Freight answers
Who pays for detention?
The carrier bills whoever hired it. If you hired the carrier directly, you get the bill. If a broker hired it, the broker usually pays the carrier and bills you. Whether you can pass the cost on to the building that caused the wait depends on your contract with that building.
That is the short answer. The longer one is about evidence: detention is one of the most disputed charges in freight because the two sides rarely hold the same record of when the truck arrived and when it left.
What detention is
Detention is the charge for holding a driver at a facility past the free time allowed for loading or unloading. Free time is typically two hours. After that, the carrier bills by the hour at the rate in the rate confirmation.
It is not a rare event. Industry data puts detention at roughly 39% of truckload stops, at an industry cost of more than $15 billion a year. The sourced figures are in our field guide.
Who gets the bill, by situation
| Situation | Who the carrier bills | Who may end up paying |
|---|---|---|
| You hired the carrier directly | You | You, or the facility that caused the wait if your contract with it allows a charge-back |
| A broker hired the carrier | The broker | Usually you, because the broker passes it through under your agreement with the broker |
| The wait was at your 3PL's dock | Whoever hired the carrier | You or the 3PL, depending on who caused the wait and what your warehouse agreement says |
| The wait was at your customer's receiving dock | Whoever hired the carrier | Often you, unless your sales terms let you bill the customer |
| The driver arrived late | Whoever hired the carrier | Often nobody: many contracts void detention when the truck missed its appointment |
This is the pattern, not the law. The rate confirmation and your own contracts decide every row. Read them before a bill arrives, not after.
What your contract should answer
Most detention arguments are really arguments about terms nobody wrote down. These are the ones worth settling in advance:
- How much free time is allowed, and is it different for live loads and drop trailers?
- Does the clock start when the truck arrives, when it checks in, or at the appointment time?
- What happens to detention if the driver arrives early, or late?
- Is time billed by the hour, or in smaller increments, and how is it rounded?
- Is there a cap per stop, and how soon after the stop must the carrier bill?
- What evidence does the carrier have to send with the bill?
Work out a detention charge
Enter the times from the visit. The calculation rounds billable time up to the next quarter hour, which is how Dock Optimizer calculates it. Your contract may round differently.
Enter a check-in and check-out time.
Why detention gets disputed
Each company in the chain keeps its own record of the same visit, and they rarely match.
- Two clocks. The driver logs one arrival time and the dock's sign-in sheet shows another.
- No check-out time. Nobody wrote down when the truck actually left, so the length of the wait is a guess.
- Who caused it. The facility says the truck was late. The carrier says the dock wasn't ready. Neither has the other's record.
- The bill arrives weeks later. By then the people who were at the dock have moved on to other loads.
For a shipper whose freight moves through other companies' buildings, this is one of several places where two records of one event drift apart. Our shipper guide maps the rest, from the first order change to the chargeback.
What to record at the dock
The fix is a record both sides can read, written at the dock as the visit happens:
The appointment time the truck was booked for.
The time it arrived and the time it checked in.
The time loading or unloading finished, and the time it checked out.
The reason for any delay, noted when it happened.
Who the driver was and which carrier they drove for.
How Dock Optimizer handles it
Dock Optimizer stamps check-in and check-out at the dock for every appointment, so detention can be worked out from the visit itself. Each facility sets its own free time and rate. Billable time is rounded up to the next quarter hour, and a charge is stored as hours times rate, so the arithmetic is still visible when someone questions it.
Nothing is billed automatically. A visit that ran long shows up as a suggestion, and a worklist shows the detention that was never billed. A person decides whether to send each charge. The check-in record also carries the photos taken at the dock and, where the facility uses it, the result of the driver ID check.