Getting paid for detention

When detention goes unpaid, the carrier's version is that the broker refused it. The broker's version is that the claim could not be substantiated. Both are describing the same event from different ends, and the second version is the one you can do something about.

Detention is the clearest example of a cost you have already paid — in hours the truck could not earn — being recovered only if you can prove it happened. The right to it comes from the rate confirmation, not from a federal rule, so the document is where the claim starts.

Time spent attending the truck while it waits to be loaded or unloaded, ready to move it when called, is on-duty time (§ 395.2), and it runs inside the driver's 14-hour window (§ 395.3). Four hours at a dock can be four hours the driver can no longer drive today, which is why detention pay is compensation for lost capacity rather than a tip for patience.

The rate confirmation defines the claim. Three things decide whether one is even possible:

• When the clock starts. Rate confirmations differ: some run free time from your arrival, some from your appointment. The difference matters if you arrive early.
• What evidence is required, and in what form. This clause is where claims are actually lost.
• Any cap, and whether detention accrues hourly or in blocks.

1. 1Arrival time, recorded the moment you arrive rather than reconstructed later.
2. 2Check-in evidence — a signed or stamped time on the paperwork wherever the facility will give one.
3. 3A message to the broker as the free time expires, in writing, so the notification has a timestamp of its own.
4. 4Departure time, and the delivery receipt showing both.
5. 5Electronic logging records, which corroborate the rest. The carrier has to keep them for six months (§ 395.8), so they are there when a claim is questioned.

None of this takes more than a few minutes. All of it is impossible to recreate two weeks later.

The person receiving your claim may have to justify it to someone else. Make that easy and approval gets easier:

• Reference the load the way THEY file it, not the way you do.
• State the arithmetic plainly — arrival, free time, departure, hours claimed, rate, total.
• Attach the evidence with the claim rather than offering to send it.
• Submit it with the invoice, not weeks later; an aged claim competes with nothing and loses.

Track which customers generate detention repeatedly. A facility that reliably holds you for hours is not an unlucky stop, it is a lane priced wrong — and that is a decision about whether to keep going there, which no claim process will make for you. The detention calculator shows what those repeat stops add up to in a month.