The Detention Economy

A freight broker loses a trusted carrier the same way most relationships end in this business. Quietly, and over a single lane.

The pattern is familiar to anyone who has run a book for more than a year or two. A carrier runs a contract lane three or four times. Each load, the shipper's dock burns more hours than the rate card was written to absorb. The carrier doesn't file a formal complaint. They don't raise their rate mid-contract. They just stop bidding. A month later the broker is covering the lane with a carrier they don't know as well, who doesn't know the dock, who won't pick up on the first ring when something goes sideways.

The shipper on the other end usually doesn't see any of it. Their next load moves. They pay roughly what they paid last week. Coverage comes from a carrier they've never worked with. And by the time the service numbers slip enough to show up on a scorecard, the original carrier is three lanes removed from the account.

That is what detention actually costs. Not the line item on the accessorial invoice. The relationship that got burned through without the shipper ever seeing the bill.

ATRI put the industry-wide number at $15.1 billion in 2023. That's $3.6 billion in direct carrier expense and $11.5 billion in lost productivity, from their "Costs and Consequences of Truck Driver Detention" report. But that's the view from 30,000 feet. From the broker desk, it looks different.

Who actually gets detained

The ATRI data has a detail that doesn't get quoted enough in the press releases. Detention isn't evenly distributed. It clusters.

Women drivers report being detained in 49.1 percent of stops. Reefer drivers, 56.2 percent. Spot-market fleets, 42.5 percent versus the 39.3 percent industry average. If you run refrigerated freight in the spot market and you're a woman behind the wheel, detention isn't an occasional frustration. It's the job.

That matters to brokers for reasons that go beyond optics. The carriers most likely to get crushed on a bad dock are often the same carriers the industry says it wants to keep. New entrants. Smaller fleets. Owner-operators who can't absorb a 6-hour sit the way a 2,000-truck asset carrier can. Every time a shipper's dock eats an owner-op's day, a broker loses a piece of their bench.

Where it actually shows up on a broker's P&L

Here's the part brokers don't talk about in public.

You don't have a "detention" line on your P&L. You have a margin line, and detention slowly eats it from three directions at once.

The first is the accessorial gap. Shipper contracts cap detention at $50, $75, sometimes $100 an hour. The carrier's real cost of sitting is usually higher than that once you count driver pay, fuel idle, lost next-load revenue, and the HOS clock the driver just burned. When the math doesn't work, somebody absorbs it. Sometimes it's the broker. More often it's the carrier, who doesn't say anything and just quietly moves the lane to the bottom of their list. Which leads to the second one.

The second one is bid quality. Every broker watches their carrier acceptance rate on contract lanes. When it starts drifting, most brokers blame the rate or the market. Usually it's detention. A carrier who got crushed on your lane last month doesn't say anything. They just don't bid on it this month. Or they bid it 15 to 20 percent higher to cover themselves. You cover the load, technically, but your spot rate has crept, your covered-load time has crept, and your shipper starts asking why the lane "feels different."

The third one is the quiet list. Every broker I know keeps one. You don't write it down. You just know. These are the shippers who make life harder than it needs to be, and when their RFP comes around, you either price it high enough to make the pain worth it or you politely pass. The carriers keep the same list. And when the two lists overlap, the freight still moves, just not by your first-choice partners and usually not at your contract rate. Your customer never sees any of that. They just see the invoice.

There's a fourth direction the cap doesn't cover, and it's the one that should keep every broker up at night. The safety tax.

ATRI's GPS data showed something every broker already suspected but nobody wanted to measure. Trucks that got detained drove 14.6 percent faster on average than trucks that didn't. Even more telling, trucks drove faster on the way to facilities where they expected to get detained. Drivers know. They're trying to make back time before they've lost it.

DOT's Inspector General put numbers on that years ago, and FMCSA reconfirmed them in their 2025 detention study. A 15-minute increase in average dwell time raises the expected crash rate by 6.2 percent. Every hour your shipper's dock sits on a driver, that driver is doing math on the way to the next stop about whether to push the speed, skip the break, or roll past a yellow light.

The shipper doesn't see that math. The broker doesn't see it until a claim hits. The carrier sees it every day. This is the part of the P&L that's measured in something other than dollars until the day it isn't.

None of this shows up on the P&L as "detention." It shows up as rising spot costs, slower coverage, and customer calls you'd rather not take.

Why the bill keeps getting bigger

The frequency of detention has actually ticked down a little over the last decade. ATRI's latest data has drivers getting detained in 39.3 percent of stops in 2023, versus closer to 46 percent a decade earlier. That's the good news. The bad news is that everything about what a detention event costs has gone the other way.

Warehouse labor keeps getting cut. Every time a shipper trims dock headcount to hit a quarterly number, the time on the dock gets longer. The detention cap doesn't move. The clock does.

Appointment systems are quietly getting gamed. A growing share of RFPs now have "flexible appointment" language somewhere in them. That's a polite way of saying the carrier will get unloaded when the warehouse feels like unloading them. If a driver has an 11 AM appointment and nobody touches the trailer until 2:30, the free clock was already burned before the clock technically started.

Detention caps have barely moved while everything else on a carrier's P&L has climbed. ATRI's 2025 Operational Costs of Trucking report puts 2024 marginal cost per mile at $2.26, and when you strip out fuel, non-fuel operating costs hit $1.779 per mile, the highest level ATRI has ever recorded. Driver wages, tractor payments, insurance premiums, maintenance. All of them up. The one number that's supposed to protect the carrier when a shipper wastes everyone's day is the one number that hasn't caught up.

The market is making this worse too, not better. After three and a half years of an inverted rate environment where spot ran below contract, the spread finally closed in early 2026. DAT had national dry van spot at $2.01 per mile in February 2026, climbing for seven straight months, against contract at $2.12. That's a $0.11 gap, down from $0.39 a year earlier. DAT iQ's 12-month outlook has spot up another 12 percent and contract up 8.

What that means at the desk is simple. Every broker who won a contract lane in the 2022-2025 soft market at a thin margin now has spot rates chasing the floor. The only accessorials available to widen that margin back out are the ones shippers won't pay on time, or at all. Detention used to be an annoyance. In a tightening market, it becomes the variable that decides whether the lane is profitable or a slow bleed.

Nobody's going to fix this for us. Not the shippers. Not the TMS vendors. Not FMCSA. If you're a broker and you care about your carrier base, you're on your own.

What works at the desk

There's no magic fix. There isn't one. But here's what brokers who care about their carrier base have been doing that moves the needle.

Call carriers before quoting a new shipper. Thirty seconds of "hey, you ever run into these folks?" saves brokers from contracts they had no business winning. A broker's carrier network is the best market intelligence available anywhere, and it's free. Waiting until a lane is already committed before asking is how you end up with a contract you can't honorably cover.

Negotiate the detention clause as hard as the rate. Free time, hourly rate, cap, how disputes get resolved. On paper. Before the lane is agreed to. Most shippers don't want to have this conversation. The ones who refuse to have it are telling you something you needed to hear anyway.

Stop sending the best carriers to the worst shippers. That's a hard habit to break. It's easy to rationalize it by telling yourself the relationship is "worth it" because the customer is paying. The math usually doesn't work. If a shipper's dock consistently cooks carriers, the two real options are to reprice the lane high enough to pay the carrier what sitting is actually worth, or decline the freight and tell the shipper why. Some shippers walk. More of them fix the dock than most brokers expect.

Keep real detention data per shipper, and share it. Every load, every actual in-time and out-time, every accessorial paid or unpaid. Quarterly one-page summaries to each larger shipper account work. Not a complaint. Not an invoice. Just numbers. Roughly half of shippers will ignore it. The other half will use it, and those are usually the accounts worth keeping.

Tell carriers the truth before they take the load. If the receiver is a slow-dock, say so. If the cap is light, say so. Some carriers pass. The ones who take it go in with their eyes open and don't blame anyone when it goes long. That's the quiet version of how a broker's reputation actually gets built. One honest phone call at a time.

Track dwell by facility, not by customer. One big shipper can have a great HQ dock and a terrible distribution center four states away. Pricing by the customer name on the RFP misses that. Pricing by the actual facility gives the shipper a number they can fix. Half the time the shipper didn't know the DC was the problem. The managers who get measured on dwell tend to have already fixed it before the broker calls.

Don't accept detention denials without documentation. When a shipper refuses to pay a detention accessorial, the reflex is to just move on. Don't. Ask for the data. Every shipper has an appointment system that logs in-times and out-times. When they can't produce that data, you've learned something. When they can and the numbers still don't match the carrier's, you've learned something else. Either way, the conversation gets easier the next time.

What a well-run detention clause looks like

Most broker-shipper contracts have a detention clause that's one paragraph long and written to lose. Here's what a better version looks like. None of it is radical. All of it is specific.

Free time stated in hours, from appointment time, not from arrival. If the shipper makes the truck wait two hours before starting the clock, the clock was never two hours. Pin this down in writing or the number is meaningless.

Hourly rate that actually references driver pay and tractor costs. I won't agree to $35 an hour from a shipper who last updated their tariff in 2018. The 2025 ATRI numbers are public. I quote them.

No cap, or a cap high enough that the shipper has a real incentive to not hit it. A cap of $300 on a 10-hour sit tells the carrier the shipper has already decided they're fine with burning a day.

Dispute window shorter than invoicing terms. If payment terms are net 45 and detention disputes have to be raised within 14, the math penalizes the carrier for waiting on their own accessorial invoice.

Documentation burden that isn't one-sided. If I have to produce seal times and door photos to prove detention, the shipper produces appointment logs to dispute it. Same evidence bar on both sides.

A reporting cadence. Quarterly dwell summary by facility, shared in both directions. No fishing expeditions. Same report, same numbers, same meeting.

Most shippers don't want any of this in the contract. The good ones do, because they already know which of their docks are problems and they want the data to make their case internally.

If you're a carrier reading this

I know the numbers in this piece don't come as a surprise to you. ATRI says 135 million productive hours were lost to detention across for-hire trucking in 2023. You lived those hours. The cab's temperature rising, the HOS clock running, the dispatcher calling to ask when you're going to roll.

A few things I've watched good carriers do that separate them from the rest.

Document everything. Seal times, door photos, GPS pings, BOL signatures with times. Every time. The carriers who get paid on disputed detention are the ones who built the evidence file before they knew they needed it.

Quote your own detention rate back to the broker, not the shipper's tariff. If you're running on a spot load at $2.01 per mile and the shipper's tariff says $40 an hour for detention, that number doesn't cover your cost of sitting. Say so in writing when you accept the load. Most good brokers will carry that message into the next RFP.

Keep your own facility list. The ATRI data is useful at industry scale. Your own facility list is useful tomorrow morning. The best carriers I work with know, down to the DC address, where the two-hour load turns into a six-hour sit. That information is worth real money at bid time.

Call the broker before you decline the freight. If a lane is getting worse, tell me before you stop bidding. I can't fix what I don't hear about, and the shippers on my quiet list got there because carriers I trust told me the truth before they walked away.

And if your broker doesn't take that call, or doesn't do anything with the information when you give it to them, that broker is also information. Make a note.

If you're a shipper reading this

Most of you aren't trying to screw anyone. I actually believe that. The warehouse manager isn't sitting there thinking about how to punish carriers. He's trying to hit a productivity number so he doesn't get a phone call from his VP.

But that reality has a cost, and right now the cost is living with your carriers and your brokers. You won't see it on a scorecard. You'll see it when your top three carriers quietly stop bidding, when your covered-load time slips a few hours, when your 3PL's quarterly review starts using phrases like "service challenges on the X lane."

Here's a thing you can do Monday morning. Ask your logistics team to pull a dwell-time report across your top 20 facilities. Not industry average. Your actual numbers. You will find one or two that are costing you real money in accessorials, claims, rebid risk, and refused loads. Fix those facilities and your transportation budget just got cheaper without you renegotiating a single contract rate.

If your broker is any good, they already have this data. Ask for it. If they can't give it to you, that's also information.

One more number worth sitting with. ATRI found that 94.5 percent of carrier fleets charge detention fees, and fewer than half of those invoices ever get paid. Think about what that means. On your ledger, detention looks like a cost you're managing. On your carrier's ledger, it's an invoice they've already written off. The gap between those two views is the relationship, and it's almost always the shipper's to close.

The shippers I've seen get this right don't treat detention accessorials as a negotiation. They treat them as data. They pay on time, they pay in full, and then they use the size of the bill as a trigger for a conversation with their DC managers. The ones who do it that way are the ones whose lanes I'm fighting to keep in my book of business. Not because they're easy. Because they're honest.

Watch the spread. Ignore the noise.

— Ted Fyock

Founder, CEO & President

Carolina Expressways Inc.

If you're a shipper tired of finding out about dock problems through your covered-load rate, or a carrier that's done eating detention quietly, there's a better way to work. Carolina Expressways is the brokerage behind The Backhaul, freight, SDVOSB federal contracting, managed logistics, and advisory. See how to work with us: Work with Ted