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Detention pay, and how to actually collect it
Most detention goes unclaimed, and almost always for the same reason: nobody recorded the times. The fix is procedural, not adversarial.
Getting paidBy BSG Carriers·Published ·3 min read
Why so much of it goes uncollected
Detention is what a shipper or receiver owes when they hold your truck beyond the free time agreed on the rate confirmation. It is one of the few parts of a carrier’s income that is genuinely owed and routinely never claimed.
The reason is almost never a dispute about whether you waited. It is that nobody wrote down when you arrived and when you left, in a form anyone will accept a fortnight later. By the time the invoice is being assembled the times are a memory, and a memory is not a claim.
That makes it a procedural problem rather than a negotiation problem, which is good news: procedures are fixable.
Settle it before you sign, not after you are sitting
The rate confirmation is where detention is won or lost. These are the questions worth asking.
- How much free time is allowed at pickup and at delivery? Two hours is the common figure, but it is negotiated, not a law.
- What is the detention rate per hour after that, and is it capped per day?
- Does the clock start at the appointment time or at arrival? This matters enormously if you arrive early.
- What happens on a missed appointment caused by the facility rather than by you?
- Is a TONU payable if the load cancels after you have arrived, and how much?
- Who must be notified, and within how long? Some brokers require notice within a set window or the claim is void.
The documentation that makes a claim stick
Get in and out times signed or stamped on the bill of lading wherever the facility will do it. A signed document from the party that held you is the strongest evidence there is.
Where they will not, your ELD is the fallback and it is a good one — it records arrival and departure automatically, it is timestamped, and it is difficult to argue with. Photographs of the gate and the dock with visible timestamps help.
Tell the broker while it is happening rather than afterwards. A message sent from the dock at the moment the free time expires does two things: it satisfies most notification clauses, and it creates a contemporaneous record. An email the next day does neither as well.
Then bill it as a separate line on the invoice with the evidence attached, rather than mentioning it in a covering note. Claims that are not invoiced do not get paid.
What a dispatcher does about it
01
Reads the terms before the load is accepted
Free time, hourly rate, notification window and TONU — all agreed in writing before the truck moves, not discovered at the dock.
02
Starts the clock with the broker in real time
You tell us the moment the free time expires. We notify the broker then, which is what most contracts require.
03
Documents against the appointment
Arrival and departure recorded against the appointment time, with the ELD record kept.
04
Invoices it as a line item
Assembled into the invoice packet with the evidence, in the format your factoring company wants.
A note on proportion
Detention is worth claiming every time it is genuinely owed, and it is worth being straightforward about when it is not. A carrier with a reputation for billing every fifteen minutes will find brokers quietly routing around them; a carrier who never bills any is subsidising facilities that waste their day.
The middle position — claim it when the free time is genuinely exceeded, document it properly, and drop it when the facility got you out in reasonable time — is both fairer and more profitable over a year.
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