Detention loss estimator
What is detention costing your fleet a year?
A stop that runs three hours long feels like a $60 annoyance. Across a fleet, across a year, it is a different number. This works out which.
Your fleet
What detention is costing you
$392,400
of billable detention a year — about $32,700 a month
- Facility stops a year
- 16,640
- Running past free time (39.3%)
- 6,540
- × 1h billable each
- 6,540 h
- × $60/hr
- $392,400
Does that look right?
Your inputs work out to 164 hours of detention per truck per year. That sits inside the 117–209 hour band ATRI measured, so the estimate is in plausible territory.
How much of that is realistically collectable
ATRI found fewer than half of submitted detention invoices get paid, and a substantial share are never submitted at all. So $196,200 is an upper bound on the year, not a target — the real figure is lower, and the gap is mostly missing notices and missing timestamps rather than brokers arguing the merits.
This is an estimate of what detention costs you, not a claim you can send. A payable claim needs written notice to the broker at or before free time expires, which is something no back-dated arithmetic can supply.
What the estimate is, and what it isn’t
It is arithmetic on figures you supplied, which makes it exactly as good as your inputs. That is why it compares the result against ATRI’s measured band of 117 to 209 detained hours per driver per year and tells you when your numbers sit outside it. A confident wrong answer is worse than no answer.
It is a rate of loss, not a pot of money. Most of what it describes has already gone: a payable claim needs written notice to the broker at or before free time expires, and nothing reconstructed afterwards can supply that. What the figure is good for is deciding whether the next twelve months are worth changing.
And it is an estimate. If you want the real number for your own fleet rather than an average of somebody else’s, that is what the free audit does — it reads the last 30 days out of the ELD you already run and measures every hold past free time at every customer site.
Keep going
Work out what a single stop was worth
Work out what a single stop was worth — billable hours and the amount, with the arithmetic shown.
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.
Detention frequencies and the hours band come from ATRI, Costs and Consequences of Truck Driver Detention: A Comprehensive Analysis (September 2024). All of it is US research; no Canadian equivalent is published.
Stop estimating.
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