Detention Pay in Trucking: What It Is and How It Works

What is detention pay in trucking?

Detention pay is the hourly charge a motor carrier bills when a shipper or receiver holds its truck past the free time allowed in its contract. The threshold that, per FMCSA’s 2024 Federal Register notice, industry and researchers have used is dwell time exceeding 2 hours, but the rate confirmation or carrier agreement for the load sets the actual free time, the hourly rate and the proof required. Without those written terms, a long wait is a cost and not a receivable.

Regulators describe the wait, not the payment. FMCSA’s 2024 Federal Register notice says detention time “refers to the extra time CMV operators wait at shipping and receiving facilities due to delays not associated with the loading and unloading of cargo.” The same notice says there is “currently no standard definition of detention time” and that researchers have used dwell time exceeding 2 hours to mark where it begins.

The DOT Office of Inspector General found that most of the industry measures “only time spent at a shipper or receiver’s facility beyond the limit established in shipping contracts.” The limit is whatever the paperwork for that load says it is.

How does detention pay work?

Detention pay works as a clock with a written start, a free period and an hourly rate: once the free time runs out, each further billing increment is charged until the truck is released. Every one of those values comes from the rate con, and every time on the clock has to come from a record.

1. The terms are agreed before dispatch. The rate con states the free time, the hourly rate, the billing increment, any per-stop cap and whether the clock starts at arrival or at the appointment.
2. The truck arrives and the arrival is recorded. A gate log, a time written on the BOL by the facility, or an ELD position record establishes when the clock could start.
3. Free time runs. No charge accrues during this period. On a load with 2 hours of free time and an 08:00 start, detention begins at 10:00.
4. Detention accrues until release. The departure time is recorded the same way the arrival was. A truck released at 13:30 on that load has 3.5 billable hours.
5. The carrier invoices the payer named in its contract. The detention line goes on the freight invoice with the rate con, the signed BOL and the record the times came from.
6. The payer checks the claim against its own terms. The invoice is measured against the rate con, so the detention line has to match its free time, rate and increment, and the times have to match the attached record.

The calculation is the easy part: billable hours times the rate. It takes the two times and the terms on the rate confirmation, and the part a payer disputes is not the multiplication but who recorded each time.

Who pays detention, and who receives it?

The party that hired the carrier pays the detention charge, and the driver receives detention pay only if the carrier’s pay plan or lease provides for it. These are two payments under two agreements, and one can be paid while the other is not.

The facility where the delay happened is not necessarily the party that pays. On a brokered load the carrier’s contract is with the broker, so the carrier bills the broker. Whatever the shipper agreed with the broker sits in a contract the carrier is not a party to, which is why the carrier’s claim rests on the detention term in its own broker-carrier agreement or rate con.

Drivers carry the gap. FMCSA’s notice states plainly: “Drivers are often not paid for this extra time.” The Inspector General estimated in 2018 that detention is associated with reductions in annual earnings of $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion for for-hire truckload drivers.

Is detention pay required by federal law?

No, not by the hours-of-service rules: 49 CFR 395.2 and 395.3 count the wait against the driver’s day but do not mention free time or a detention rate, which leaves the right to bill to the contract. FMCSA completed a study of detention time in 2014 and, in its 2024 notice, was still proposing to collect data and reporting that no standard definition exists.

What the rules do regulate is the driver’s clock. 49 CFR 395.2 includes in on-duty time “attending a commercial motor vehicle being loaded or unloaded” and time at a shipper’s property “waiting to be dispatched, unless the driver has been relieved from duty by the motor carrier.” 49 CFR 395.3 then bars driving after the 14-hour period that begins when the driver comes on duty. A wait at the dock can use up that window with no miles to show for it.

This article reads only those two sections. Other federal regulations, state law, wage-and-hour rules for employee drivers and the terms of a specific lease are not examined here, and what a carrier owes its driver is a separate question from what the carrier may bill a customer.

How often is detention actually paid?

Fewer than 50% of detention invoices are paid, even though 94.5% of fleets charge detention fees, according to ATRI’s 2024 research. Billing is nearly universal. Collecting is not.

The ATRI release puts the scale in four numbers, all for 2023:

• Drivers reported being detained in 39.3% of all stops.
• In for-hire trucking, time lost to detention exceeded 135 million hours.
• The industry lost $3.6 billion in direct expenses.
• It lost a further $11.5 billion in productivity.

ATRI’s release frames detention as being held at a customer facility for more than two hours, and it describes its inputs as what drivers reported and as industry-reported data. Measurement was already a known limit: the Inspector General found in 2018 that available electronic data “cannot readily discern detention time from legitimate loading and unloading tasks.”

Why detention goes uncollected

ATRI’s release does not say why invoices go unpaid. catuh’s position is that a detention claim can be lost before the invoice is written: the wait happened, but nobody with standing recorded when the truck arrived, when the free time ran out or when it left, and the payer is left with the carrier’s reconstruction.

catuh’s Capture-First Method names the order that fixes this: audit, instrument capture, automate. Audit which times and terms are missing from past claims, put the capture in place at the point where the time occurs, and only then automate the billing. Automating an invoice built on times nobody recorded produces a faster rejection.

A claim that survives review has three things in writing:

1. A detention rate on the rate con for that load.
2. A free-time period and the event that starts it, arrival or appointment.
3. A source for each time: the facility’s gate log, the in and out times on the signed BOL, or an ELD location report, which shows where the truck was but not when it passed the gate. The BOL is the document both sides already hold, which makes it the cheapest place to capture them.

When detention pay does not apply

Detention is not owed just because a truck waited. The conditions are in the contract for the load, and Uber Freight’s published accessorial policy for carriers, which covers non-hazmat loads tendered by its brokerage, shows the kind of terms to look for.

• No detention term in the contract. With no written free time and rate, there is nothing to bill against.
• The wait stayed inside free time. A wait shorter than the free period bills nothing.
• The truck missed its appointment. Uber Freight’s policy counts eligible hours from 2 hours after the scheduled appointment time, and states: “In order to qualify for detention, the carrier must be on time to the scheduled appointment time.”
• A notice or filing deadline was missed. The same policy says detention requests “must be submitted within 24 hours of delivery,” and that a carrier unable to share location data must notify the broker 30 minutes prior to entering detention.
• The hours ran past a cap. That policy pays a maximum of 5 hours of detention.
• The delay was paid as layover. The policy treats layover as a separate, per-day accessorial: “Carriers are not eligible for both detention and layover at the same stop, covering the same time period.”

Those are one broker’s terms, not a standard. Another payer’s rate con can set different free time, deadlines and caps.