Detention Time: The Hours Small Fleets Aren’t Getting Paid For

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A complete walkthrough of what driver detention time actually costs a small fleet — ATRI’s $15 billion industry-wide figure, why mid-size carriers get stuck waiting almost twice as often as large ones, why fewer than half of detention invoices ever get paid, and the crash-risk data behind drivers making up lost time on the road afterward.

• Driver detention cost the trucking industry $15 billion in 2023 — $3.6 billion in direct expenses and $11.5 billion in lost productivity — according to the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI). Drivers were detained beyond free time on 39.3 percent of all stops.
• A federal study on driver detention found medium-size carriers detained on 19 percent of stops, more than double the 9 percent rate for large carriers — and collected too little small-carrier data to even measure that segment reliably.
• 94.5 percent of fleets charge detention fees, but fewer than half of those invoices actually get paid, per ATRI’s 2023 data — a documentation problem as much as a negotiating one.
• A federal review of detention and safety found that each 15-minute increase in dock dwell time is associated with a crash-rate increase of more than 6 percent, and trucks that had been detained were driven 14.6 percent faster afterward than trucks that hadn’t.
• Timestamped arrival and departure records — not driver memory or a handwritten log — are what actually get detention invoices paid and let a fleet see which facilities are costing it the most.

The delivery window says 9 a.m. The truck is there at 8:55. Then nothing happens. By the time the dock doors finally open, the driver has lost three hours — hours that don’t show up as a repair bill or a fuel receipt, just a day that quietly falls apart and a route that ends late.

This is detention time, and new research from the American Transportation Research Institute puts a hard number on what small fleets have long felt but rarely tracked: it cost the trucking industry $15 billion in 2023. A separate federal study found that mid-size fleets — the exact segment most Responsible Fleet readers run — get stuck waiting more than twice as often as large carriers do.

This post covers how big the detention problem actually is, why mid-size fleets absorb more of it than anyone else, why the fees fleets are owed so often go uncollected, and the safety risk that rides along with every hour a truck sits still.

ATRI tracks driver detention nationally, and its most recent research shows just how far from a rare inconvenience it’s become. In 2023, drivers reported being detained beyond the industry-standard free time on 39.3 percent of all stops — roughly two out of every five loading or unloading events. Depending on the sector, drivers lost between 117 and 209 hours a year to detention, and across for-hire trucking alone that adds up to more than 135 million hours lost in a single year.

ATRI’s dollar figure for 2023: $15 billion industry-wide — $3.6 billion in direct expenses like detention fees and extra driver pay, and $11.5 billion in lost productivity from freight that could have moved if the truck hadn’t been sitting still.

Detention isn’t distributed evenly. ATRI found refrigerated-trailer drivers detained 56.2 percent of the time and spot-market drivers detained 42.5 percent of the time. Any small fleet running temperature-controlled freight or picking up spot-market loads is running directly into the sectors where detention is worst.

The most important number for a small-to-mid-size fleet owner isn’t the industry total — it’s who absorbs it. A federal study on driver detention in commercial motor vehicle operations found medium-size carriers experienced detention on 19 percent of stops, more than double the 9 percent rate large carriers experienced. Large carriers have the freight volume and negotiating leverage to push shippers and receivers toward faster turnaround, or to walk away from chronically slow docks. A five-truck or twenty-truck fleet usually doesn’t have that leverage — the load still has to move, so the truck still waits.

The same study collected so little detention data from small carriers that it explicitly said the results for that segment weren’t statistically representative. That’s not good news dressed up as a data gap — it means the carriers small enough to feel detention the hardest, dollar for dollar, are also the carriers nobody has properly measured.

And when a stop does cross the detention threshold, it doesn’t clear quickly: the same study found that once drivers were detained beyond the standard free-time window, their average total detention time ran to nearly three and a half hours — not the “fifteen minutes behind schedule” scenario a lot of owners picture.

Here’s the part that should bother a small fleet owner more than the raw hours: ATRI’s 2023 data found that 94.5 percent of fleets charge detention fees, but fewer than half of those invoices actually get paid. The fee exists. The policy exists. The collection doesn’t.

This is a documentation problem as much as a negotiating one. A detention invoice that says “the driver waited a long time” is easy for a shipper or broker to push back on. A detention record with a precise arrival timestamp, a precise departure timestamp, and a clean paper trail is much harder to dispute. Fleets that automatically and consistently timestamp arrival and departure — through GPS tracking on the vehicle rather than a driver’s memory or a handwritten log — are the ones actually collecting on the fees they’re already charging.

For a small fleet, closing that collection gap on even a portion of detained stops can recover real money that’s currently just being written off as the cost of doing business.

Detention isn’t only a money problem. A federal review of how detention time affects safety found that every 15-minute increase in the time a truck spent at a shipper or receiver facility was associated with more than a 6 percent increase in the expected crash rate on the trip that followed. The same review’s modeling suggested that reducing average detention time by even one minute nationally would prevent more than 400 truck crashes a year.

The mechanism isn’t mysterious: a driver who loses three hours at a dock still has the same delivery commitments and the same hours-of-service clock. ATRI’s detention data backs this up directly — trucks that had been detained were driven 14.6 percent faster on average afterward than trucks that hadn’t been detained, and drivers even sped up on the approach to facilities with a known history of long dock times. Detention doesn’t just cost money sitting still; it buys back speed on the road afterward, and that’s exactly the trade a tired, behind-schedule driver shouldn’t have to make.

The same review found that detention reduces truck drivers’ annual earnings industry-wide by more than $1 billion — a driver paid by the mile or the load earns nothing while the truck sits at a dock, which is its own retention pressure on a small fleet trying to keep drivers from walking to a carrier that promises fewer wasted hours.

The single most common error is treating detention as an unavoidable cost of doing business rather than a collectible one. A detention fee clause sitting unused in a rate confirmation isn’t worth anything — it only pays out when the fleet can prove, with a timestamp, exactly when the truck arrived and exactly when it left.

The second common error is scheduling around average dock times instead of known-slow facilities. A fleet that isn’t tracking which shippers and receivers detain trucks longest, and for how long, keeps sending drivers back into the same bottlenecks without ever pricing that risk into the load or pushing back on repeat offenders the way a large carrier already can.

The third common error is treating the hours lost to detention as separate from the hours-of-service clock and the safety picture. A driver who loses three hours at a dock still has the same stops left on the route, and asking that driver to make up the time on the road is asking them to absorb detention’s cost twice — once in lost pay, once in added risk.

As the Responsible Fleet team has observed reviewing detention patterns across small fleets: the fleets that actually collect on the fees they charge are almost always the ones with automatic, timestamped arrival and departure records attached to every stop — not the ones reconstructing what happened from memory three weeks later during a billing dispute.

Detention time isn’t a rounding error next to fuel and maintenance costs — ATRI puts it at $15 billion industry-wide in 2023, and a federal study shows mid-size fleets absorb more than double the detention rate of large carriers while being the segment least measured by the government’s own data. For a small fleet, the practical takeaway is documentation: arrival time, departure time, and location attached automatically to every stop, the same way maintenance and hours-of-service records already are.

A fleet that can prove exactly how long a truck sat at a dock collects more of what it’s already owed and can start pricing repeat-offender facilities into future loads. A fleet that can’t is stuck absorbing the cost twice — once in the wasted hours, and again when a tired, behind-schedule driver makes up the difference at higher speed. As the Responsible Fleet team tells small fleet owners weighing where to focus next: the detention fee clause you’re not collecting on is worth more than most rate increases you could negotiate.

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