Detention Cost Calculator — what do closed docks cost you?
Detention is not a rounding error — for most fleets it is one of the largest controllable costs in the operation. Drag the sliders to your numbers and see the annual damage.
Detention fees paid (per year)
$52,000
8.0 events/week x 2.5 hrs x $50
Lost driving revenue (per year)
$88,400
A parked truck earns nothing — usually the bigger number
Closed-dock arrivals (per year)
$4,800
Layover + re-dispatch + driver time, ~$400 each
Total annual cost
$145,200
Dispatching against verified hours prevents roughly a third of this — about $43,560/year back.
The math
Detention events per week = loads per week x detention rate. Each event costs the detention fee (hours x rate) plus the revenue that truck would have earned moving freight (hours x revenue/hr) — the fee is what you pay, the idle truck is what you actually lose. Closed-dock arrivals are estimated at $400 each (layover fee, re-dispatch, and burned driver hours-of-service time). The prevention estimate assumes dispatching against verified facility hours eliminates roughly 30% of events — the share caused by stale hours, unannounced closures, and wrong-timezone bookings rather than genuine congestion.