Detention Charges: How Brokers Verify Claims Before Paying

Detention is one of the most common surprises on a carrier invoice. A driver waits at a shipper or receiver, the carrier adds an hourly charge, and the invoice arrives with a photo of a handwritten receipt attached. Your team has to decide whether to pay, dispute or push back. Doing that well means checking several small facts that live in different places.

How common is detention?

The most recent large study we found is ATRI's 2024 report on driver detention, using 2023 data. ATRI counts detention as time beyond two hours at a customer facility while waiting for active loading or unloading. Drivers reported detention at 39.3% of stops. The study estimates that for-hire trucking lost 135.9 million hours to detention in 2023, with $3.6 billion in direct expenses and $11.5 billion in lost productivity.

The same study reports that most fleets charge detention fees, but fewer than half of those invoices are paid. Trade coverage of the report carries the same figures. The study measures carriers and drivers, not brokers, and we could not find a published dispute rate for brokers. That is why the best number to use is your own, which the measurement section below shows you how to get.

What a valid detention claim needs

Most brokers and carriers agree on the basic rule. Detention starts after a free-time window and is billed per hour after that. The window, the rate and the starting point should be written in the rate confirmation for that load. If the agreement is silent or vague, the claim is hard to defend either way.

To check a claim properly, you need three things:

• The terms: the free-time window, the rate, and where the clock starts. It might be the appointment time, the gate check-in or arrival at the dock.
• The driver's timeline: arrival at the facility, check-in and departure. GPS or ELD records usually provide these.
• The paperwork: the signed bill of lading, which often carries its own loading or unloading times.

For example, a driver who arrived two hours after the appointment, against a two-hour free-time window, has not triggered detention. A driver who was checked in on time and then sat for six hours probably has. Most disputes come down to which of these facts you can prove.

Signs your team is losing time or money

• Detention claims are approved by whoever has time that day, not by a written rule.
• The arrival time on one system does not match the time on another, and nobody agrees which to use.
• Disputes start only after the carrier sends a demand letter.
• Someone spends a large part of the week copying times between tabs.
• Fee claims are paid without a timeline attached, and nobody can say later why they were approved.

How to measure it in your business

Pull the last 50 detention lines from your accounts payable. For each one, check three things: whether the rate confirmation states the free-time window, whether you have arrival and departure times from a single source, and whether the BOL is attached. Count how many lines have all three. Then count how many were paid, how many were disputed, and how many minutes your team spent on each one.

Those four numbers tell you more about your exposure than any industry survey. They also make it easy to decide whether a fix is worth the effort.

Why it takes so long

Reading the invoice is rarely the hard part. The hard part is pulling the right timestamps from different sources and lining them up. Check-in times live in one system, GPS pings in another, and the BOL has a handwritten time. People copy numbers between tabs, and one load can take an hour to review. Multiply that by a busy week and the team spends more time checking freight than moving it.

Best practice for detention checks

• Put the terms in data, not in email. Store the free-time window and the rate on the load record when the rate confirmation is signed. A check can then run against the agreement automatically.
• Use one clock for facility times. Pick a single source for arrival and departure, such as geofence entry and exit, and use it for every load. Mixed sources cause most of the disagreements.
• Build the claim packet before you need it. For each detention line, keep the timeline, the BOL and the terms together. A dispute then takes minutes instead of an afternoon.
• Agree on exception rules in advance. Decide which claims are paid automatically, which are disputed automatically, and which go to a person. Clear cases should not sit in a queue.

Your team should spend its time on the claims that could go either way.

How automation can help

At Asauvia, we build document and data pipelines for freight teams. A typical setup reads the carrier invoice and any attached receipts, pulls out the charges and their dates, matches each one to the load and its rate confirmation, and compares the claimed time with the driver's timeline. Clear matches and clear mismatches are sorted automatically. Anything the system cannot match with confidence goes to a reviewer, with the evidence already gathered.

Reading text from a photo is the easy part, and modern OCR does it reasonably well. The real work is the matching logic: which time to trust, how to handle a late check-in, and what to do when the BOL and the GPS disagree. That logic should come from your contracts and your dispute history, and your team should review it before anything runs unattended.

A first engagement usually starts with your last three months of detention lines. We measure how many already have the three checks in place, build the matching rules with your team, and then run them alongside your current process before anyone relies on them.

Dispute rules and payment terms depend on your contracts and where you operate, so have your legal or compliance advisor review the final process.