How Do You Actually Get Paid for Detention?
Almost every carrier bills for detention. Most don’t collect it. That gap is where a small fleet’s margin quietly goes.
The instinct is to blame the shipper, or the broker, or the rate. Usually it’s none of those. The invoice gets rejected because nobody can prove what happened at the dock, and by the time anyone looks, the only record is a driver’s memory and a scribbled time on a bill of lading.
This post is about closing that specific gap.
Key Takeaways
- In 2023, 94.5% of fleets charged detention and were paid on fewer than half those invoices (ATRI, 2024).
- Carriers who can’t produce timestamped check-in and check-out records lose roughly 70% of disputes, even after a genuine 3-hour wait (Laneproof, 2025).
- Detention cost the industry $15.1 billion in 2023 across 135.9 million lost hours.
- The fix is evidence capture at the dock, not a better invoice template.
Why Do Detention Invoices Get Rejected?
Fewer than 50% of detention claims are paid, despite 94.5% of fleets billing for them (ATRI, Costs and Consequences of Truck Driver Detention, September 2024). The invoices aren’t wrong. They’re unsupported.
A shipper disputing a detention charge isn’t usually claiming the truck wasn’t late. They’re asking you to prove when it arrived, when it was released, and that both fall outside the free time in the contract. Most carriers can’t answer all three with documents.
An analysis of 3,100 detention disputes found that parties who couldn’t produce timestamped check-in and check-out records lost roughly 70% of the time, even when the driver had genuinely waited three hours or more (Laneproof, Freight Billing Compliance, 2025). Being right isn’t the same as being able to show it.
What Evidence Actually Holds Up?
Three things decide a detention dispute: an arrival time, a departure time, and the contract term they’re measured against. Everything else is supporting material.
Arrival and departure timestamps. Not the driver’s text message. Not a handwritten time on the BOL. A recorded time, captured automatically, that nobody edited after the fact.
The signed bill of lading. It ties the times to a specific load, shipper, and stop. A timestamp with no paperwork attached is a number without a claim.
The free time term. Two hours is common, but “common” isn’t a contract. If your rate confirmation doesn’t state free time, you’re negotiating after the fact and you’ll lose.
Photographs, when there’s something to show. A closed dock at 06:00, a line of trucks, a sign-in sheet with your driver’s arrival written by the guard.
Notice what these have in common. Every one is created at the dock, during the wait. None can be reconstructed afterwards. That’s why detention is an operations problem wearing a billing costume, and why “we’ll chase it in accounting on Friday” never works.
Can This Be Captured Automatically?
Yes, and it’s the only version that survives contact with a busy week. Manual capture fails for a boring reason: the driver is the one person at the dock, and they’re tired, and logging a timestamp is the least urgent thing they could be doing.
Automatic capture uses the phone the driver already carries. A geofence around the stop records arrival when the truck enters and departure when it leaves, without anyone pressing anything.
In Oculus Freight, detention runs on that arrival and departure pair. Free time is configurable per customer, so a shipper with a three-hour term and one with two hours are measured against their own contracts rather than a global default. The dwell report shows where hours are actually going by stop and by customer.
What changed for us: the useful part wasn’t the invoice. It was seeing which customers ate the most hours across a month. Two of ours accounted for a wildly disproportionate share of waiting, and neither had ever been billed for it, because each individual wait felt survivable. The pattern only appears once the timestamps collect themselves.
One clarification, since vendors blur this line: the arrival and departure times behind your invoice come from the truck on that load. Our broader facility dwell research is a separate dataset built to answer “what is this receiver usually like.” They inform each other. They are not the same record, and I won’t tell you otherwise.
When Should You Bill It?
Bill detention on the original invoice whenever you can, because a separate accessorial invoice sent later is easier to ignore. Processing on disputed accessorials runs anywhere from 7 to 90 days, with delays driven by unclear terms and missing paperwork (Laneproof, 2025).
Sometimes you can’t. The detention becomes clear after the invoice has already gone out, or after it’s been sold to a factor. That’s the case most systems handle badly, and it’s the one that quietly costs the most, because the answer becomes “forget it.”
Oculus Freight supports revising an invoice after it has been issued and resubmitting it to the factor, so a late detention discovery doesn’t become a write-off. It’s an unglamorous feature. It’s also the difference between collecting and shrugging.
Whatever system you use, ask it one question: what happens when I learn about detention after invoicing? If the answer is “create a new invoice and hope,” budget for the write-offs.
What Free Time Should Your Contracts Say?
Free time is the term you’re measured against, and it belongs in the rate confirmation before the truck rolls. Two hours is the industry’s informal default, but drivers were detained on 39.3% of all stops in 2023, and the rate ran higher for refrigerated (56.2%) and spot-market work (42.5%) (ATRI, 2024).
If most of your freight is reefer or spot, a two-hour term with no detention rate written down is a standing donation.
Three things worth stating explicitly in the confirmation:
1. Free time in hours, from arrival, not from appointment time. Those differ, and the difference is often the whole claim. 2. The detention rate per hour, and whether it’s prorated or billed in whole hours. 3. What counts as arrival. GPS geofence entry and guard-shack sign-in can be forty minutes apart at a busy receiver.
That third point is where most disputes actually live. Whatever definition you use, use the same one every time and make sure your system records it the same way.
Where This Approach Falls Short
Automatic capture fixes evidence. It doesn’t fix everything, and I’d rather say so.
It doesn’t make a shipper pay. A customer who refuses detention on principle will keep refusing with perfect records. What changes is that you can now decide whether to keep hauling for them, which is a different and more useful decision.
It doesn’t help without contract terms. Timestamps prove a wait. Only the rate confirmation turns a wait into money.
Geofences need tuning. A large yard, a nearby truck stop, or a receiver whose gate sits half a mile from the dock will all produce times that need a human look. Any vendor who tells you geofencing is set-and-forget hasn’t run it at a hundred stops.
It won’t recover last year. This starts working on the loads you run after you turn it on.
Where Do You Start?
If you’re doing none of this today, do these three in order. They compound.
One: write free time and a detention rate into every rate confirmation. Costs nothing. Without it the rest is decoration.
Two: start capturing arrival and departure automatically. Whatever system you run, if the driver has to remember, you’ll get maybe a third of them.
Three: read your dwell by customer once a month. Not to invoice, at first. Just to see which accounts are expensive in hours rather than in rate. Some of the worst-paying freight looks fine on the rate sheet.
Detention is 135.9 million lost hours a year across the industry (ATRI, 2024). Your share of it is smaller and much more fixable.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much detention can I charge?
Whatever your rate confirmation says. There’s no regulated rate for truckload detention. Common terms give two hours free then bill hourly, but the number only matters if it’s written down before the load moves.
Do I need an ELD to prove detention?
No. Arrival and departure can come from a driver app’s GPS geofence, and that’s what most TMS platforms use. ELD records can corroborate, but the practical evidence is a timestamped arrival and departure tied to the load and BOL.
Why do shippers dispute detention so often?
Because they can. Carriers who can’t produce timestamped check-in and check-out records lose roughly 70% of disputes (Laneproof, 2025). Disputing is cheap when the other side probably can’t document the claim.
Can I bill detention after I’ve already invoiced?
You can, though many systems make it painful and factored invoices make it harder. Look for a platform that supports revising an issued invoice and resubmitting to the factor. Otherwise late detention discoveries become write-offs.
Does detention tracking work for a 5-truck fleet?
Yes, and arguably it matters more. A large carrier absorbs unbilled detention across hundreds of loads. At five trucks, a few hundred unpaid hours a year is a meaningful share of what the company earns.
The Short Version
The industry bills detention and doesn’t collect it, and the reason is almost never the invoice. It’s that nobody can prove the wait.
Write the terms into the confirmation. Capture arrival and departure without asking the driver to remember. Look at dwell by customer once a month. That’s most of the gap.
If you want to see what that looks like running, start a 14-day trial or tell us what you’re running today. If you’re weighing platforms more broadly, our comparison of TMS platforms for small carriers covers what actually differs between them.
Sources
- American Transportation Research Institute, Costs and Consequences of Truck Driver Detention, September 2024. Retrieved 2026-09-01. https://truckingresearch.org/2024/09/new-research-documents-substantial-financial-and-safety-impacts-from-truck-driver-detention/
- Laneproof, Freight Billing Compliance: What It Costs Brokers in 2025. Retrieved 2026-09-01. https://www.laneproof.com/blog/freight-billing-compliance-costs
- OTR Solutions, Detention Pay in Trucking: What It Is & How It Works. Retrieved 2026-09-01. https://otrsolutions.com/blog/detention-pay-in-trucking
