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Your driver just texted: “Hour 4 at the dock. Still no bay assignment.”
Relatable? Detention in trucking is that special kind of nightmare in which you’re paying drivers to scroll through their phones while your delivery schedule goes up in flames. Three hours here, five hours there — suddenly, you’re explaining to accounting why detention ate 15% of your margin this quarter.
The worst part? Most of this waiting around is completely avoidable. We’re talking about the same delays at the same facilities, happening to the same carriers week after week.
It’s like “Groundhog Day,” except Bill Murray is pulling a 53-footer, and you’re picking up the tab.
The FMCSA finally noticed this dumpster fire and launched a yearlong study on detention delays. But here’s the thing — while the FMCSA is busy counting how many hours we’re wasting, smart operators are already fixing the problem with technology like next-gen TMS platforms.
Detention in trucking doesn’t have to be the cost of doing business anymore.
So, what exactly are we dealing with here? Detention in trucking starts ticking after that laughable “free” two-hour window most facilities give you. The problem is that nearly 40% of stops blow past that mark, and about 5% stretch beyond four hours. When you’re running a fleet, those aren’t outliers — they’re Tuesday.
The math is brutal. In 2023 alone, the industry lost 135 million driving hours to detention. That works out to about 15 wasted driver-days per truck annually — time that should’ve been generating revenue but instead got burned sitting in some warehouse parking lot.
That’s $11.5 billion in lost productivity, plus another $3.6 billion in direct costs that carriers absorb because shippers won't pay detention fees.
For drivers, this hits where it hurts most: their paychecks. Since most still get paid by the mile, all those detention hours translate to roughly $11,000 to $19,000 in lost annual income per driver. Your best drivers know this math, and they’re not sticking around for it.
The fundamental problem isn’t complicated — it’s incentives. Shippers face zero consequences for inefficient loading operations, so they treat your equipment like free warehouse space. Meanwhile, carriers eat every cost associated with these delays: fuel, wages, missed opportunities, and driver turnover.
Here’s where detention in trucking gets really expensive: It’s killing your driver roster and turning your fleet into a safety liability. Over a third of drivers have walked off the job specifically because of excessive detention, and carriers with longer detention times consistently see higher turnover rates. In today’s driver market, that’s like lighting money on fire while competitors poach your best talent.
However, the real danger starts when drivers who stay adapt to the system. They know exactly which customers will detain them, so they start gaming their schedules. ATRI found that trucks run about 14.5% faster in the 24 hours around a detention event — drivers are flooring it before and after stops to make up the time they know they’ll lose sitting in parking lots.
The aftershocks are ugly. Even a 15-minute delay bumps crash risk up by 6.2% on the next trip. Your drivers are stressed, racing against hours-of-service clocks, and making split-second decisions about pushing through fatigue or missing their delivery windows. It’s a recipe for accidents, violations, and insurance claims.
The irony is that detention forces good drivers to drive unsafely to maintain barely acceptable service levels. They’re not speeding because they’re reckless — they’re speeding because customers have made efficiency impossible any other way. Eventually, your safest, most professional drivers get fed up with this no-win situation and find carriers that have figured out how to avoid it altogether.
If losing drivers and creating safety risks weren’t bad enough, here’s the final kick in the teeth: You’re probably not getting paid for most of your detention time anyway.
About 75% of carriers try to bill shippers for detention in trucking, but less than 55% of those invoices ever get paid. Do the math — only 40-45% of detention incidents ever see a dime of compensation.
Shippers have turned dodging detention fees into an art form. “Your driver was 10 minutes late.” “We never got proper notification.” “The paperwork wasn’t signed in triplicate.” They’ll find any excuse to void fees they contractually agreed to pay, and most carriers don’t have the documentation or capacity to fight every bogus dispute.
Owner-operators have it even worse. Less than half even bother submitting detention claims anymore, and of those who do, only about 25% get paid. Chasing $200 detention fees from a Fortune 500 company isn’t a fair fight when you’re a small operation.
The end result? Carriers absorb tens of millions in uncompensated costs, while shippers get free warehouse services courtesy of your equipment and drivers. It’s a wealth transfer disguised as a standard business practice, and it’s been going on for decades because most carriers lack the tools to collect provable data and supporting notification communications that is required to successfully bill and collect contracted detention fees. It is worse as a high percentage of trucking companies do not have a detention contract with their shipper.
You’ve likely heard every promise and sales pitch before — “Technology will solve detention!” — usually followed by some half-baked app that crashes when you need it most. But here’s the thing: The right TMS platform can turn detention in trucking from a profit-killing nightmare into a manageable, even profitable, part of your operation. Modern systems like EKA’s Omni-TMS™ don’t just track detention — they automate the entire process from scheduling, to shipper notifications, to billing, finally giving carriers the tools to fight back.
So here we are: Detention in trucking is burning through $15+ billion annually, your drivers are either speeding to make up time or walking off the job, and shippers keep finding creative ways to stiff you on detention fees. Meanwhile, you’re stuck playing an expensive waiting game with equipment that should be making money, not sitting in parking lots. The carriers that have figured this out aren’t running magic tricks — they just stopped accepting detention as a necessary evil and started treating it like the manageable problem it is.
At EKA Solutions, we built the OmniTMS to help fix detention instead of only tracking it. GPS time stamps that shippers can’t argue with, automated billing that chases down every unpaid fee, and scheduling tools that get your drivers in and out without the guessing games. Your drivers document delays with a few taps, your office automatically collects detention fees, and you finally have data showing which customers are worth the headache and which aren’t. When detention becomes something you control instead of something that controls you, it’s funny how quickly those profit margins start looking healthier.
Contact EKA today and stop letting detention pick your pocket.
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