A driver for a twelve-truck carrier checks in at a distribution center at 7:40 for an 8:00 appointment. The dock is backed up, nobody gives a reason, and the truck is not unloaded until early afternoon. By then the driver has burned most of a day's hours, the next pickup has to be pushed, and the dispatcher has spent part of the morning on the phone shuffling loads. In principle the carrier is owed detention for the wait. In practice, whether that money ever arrives depends on a short chain of small administrative steps, most of which have to happen while the truck is still sitting at the dock.
That chain is where small fleets lose. The waiting itself is common and largely outside the carrier's control. What a carrier can control is whether a delay becomes a clean, documented claim that a broker or shipper will actually pay, and for most small operations that process runs on memory, phone calls and a dispatcher who has twenty other things to do.
A routine cost that rarely gets recovered
The scale is not in dispute. In research published by the American Transportation Research Institute, drivers reported being detained at 39.3 percent of all stops in 2023, and the share was considerably higher for refrigerated freight and for fleets working the spot market. ATRI put the cost to the industry at $3.6 billion in direct expenses and $11.5 billion in lost productivity for that year. The figure that matters most for a small carrier's books is a different one: 94.5 percent of fleets charge detention fees, but fewer than half of those invoices are paid.
Source: American Transportation Research Institute
View data
| Stops with detention | |
|---|---|
| Refrigerated | 56.2% |
| Spot market fleets | 42.5% |
| All stops | 39.3% |
For a large fleet with a claims team and contracted lanes, an unpaid detention invoice is an annoyance. For a carrier running a handful of trucks on brokered freight, a few unpaid afternoons a week is the difference between a truck that earns its payment and one that does not. The money is also lumpy and late. Detention is often invoiced separately from the linehaul, approved on the broker's timeline and paid weeks after the load, if at all.
Where a detention claim falls apart
Owners and drivers describing their losses in trucking forums tell a remarkably consistent story, and it is rarely that the wait was disputed outright. More often the claim failed on a technicality. The detention terms were not written on the rate confirmation, so the broker treated the charge as unagreed. The driver did not notify the broker within the window the rate confirmation required, or notified the dispatcher, who meant to pass it on. The only record of the in and out times was a handwritten note on the bill of lading, which the broker said was not proof. The receiver would not sign or stamp the times at all.
Each of these is a small failure, but they compound because of how brokered freight is structured. The broker who owes the carrier usually has to collect from the shipper first, and the shipper's facility is the one that controls the dock, the clock and the paperwork. A broker with a thin margin and a shipper who disputes the delay has every incentive to find a reason the carrier's claim is incomplete. Small carriers also negotiate from a weak position. When owner-operators filed comments urging federal regulators to make brokers pay for detention, one noted, as FreightWaves reported, that established carriers are "able to negotiate a maximum wait time," an option a small operation rarely has.
The terms also differ on almost every load. Free time varies from broker to broker. One rate confirmation requires notice shortly before the free time expires, another wants a detention request form, a third wants GPS evidence. Keeping all of that straight across dozens of loads a week, while dispatching, is the actual job, and it is a job nobody at a small carrier has time to do carefully.
What fleets have tried
Carriers are not passive about this. The common advice among owners is to refuse loads without detention terms on the rate confirmation, to make a documented check call the moment free time runs out, to photograph gate clocks and stamped paperwork, and to stop hauling for brokers who do not pay. Some pursue broker bond claims or small claims court for larger amounts. These steps work, but each one relies on a person remembering to do it at the right moment, and the moment is usually when the dispatcher is busiest.
Software has narrowed the gap without closing it. Electronic logging devices and trailer telematics already record when a truck arrives and leaves a facility, and broker tracking platforms capture much of the same data. Many transportation management systems sold to smaller fleets offer some form of detention tracking. Yet the data rarely flows into a claim on its own. In a recent Trucking Info article, the owner of a 150-truck fleet put it bluntly: "We pay for our TMS's detention module, but our dispatchers are still doing 99% of the work." The module may flag that a truck has been at a geofence too long, but it does not read the specific rate confirmation, send the notice in the form that broker wants, attach the right evidence or follow up when the invoice goes quiet.
More data, and more scrutiny
Two things have changed. The first is regulatory attention. FMCSA is preparing a 2027 pilot that would let drivers pause their 14-hour window for qualifying time spent at pickup or delivery locations, and the agency has said it will monitor shippers during the pilot to see whether the added flexibility leads to more detention. That does not put money in a carrier's account, but it keeps detention measured and visible, and it gives carriers with good records more standing in disputes.
The second is that the documents involved are now readable by software. Rate confirmations arrive as PDFs in email, check calls happen by text and email, and arrival and departure times sit in ELD and telematics data that most fleets already pay for. Language models can extract the detention clause from a rate confirmation, including the free time, hourly rate, notice window and evidence requirements, which rule-based tools could not do reliably across the many formats brokers use.
A custom-built automation for this problem would connect those pieces for a specific fleet. It would read each rate confirmation as it arrives, watch the truck's location data against the appointment, send the broker a timestamped notice in the required form before the window closes, assemble the evidence packet when the truck leaves, and track the invoice until it is paid or disputed. Dispatchers would still handle the judgement calls and the difficult conversations. What changes is that a valid claim no longer depends on someone remembering it during the worst part of their day.