Cost per truck-hour
What does an hour of truck time actually cost you?
It is the number that tells you whether a detention rate is worth accepting — and the one most carriers have never worked out.
Your costs
What an hour costs you
$89.85
per truck, per hour — across 2,600 operating hours a year
- Your detention rate
- $60.00/hr
- What the hour cost
- $89.85/hr
- Not covered
- − $29.85/hr
A detention claim you collect in full returns 67% of what that hour cost you, and nothing of the linehaul you didn’t run. That is the honest frame: detention pay is loss mitigation, not revenue.
For comparison, ATRI put the industry-average marginal cost of operating a truck at $2.336 a mile in 2025, and published an hourly equivalent of roughly $91 an hour for 2024 — the most recent year they reported it that way. Two different years, not one measurement.
Why this is the number that matters
“Is my detention 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. Comparing yours to the market tells you what everyone else accepted, not whether it covers anything.
What your own cost per hour tells you is whether a quoted rate is acceptable, which is a different and far more useful thing. It also reframes the argument: the question stops being how much detention revenue am I missing and becomes how many hours a month is my fleet not moving, and what did each one cost.
The uncomfortable part is that the answer rarely flatters anyone. At ATRI’s figures a fully collected claim returns about two thirds of the hour, before counting the linehaul that didn’t run. 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.
Keep going
Now put it across the fleet, across a year
Estimate what detention costs your fleet in a year, from truck count, stop volume, how often stops run long, and your rate.
Standard Detention Rates by Freight Type
Standard detention is two hours free then $50 to $60 an hour, capped around six hours. Here’s what real contracts say, and why normal doesn’t cover your costs.
How Much Detention Is Your Fleet Losing Every Month?
Drivers lose 117 to 209 hours a year to detention and fewer than half of the invoices get paid. Here’s how to work out what that costs your fleet each month.
Industry figures from ATRI, An Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking: 2026 Update (July 2026). US research; no Canadian equivalent is published.
Find out how many of those hours you are losing.
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