How Much Detention Is Your Fleet Losing Every Month?

ATRI’s research puts detention at between 117 and 209 hours per driver per year, depending on sector. Multiply that by your truck count, then by what an hour of truck time costs you, and you have the exposure.

For a 40-truck fleet at the low end of that range, it’s around 390 hours a month. At $60 an hour that’s roughly $23,000 of billable detention. Fewer than half of submitted detention invoices get paid, and a substantial share never get submitted at all.

The arithmetic

The upper end of ATRI’s range is 209 hours, which nearly doubles it. Where you land depends on your equipment mix and how much of your freight comes off the spot market.

Your rate depends heavily on what you haul and where you get it

ATRI measured detention across 2023 operations. Drivers were detained on 39.3% of all stops, and on 9.9% of stops the delay ran more than two hours past free time.

The splits matter more than the average:

If you run reefer off the spot market, the industry average is a floor rather than an estimate. If you run specialized on contract lanes, your exposure is a third of what the headline suggests — and what you can charge varies the same way.

One honest note: detention has improved. The share of stops with detention fell by about six and a half percentage points between 2014 and 2023. It’s still 39.3%.

An hour of detention costs more than an hour of detention pay

ATRI puts the industry-average marginal cost of operating a truck at $2.336 per mile in 2025, the highest in the report’s history, and publishes an hourly equivalent of roughly $91.

Detention typically bills at $50 to $60 an hour and caps around six hours a day.

So a claim you collect in full covers about two thirds of what the hour cost you, and nothing of the linehaul you didn’t run. The uncollected claims are the visible problem; the full cost of a detained hour also includes the duty clock you can’t get back and the downstream appointment you’re now late for.

That means the honest framing isn’t “how much detention revenue am I missing.” It’s “how many hours a month is my fleet not moving, and what did each one cost.”

Then subtract what you don’t collect

ATRI found that 94.5% of fleets charge detention fees and fewer than half of those invoices get paid. That’s the collection gap, and it sits on top of whatever you never billed at all.

Denials cluster around missing timestamps and missing real-time notice rather than around the merits, which means most of the gap is process rather than negotiation — and the paperwork that closes it is knowable in advance.

Run your own figure through both gaps and the recoverable number is a fraction of the exposure. That fraction is still larger than most fleets assume, which is why writing it off stops being obviously correct.

What the calculation leaves out

• Fuel burned sitting. ATRI put idling during detention at over 72 million gallons across the industry in 2023.
• Safety. DOT’s Inspector General estimated that a 15-minute increase in average dwell time raises expected crash rates by 6.2%, and ATRI’s telematics work confirms detained trucks drive faster afterward.
• Driver experience. ATRI found 44% of customer facilities offered no restroom access during detention and 78% had no lounge or waiting area. Canadian driver demographics make that expensive: the average age of a Canadian truck driver has risen to about 49.

Be careful which numbers you repeat

Detention statistics get quoted badly. If you’re building a case internally, know what you’re holding.

• The $15 billion industry figure is real and it’s ATRI’s, from 2023 data: $3.6 billion in direct expenses plus $11.5 billion in lost productivity. It’s industry research rather than a government statistic, but it is not a vendor extrapolation, and it’s fine to cite with attribution.
• The $1.1 to $1.3 billion figure is from DOT’s 2018 audit, based on 2015 data, limited to for-hire truckload, and it measures lost driver earnings rather than carrier revenue. It gets misquoted as total industry loss constantly.
• Older 10% of stops benchmarks come from 2014 field work and have been superseded.

Work out your own number

You need three things from your own records: total facility stops last month, how many ran past free time, and your average hours over.

If your dispatch or ELD records can produce those, the arithmetic takes ten minutes. If they can’t, that’s itself the finding, and it’s the more common outcome — which is also the honest limit of what ELD data can settle on its own.

We are building a loss estimator that runs this calculation from a few inputs about your fleet, and DwellWatch measures the real figure from ELD data once you want to stop estimating.