Standard Detention Rates by Freight Type

Two hours free, then $50 to $60 an hour, capped at roughly six hours per day. That’s what two large shippers’ published accessorial schedules actually pay, and if your rate confirmation looks like that, your terms are normal.

The more useful question is whether normal covers what the truck costs you while it sits. ATRI puts the marginal cost of running a Class 8 truck at about $91 an hour. Detention at $50 doesn’t get you back to even.

What published schedules actually pay

Notice the structure. In both, the detention cap is exactly the layover day rate. Detention accrues hourly until it costs what a full layover day costs, then stops. That’s not arbitrary — it’s the point where the payer would rather buy the whole day, which is also how a detention day becomes a layover day.

Free time barely varies by equipment. Detention frequency varies enormously.

Two hours is close to universal across dry van, reefer and flatbed. What differs is how often you blow through it.

A reefer operation hits detention on more than half its stops, against about a third for dry van. Same two-hour clause, more than double the exposure. The causes are structural rather than contractual: pulp checks, pre-cooling verification, and lumper-dependent unloading at cold storage.

So comparing your reefer rate to the market tells you very little. If reefer stops detain at 56% and dry van at 33%, the same $60 an hour is a materially different piece of business. Price the frequency, not the clause — which is what turns it into an annual figure.

Two other splits worth knowing: spot market freight detains at 42.5% of stops against lower rates on contract lanes, and across all stops, 39.3% saw detention of some length while 9.9% ran more than two hours past free time.

Specialized freight often trades free time away, and that’s usually right

On heavy haul, oversized and permitted moves, carriers frequently negotiate free time down to an hour or bill from arrival.

That looks aggressive next to the two-hour convention, and it’s the correct instinct. Capital tied up in specialized rigging, higher driver cost, and ministry curfew windows governing when oversized loads can move all mean an hour lost costs far more than it does on a dry van. Free time is a discount, and there’s no reason to give the same discount on a load that costs three times as much to hold.

If you run mixed equipment on identical accessorial terms, that’s worth revisiting.

Why “is my rate normal” is the wrong question

Detention rates were never set to make carriers whole. They emerged from negotiation between parties with unequal leverage and settled where they settled.

ATRI’s operational costs work is the useful comparison. The industry-average marginal cost of operating a truck reached $2.336 per mile in 2025, the highest in the report’s history. ATRI also publishes the hourly equivalent: roughly $91 an hour in 2024, the most recent figure published that way.

That’s the honest frame. Detention pay is loss mitigation, not revenue. Which is why the fleets that do well here work on frequency and collection rate rather than on negotiating the hourly figure up by ten dollars.

The same numbers explain why margins are what they are. ATRI found truckload operating margins below 1% in 2025, with flatbed carriers averaging an operating loss. In that environment, uncollected accessorials aren’t a rounding error.

What to do next

Work out your own cost per hour first: total operating cost including the driver, divided by operating hours. That number, not a published range, tells you whether a quoted rate is acceptable.

Then check three clauses on your current rate confirmations, in this order: the cap, the billing increment, and the currency. Those decide what a rate is actually worth, and all three are easier to negotiate than the headline number because brokers pay less attention to them.

Working out how often each lane and each receiver actually pushes you past free time is the harder half, and it’s the half that changes pricing. That’s why we built DwellWatch to measure it from ELD data rather than from memory.

Free time itself is the other half of the clause, and it varies more by region than by equipment.