What is detention time, and who pays for it?

Detention is the fee a carrier charges when a truck is held at a facility beyond the agreed "free time" for loading or unloading. It exists because a parked truck is a truck not earning — and under hours-of-service rules, a driver's clock keeps burning whether freight moves or not.

The three cousins: detention, demurrage, layover

• Detention (with power): the tractor and driver wait at the dock. Typically billed per hour after free time.
• Demurrage / detention without power: a trailer or container sits at a facility beyond its allotted days. Common in drayage and drop-trailer operations, billed per day.
• Layover: the truck cannot be worked at all until the next day — usually a flat fee, and usually the most avoidable of the three.

How the clock works

Most contracts allow two hours of free time from the scheduled appointment (or from arrival/check-in for first-come-first-served facilities). After that, detention accrues per hour — commonly somewhere between $25 and $100+ per hour depending on equipment, market, and contract. Reefer detention runs higher: the load is perishable and the equipment burns fuel while it waits.

The perennial fight is proof. Detention claims live and die on documented times: arrival, check-in, dock assignment, and departure. Electronic logging devices largely settled the "was the truck really there" argument, but the "was the appointment valid" argument survives — which is where accurate facility hours matter.

Who actually pays?

Contractually, whoever the rate agreement says. In practice, the cause matters: if the facility was slow, the shipper or receiver eats it (and often passes it upstream); if the carrier arrived outside the facility's receiving window, the claim usually dies. That second scenario is remarkably common — and remarkably preventable, because it is usually a data failure, not a driver failure: the appointment was booked against hours that were wrong, stale, or ignored a holiday closure.

Reducing detention at the source

• Book against verified, current receiving hours — not the hours from a five-year-old directory listing.
• Respect appointment-required windows: showing up FCFS at an appointment-only DC is a guaranteed wait.
• Check closures (holidays, inventory counts, weather shutdowns) before dispatch, not at the gate.
• Mind timezones— a "7 AM receiving" window is facility-local, and cross-country dispatch gets this wrong constantly.

This is precisely the data suppliers publish on SupplierHours: per-facility receiving windows with appointment flags, closures with reasons, an IANA timezone on every location, and a last-verified timestamp so you know how fresh the answer is.