Detention Pay in Canada: How Free Time Actually Works

If your driver is an hourly employee, Canadian employment law requires you to pay them for the four hours they spent sitting at a dock. Nothing in Canadian law requires the shipper, the consignee, or the broker to pay you back.

That asymmetry is the whole problem with detention pay in Canada. The cost is mandatory. The recovery is optional, and it happens only if you wrote it into the rate confirmation before the truck rolled.

Two separate legal questions, and only one has an answer in your favour

Carriers tend to collapse these into one, which is why the arguments go badly.

What you owe your driver is set by employment standards. Interprovincial and cross-border carriers fall under Part III of the Canada Labour Code. Waiting time at a customer facility counts as working time whenever the driver is at your disposal, responsible for the vehicle and cargo, and waiting on an assignment. Under the Motor Vehicle Operators Hours of Work Regulations, highway drivers earn overtime past 60 hours in a week, and city drivers past 9 hours in a day or 45 in a week, at time and a half. Intra-provincial fleets run on provincial employment standards instead, and the thresholds differ by province.

What a customer owes you is, for general freight, set by nothing at all. No federal statute and no provincial statute obliges a shipper, consignee, or broker to compensate a carrier for detention on a general freight move. Employment standards govern the employer–employee relationship and have no reach into the commercial one.

Canadian hours of service make detention more expensive here than in the US

This is the part most carriers underprice, and it’s a real Canada-versus-US difference rather than a convention.

Under the federal Commercial Vehicle Drivers Hours of Service Regulations (SOR/2005-313), on-duty time expressly includes time spent waiting before and while a vehicle is loaded, unloaded, serviced, or dispatched. A driver waiting at a dock cannot log that time as off-duty unless you have fully relieved them of responsibility for the vehicle, equipment, and cargo, and they’re free to leave.

The practical result is that detention burns your clocks whether or not you ever collect a dollar for it. Canadian rules give you two more driving hours than the US 11-hour limit, but the 14-hour on-duty clock is consumed the same way on both sides of the border, and neither can be paused for a dock wait.

A fleet that writes off detention isn’t just writing off the accessorial. It’s paying wages and consuming cycle hours to produce nothing.

One more cross-border note. Hours of service follow territory, not domicile. Your Canadian truck switches to FMCSA rules at the border, and a US carrier switches to Canadian rules coming north. Dock wait gets logged under whichever country the driver is standing in.

When the clock starts, and how much free time you get

Two hours per stop is the benchmark, and it holds up at source. Both Campbell Soup and Knight-Swift publish accessorial schedules giving two hours free before detention accrues. It’s a convention, not a floor.

None of that is enforceable in either direction. The rate confirmation governs. If it says four hours free, four hours free is what you agreed to, and the convention is irrelevant.

The start trigger matters more than the free time number, and it’s what most rate cons leave out. Arrival on property, check-in at the guard shack, appointment time, and dock assignment can be hours apart, and a broker will apply whichever is latest. Get it named in writing.

The notification clause kills more claims than bad paperwork does

Broker-carrier agreements commonly require the carrier to advise the broker at or before the charge is incurred, and treat failure to do so as forfeiting the right to collect. Knight-Swift’s agreement says exactly that. So the standard isn’t a set number of minutes’ warning, it’s simply this: tell them before the clock starts.

Your documentation can be flawless and the claim still dies, because the obligation was to warn them while the truck was still sitting there, not to prove it afterward. One agreement allows the notice verbally so long as it’s confirmed in writing within 24 hours, which is worth knowing if your driver already told the facility.

If a Canadian broker won’t pay, your recourse is thinner than in the US

American carriers have a backstop. FMCSA-licensed property brokers must carry a $75,000 USD surety bond or trust fund, and an unpaid carrier can file against it.

Canada has no federal freight broker licensing, registration, or bonding requirement at all. Provincially:

• Ontario repealed the Truck Transportation Act and O. Reg. 556/92 effective January 1, 2006. No load broker licence or certificate is required. The one surviving obligation moved into the Highway Traffic Act, s. 191.0.1(3): anyone who arranges carriage must hold money received from the consignor or consignee for the carrier in trust until it’s paid over.
• Quebec requires transport service intermediaries to register with the Commission des transports du Québec.
• Everywhere else in Canada, freight brokerage is unregulated.

So if a Canadian broker simply doesn’t pay, there’s no bond to claim against and no regulator to complain to. You’re left with a contract claim, and for most detention amounts litigation costs more than the claim.

The practical conclusion is unglamorous. Credit-check brokers before you haul, and treat a broker’s detention payment history as part of their credit profile.

Get the tax right or the invoice bounces

Detention is an accessorial charge, and an incidental charge generally follows the tax treatment of the freight movement it attaches to.

Domestic Canadian moves are taxable. Detention gets GST or HST at the rate applicable to the destination province: 5% GST in Alberta, BC, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and the territories, 13% HST in Ontario, 15% in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, PEI and Newfoundland.

Cross-border moves that form a continuous inbound or outbound international freight movement are zero-rated, and detention billed against them is zero-rated too, at 0%.

Itemize linehaul, fuel surcharge, and detention as separate lines, and show your GST/HST registration number and the rate applied. Charging 13% on a zero-rated cross-border detention line gives a broker’s AP department a clean reason to kick the invoice back. Confirm the treatment of your specific lanes with your accountant, since the zero-rating conditions have documentation requirements attached.

What isn’t worth chasing

• No detention clause on the rate con. You can ask. You can’t collect.
• No notice given during the wait. Where the agreement says notice is a condition of collecting, and nobody sent it, the claim is dead on submission.
• Border wait time. Published detention terms apply to delay on the premises of a shipper or consignee, which a border crossing is not. It’s a real cost and a legitimate thing to price into the lane rate, but including it in a detention claim gives the broker a reason to deny the whole thing.
• Anything under an hour billable. The admin cost exceeds the recovery.

Writing off the unwinnable ones is how you afford to fight the winnable ones — and some of what gets written off as detention was never detention: layover and TONU are billed differently.

Don’t wait for this to be regulated

There is no Canadian dataset. Transport Canada publishes rail car dwell times but tracks nothing equivalent for motor carriers. Every detention statistic you’ll see quoted in Canadian trade press is extrapolated from US research. If your fleet’s numbers are going to change, they’ll change because you started billing, not because Ottawa acted.

What to do next

Pull your last twenty rate confirmations and sort them into three piles: no detention clause, clause with no named start trigger, and clause with a notification requirement you’re not currently meeting. That’s your recoverable exposure, and it usually explains the write-offs better than any argument with a broker will.

Then fix the intake. This is the language to push for:

Doing this load by load across a fleet, while the truck is still sitting and the notice window is still open, is the part that doesn’t scale manually. That’s why we built DwellWatch to detect detention from ELD data and assemble the claim in time to matter.

Two hours is the number most often quoted, but it is a starting point rather than a rule, and what counts as normal varies by freight type and region.