nut anyway. What you want is a 1/2 inch square drive impact wrench with impact rated sockets. Standard chrome sockets can shatter on an impact wrench.
• ▸The torque wrench to buy for this job. The figures on this page run from 54 Nm on a small AL-KO trailer bolt to 200 Nm on a Transit, with almost every car between 90 and 140 Nm. A 1/2 inch drive click type torque wrench covering roughly 50 to 210 Nm reaches every vehicle and trailer figure here. Click wrenches are least accurate at the very bottom and the very top of their range, so if you mostly do one car, pick a wrench whose middle sits near your number. Have it checked for calibration every couple of years or after you drop it, and always wind it back to its lowest setting before it goes in the drawer, because leaving the spring loaded takes the calibration off.

Caravans, trailers and horseboxes

On UK running gear the thread does not decide the figure, the maker does. A 1/2 inch UNF nut is 76 Nm on an Indespension hub, 88 Nm on an Avonride and 109 Nm on a Peak Trailers: a 43 per cent spread on an identical thread, and three manufacturers’ specifications rather than three guesses at one. Find the maker’s plate on the axle or the chassis first. Every figure below comes from the NTTA, the UK trailer and towing trade body, so all of them are secondary rather than hub manufacturers’ own documents, and a figure your running gear maker or van builder gives you in writing beats this table. BPW is not listed: it specifies by axle load rather than by thread and we could not verify those figures.