The Truck Waits for Free. The Bill Is $15.2 Billion.
Summary
In 2023 the for-hire trucking industry lost $11.5 billion in revenue and $3.6 billion in unreimbursed costs to driver detention at customer docks. Carriers bill a fee for it most of the time; customers pay less than half of what gets billed.
Where the bill lands
Carriers absorb detention cost two ways. First, as lost revenue: hours a truck could have been hauling freight instead sat parked, and the fee customers eventually pay rarely covers what that time was worth. Second, as straight unreimbursed expense — driver detention pay, wasted diesel, and other costs that customers never cover at all. Together the two categories cost the industry $15.2 billion in 2023, per ATRI's report: $11.5 billion in lost revenue and $3.6 billion in unreimbursed expenses.
View data as table
| Refrigerated — lost revenue | $2.04B | 36% of detention incidents ever get a fee paid |
|---|---|---|
| Specialized — lost revenue | $3.84B | 45.9% of detention incidents ever get a fee paid |
| Truckload — lost revenue | $5.66B | 43.5% of detention incidents ever get a fee paid |
| Refrigerated — unreimbursed expenses | $671M | carrier out-of-pocket cost |
| Specialized — unreimbursed expenses | $804M | carrier out-of-pocket cost |
| Truckload — unreimbursed expenses | $2.15B | carrier out-of-pocket cost |
Refrigerated ("reefer") drivers take the worst per-driver hit: $18,786 in lost revenue each in 2023, against $11,178 for specialized-freight drivers and $13,455 for truckload drivers. The fee system that's supposed to prevent this mostly doesn't fire. Carriers invoice for detention only about 75% of the time it happens, and even when they do, customers pay only about 55% of those invoices — netting out to a fee actually collected on just 36% of refrigerated detention incidents, 45.9% of specialized, and 43.5% of truckload. Detention fee rates carriers charge rose a median of just 3% between 2018 and 2023, a stretch in which the hourly cost of running a truck rose 21.4%, per the same report — the fee has been losing ground to inflation for years even before accounting for how rarely it's paid.
The time no one gets back
Money is only half the ledger. The other half is hours — time a driver spent parked at a dock instead of home, or paid, or moving freight. Industry-wide, that came to 135.9 million hours in 2023. Refrigerated drivers lost the most time per person: 209.4 hours a year, more than five work weeks, against 173.0 hours for truckload drivers and 117.5 for specialized drivers.
View data as table
| Refrigerated | 209.4 hrs/yr | per driver, 2023 |
|---|---|---|
| Truckload / dry van | 173.0 hrs/yr | per driver, 2023 |
| Specialized | 117.5 hrs/yr | per driver, 2023 |
Those hours have a human cost the dollar figures undercount. In the same survey, 34.6% of drivers said they'd quit a previous driving job at least once because of excessive or undercompensated detention time — rising with experience, from 22% of drivers with five or fewer years on the road to 38% of those with more than ten, and hitting 45.2% among refrigerated drivers specifically. ATRI's statisticians also found a significant relationship between a carrier's average dwell time and its annual driver turnover rate (p < 0.05): the longer a fleet's trucks sit detained, the faster it burns through drivers. And while they wait, most drivers wait alone in the cab — 78% of customer facilities offer no waiting area, lounge, or break room at all, per the same report.
The takeaway
- The fee exists. It mostly doesn't get paid. 94.5% of carriers charge a detention fee, but between under-billing and non-payment, an actual fee changes hands for well under half of detention incidents in every sector tracked.
- Refrigerated drivers absorb the worst of it. Highest detention rate (56.2% of stops), most hours lost per driver (209.4/year), highest per-driver revenue loss ($18,786), and the highest quit rate tied to detention (45.2%).
- This is a labor-market problem, not just an accounting one. More than a third of surveyed drivers have quit a job over detention at least once — a customer-side inefficiency that carriers pay for twice, first in lost revenue and again in turnover.
Figures cover for-hire trucking in calendar year 2023, the most recent year ATRI has published detention-cost data for; the $15.2 billion combined total is this article's sum of the report's separately stated $11.5 billion and $3.6 billion totals, not a figure the report states as a single sum.
Sources
- American Transportation Research Institute — Costs and Consequences of Truck Driver Detention: A Comprehensive Analysis (September 2024), the source for every figure in this piece: detention frequency and hours by sector, lost-revenue and unreimbursed-expense totals, detention-fee billing and payment rates, driver quit rates by experience and sector, the dwell-time/turnover relationship, and the customer-facility waiting-area rate. Based on a 2023–2024 survey of 587 truck drivers and hundreds of for-hire motor carriers. truckingresearch.org
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"Detention" is the industry's word for a truck sitting idle at a shipper's or receiver's dock past the scheduled — usually free — window to load or unload. It is not a rare event: drivers reported being detained on 39.3% of all stops in 2023, according to ATRI's "Costs and Consequences of Truck Driver Detention", a survey of 587 drivers and hundreds of motor carriers by the American Transportation Research Institute, the research affiliate of the American Trucking Associations. The industry has a mechanism designed to make the party causing the delay pay for it — a detention fee. Mostly, it doesn't work.