Detention vs Layover vs TONU: What’s the Difference?

Detention is billed by the hour. Layover is a flat daily rate. TONU is a flat fee for a load that never moved. Three different triggers, three different billing bases, and if you don’t classify the event correctly, the broker will classify it for you and pick the cheapest one.

That’s the practical stake here. A nine-hour dock delay billed as detention is worth several hundred dollars. The same nine hours reclassified as a layover is worth a flat fee that might be less than half of it.

The three charges side by side

Those figures come from published schedules rather than from commentary — what counts as a normal rate is worth checking against your own contracts.

Detention is hourly, and the cap is where the money goes

Detention starts when free time expires, which for general freight is conventionally two hours per stop. It accrues in increments, usually 15 or 30 minutes, at whatever hourly rate the rate confirmation names.

The part carriers underread is the cap. Both schedules cap hourly detention at a daily maximum, and in both the cap works out to exactly six hours. Campbell’s pays $1.00 a minute to a $360 ceiling; Knight-Swift pays $50 an hour to $300.

So the rate doesn’t determine what a bad day is worth. The cap does. Sixty dollars an hour capped at six hours is $360 and no more, whether the driver sits seven hours or fourteen. Read the cap before you read the rate.

Layover is flat and daily, and it’s where detention goes to die

Layover applies when a delay you didn’t cause forces the truck to sit overnight or across a full rest cycle, and you can’t dispatch onto the next load. It’s billed as a flat daily figure rather than by the hour.

The schedules make the relationship explicit. Campbell’s forbids charging detention and layover in the same 24-hour period, and allows layover only for each successive 24 hours after the one in which detention was incurred. So they aren’t additive — the day is either a detention day or a layover day.

TONU is the easiest of the three to collect

TONU covers a load cancelled after you’ve committed equipment: the truck was dispatched, or it arrived at origin, and then the load evaporated. It’s a flat fee meant to cover deadhead and lost opportunity.

It’s the easiest of the three to collect because it’s binary. Either the load was cancelled after dispatch or it wasn’t. There’s no free time argument, no timestamp arithmetic, no notification window to have missed. The evidence is the dispatch record and the cancellation message.

It’s also the most under-billed, because the amount feels small next to the relationship. That’s a judgment call about the lane, not a documentation problem, and it’s worth making deliberately rather than by default. As with the others, if TONU isn’t named on the rate confirmation, it isn’t collectible.

Three charges people fold into detention by mistake

• Redelivery applies when a delivery attempt fails outright, because the receiver was closed or the appointment was rejected, and you have to come back. Knight-Swift bills it per mile with a minimum, plus any applicable detention, rather than as a flat fee. It isn’t detention, because you weren’t waiting, you were turned away.
• Stop-off compensates you for the existence of an extra stop, not for waiting at it. Both schedules pay $50 per additional stop, and one requires at least a mile of travel to qualify. You can legitimately bill a stop-off charge and detention at the same stop.
• Lumper fees are a third-party labour cost you front and get reimbursed for on presentation of the receipt. It’s a pass-through, not accessorial revenue, and it doesn’t belong on the same line as anything else.

Collapsing these into one detention figure is a common reason a claim gets bounced. Itemize each on its own line — the rest of the packet has the same discipline.

Multi-stop loads are where free time gets ambiguous

On a single pickup and single drop, free time runs independently at each end. On multi-stop work, contracts diverge.

The standard model gives a separate free time window at every stop. Industry commentary describes a broker-favourable variant giving free time only at the first pickup and final delivery, but neither published schedule contains it, so treat it as something to check rather than something to expect. On a one-pickup, three-drop run the difference between the two would be several hours of billable time.

Check which model your rate con uses before you accept multi-stop freight, not after.

If the rate confirmation is silent, none of this is collectible

A signed rate confirmation functions as the contract for that load. Silence on detention, layover, or TONU is not interpreted as agreement to industry convention. It’s interpreted as no term.

Practically: each of the three charges needs its own named term. Detention terms don’t create a TONU right, and a denial citing missing terms is usually final.

Canadian specifics

Currency. Every range above is USD. If a US broker’s rate con says $75 per hour and you assumed CAD, you’ve quietly discounted yourself. Get the currency written down.

Tax. These charges are accessorial and incidental to the freight movement, so they follow its tax treatment. On a domestic Canadian move, detention, layover, TONU, and redelivery all attract GST or HST at the destination province’s rate. On a continuous cross-border movement, they’re zero-rated along with the linehaul. Confirm your specific lanes with your accountant, because the zero-rating has documentation conditions attached — the Canadian picture in full.

Vancouver drayage. Container drayage serving Port of Vancouver terminals falls under the BC Container Trucking Act, which sets minimum operator compensation and requires carriers to pass 100% of any wait time remuneration received through to the driver. It doesn’t set what terminals owe you. The billing mechanics above still apply; what you’re allowed to keep does not.

Which one applies

• The truck sat past free time, then loaded or unloaded, and still made its next dispatch. Detention.
• The delay pushed the driver into a rest cycle and killed the following load. Layover.
• The load was cancelled after you dispatched or arrived. TONU.
• You arrived, couldn’t complete the delivery, and had to return. Redelivery, plus mileage.

What to do next

Pull your last month of accessorial billings and check two things: whether each charge was classified against the right trigger, and whether the rate confirmation actually named that charge. Those two questions usually explain more lost revenue than any rate negotiation would.

Then look at your caps. If your detention clauses convert to layover after four hours, you already know what a long day at a bad receiver is worth, and you can price the lane accordingly instead of arguing about it afterward.

Catching the classification correctly on every load, while the timestamps are still clean and before the broker decides for you, is the part that doesn’t scale by hand. That’s why we built DwellWatch to detect the dwell from ELD data and assemble the claim automatically.