Detention Pay for Truck Drivers: Free Time, Hourly Rates and How to Log It

Your appointment was 8:00. It’s noon, and you’re still sitting in the door waiting. That’s time you can’t drive, and if nobody pays for it, it comes straight out of your pocket. Detention pay is how drivers and carriers get paid for that wait. Here’s how it usually works and how to log it so you can actually claim it.

This is general information, not legal or pay advice. Your detention terms come from your rate confirmation, contract or company pay policy, so read those first. The numbers below are survey results from US research, quoted in US dollars.

What is detention?

The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) describes detention as the extra time a driver has to wait at a customer’s facility to pick up or deliver freight, beyond the scheduled appointment. In its research, ATRI uses the standard industry definition: any time at the dock longer than 2 hours (ATRI, 2024).

The US DOT Inspector General found the same thing: most of the industry only measures time past the limit in the shipping contract, and that limit is “often 2 hours” (DOT OIG, 2018). The first 2 hours are usually called free time. The shipper or receiver doesn’t pay for them.

How common is it?

• ATRI found drivers were detained at 39.3% of stops in 2023, and on 9.9% of stops (about one in ten) they were detained more than 2 hours (ATRI, 2024).
• The DOT Inspector General estimated that detention cuts the yearly earnings of for-hire truckload drivers by $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion, and that a 15-minute increase in average dwell time raises the expected crash rate by 6.2% (DOT OIG, 2018; FMCSA).

Typical detention terms

There’s no single detention rate. Every contract and company is different, which is why it pays to read yours. Here’s what the research found.

When the clock starts. Of the carriers that charge detention, 67% start at the 2-hour mark, 12% at 1 hour and 6% at 3 hours (ATRI, 2024). In ATRI’s driver surveys, some drivers said their detention pay didn’t start until 3, 4 or even 6 hours (ATRI, 2019).

What carriers charge the customer. ATRI’s median detention fee charged by carriers in 2023 was $50 an hour for truckload, $60 for refrigerated and $80 for specialized (ATRI, 2024). An earlier DAT survey of carriers and brokers put detention at $30 to $50 an hour, and only 3% of carriers said they got paid on 90% or more of their detention claims (DAT, 2016).

What the driver gets. That fee isn’t all yours if you’re a company driver. ATRI found median driver detention pay of $23 an hour in truckload, $20 in refrigerated and $29 in specialized, all below average driver pay per hour in each sector (ATRI, 2024). In ATRI’s earlier survey, drivers reported rates anywhere from $10 to $100 an hour, and some policies had caps on the dollars or hours paid (ATRI, 2019).

If you’re an owner-operator with your own authority, you bill detention to the broker or shipper yourself under your rate confirmation. If you’re leased on or a company driver, your carrier bills it, and your pay policy decides how much reaches you.

Waiting at the dock counts on your logs

Detention isn’t just lost money. It burns your hours.

• US: under 49 CFR 395.2, on-duty time includes all time at a shipper’s facility waiting to be dispatched (unless the carrier relieves you from duty) and all time attending a truck being loaded or unloaded (49 CFR 395.2).
• Canada: the federal hours-of-service regulations count time spent “waiting before and while a commercial vehicle is serviced, loaded, unloaded or dispatched” as on-duty time. You can’t drive after 14 hours on duty in a day (SOR/2005-313, sections 1 and 12).

So a 4-hour wait can eat most of the day you planned to drive. That’s exactly why the times need to be on paper.

How to log detention so you can claim it

Getting paid isn’t automatic. In ATRI’s surveys, many drivers said detention was hard to collect and they had to “fight for it”. One driver even had to send photos to prove he was in his truck the whole time (ATRI, 2019). Good records make that fight short. Here’s a simple routine.

Before the load

• Read the rate confirmation or pay policy. Look for the free time, the hourly rate, whether the clock starts at your appointment time or your arrival time, any cap, and who you have to notify and when.
• If there’s nothing about detention, ask before you accept the load, and get the answer in writing.

When you arrive

• Check in on time and write down your arrival time and your appointment time.
• Get the check-in time on paper: the gate slip, the sign-in sheet or a time stamp on the bill of lading. Take a photo of it.
• If your contract says to notify dispatch or the broker before free time runs out, send that message and keep it.

When you leave

• Write down your departure time and ask the shipper or receiver to put in and out times on the bill of lading and sign it.
• Your ELD already records your on-duty status and location, so make sure your duty status matches what really happened.
• In Canada, any record showing your arrival and departure times counts as a supporting document under the hours-of-service rules, so keep it (SOR/2005-313, section 1).

Right after the load

• Send the detention claim the same day, while the times and photos are fresh.
• Check your next settlement or paystub to make sure it was paid. My guide on checking trip pay against your paystub walks through it.

A worked example

Say your appointment is 8:00, you check in at 7:45 and you leave at 13:30. Your contract starts the clock at the appointment time, gives 2 hours free, and you use ATRI’s truckload median fee of $50 an hour as an example:

• Time from appointment to departure: 8:00 to 13:30 = 5.5 hours
• Minus 2 hours free time = 3.5 hours of detention
• 3.5 × $50 = $175 billed to the customer

If you’re a company driver, your share depends on your pay policy. Being late can cost you the whole claim: ATRI heard of policies that pay no detention if the driver is more than 10 minutes late for the appointment (ATRI, 2019).

Free tools to track it

Haul Saints was built for exactly this kind of paperwork. It’s free and works on your phone:

• Trip records: log the load number, your arrival and departure times, and notes for each stop.
• Additional Pay Request: create a signed PDF request for detention, layovers or extra stops, and keep a copy.
• Free calculators: use the load calculator to see if a load is still worth it once you count the hours you might sit.

I’m also working on Haul Saints Pro, and a detention timer that fills in your pay request from your trip times is one of the ideas. If that would help you, join the Pro waitlist and tell me what you’d use.

Log it when you’re parked, not while you’re driving. Drive safe.

Amar, driver since 2018 and founder of Haul Saints

Sources: ATRI, Costs and Consequences of Truck Driver Detention: A Comprehensive Analysis (September 2024) · ATRI, Driver Detention Impacts on Safety and Productivity (September 2019) · US DOT Office of Inspector General, report ST2018019 (January 2018) · FMCSA, Impact of Driver Detention Time on Safety and Operations · DAT Solutions detention survey (July 2016) · 49 CFR 395.2, hours-of-service definitions · Commercial Vehicle Drivers Hours of Service Regulations, SOR/2005-313