How Freight Detention Charges Work

Detention compensates a carrier when its driver and equipment are held at a facility longer than the parties agreed. It is one of the most frequently disputed accessorial charges in trucking, and most of the dispute comes down to a single question: how long was the truck actually there?

The anatomy of a detention clause

• Free time — a fixed allowance per stop, commonly 60 to 120 minutes.
• Measurement points — what starts and stops the clock. Arrival at the facility, gate entry, dock arrival and appointment time are all used in practice, and they are not interchangeable.
• Rate — a per-hour or per-day amount that accrues after free time is exhausted.
• Increment — the billing granularity. Fifteen-minute and hourly increments produce materially different totals for the same dwell.
• Caps and exceptions — daily maximums, weather or force-majeure carve-outs, and appointment-window conditions.

A worked example. A contract allows 120 minutes of free time measured arrival to departure, accruing at $75 per hour in 15-minute increments. If the reconstructed dwell is 214 minutes, chargeable time is 94 minutes, which rounds up to seven 15-minute increments, or $131.25. If the reconstructed dwell is 97 minutes, chargeable time is zero and the supported amount is zero — regardless of what the invoice says.

Why the measurement point is the whole argument

Because the clause defines its own measurement points, the same movement can produce very different results. A clock that starts at appointment time ignores a driver who arrived early. A clock that starts at gate entry ignores time spent in a queue outside the gate. A clock that starts at facility arrival includes it. None of these is inherently right; what matters is which one the contract actually says, and whether the evidence you hold can measure that specific point.

Evidence for each measurement point

• Facility arrival — GPS geofence entry from a telematics provider.
• Gate entry and exit — the facility's own gate or kiosk records, or RFID portal reads.
• Dock arrival and unload times — TMS stop records and warehouse management systems.
• Carrier-declared milestones — EDI 214 status messages, useful but self-reported.
• Conditions and exceptions — weather observations at the facility, document scans, signed BOL and POD.

These sources disagree more often than people expect. A gate system and a GPS geofence measuring the same arrival can differ by several minutes for entirely innocent reasons — geofence radius, reporting interval, clock drift. Small disagreements should be reconciled, not treated as fraud. Large ones are a genuine signal that the facts are not settled and a human should look.

Practical implications

If you want detention decisions that hold up, three things need to be true. The clause must be represented as structured parameters, not prose. The evidence must come from sources the biller does not control. And the arithmetic must be deterministic, so the same inputs always produce the same number and anyone can re-derive it.