Sewage sludge is a residue of wastewater processing that is biologically active and consists of water, organic matter, including dead and living pathogens, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and heavy metals, as well as organic and inorganic pollutants. Landfilling is on the decline, giving way to more environmentally friendly utilisation routes, such as thermal utilisation. Hydrothermal carbonisation has shown to be effective in facilitating mechanical dewatering of sewage sludge, thus bringing important energy savings. However, even such improvement is insufficient as it is incapable of removing all the moisture. Therefore, drying is still needed as a pre-treatment before other thermal utilisation techniques like combustion or gasification. For high efficiency drying, relatively low temperatures are needed, in order to enable recovery of the latent heat from vapours at the outlet of the dryer. Some information on mechanical dewatering of HTC treated sewage sludge are available in the published literature. However, the influence of HTC on drying process and its kinetics has never been a subject of comprehensive investigation. This study presents experimental results of drying of sewage sludge digestate, as well as the effect of HTC pre-treatment on performance of such drying, due to lower initial moisture content. Drying was performed at temperatures ranging between 100°C and 80°C, at a bespoke experimental tape dryer rig.