How Canadian LTL Carriers Get Paid for Detention Time (And Why Most Don't)

Detention is one of the most consistent sources of lost revenue in Canadian trucking, and it's almost entirely a documentation problem.

The money is there. Most rate confirmations include a detention clause. Brokers know they owe it. But a large percentage of detention claims never get paid — not because the carrier didn't wait, but because they can't prove it well enough to win a dispute.

Here's how detention actually works in Canadian LTL operations, where carriers lose it, and what the ones who consistently recover it are doing differently.

What Detention Is and How It's Supposed to Work

When a driver arrives at a shipper or receiver and can't get loaded or unloaded within the free time window, the clock starts. Free time is typically two hours, though this varies by broker and is spelled out in the rate confirmation. Once that window closes, detention accrues at an agreed hourly rate — usually somewhere between $50 and $100/hour for small to mid-size carriers, again depending on what was negotiated.

The intent is straightforward: the carrier's equipment and driver time have value, and holding them beyond what was agreed costs the carrier money. Detention is compensation for that cost.

In practice, it's treated as optional by brokers until you prove otherwise.

Where Carriers Lose the Claim

They don't record arrival time at the dock. The most common failure point. If the driver doesn't have a timestamped record of when they arrived — not when they were told to arrive, not when they eventually got loaded — there's nothing to anchor the detention calculation to. A broker who wants to dispute the claim will ask for it, and without it, the conversation ends there.

The broker wasn't notified in real time. Most rate confirmations have language requiring detention to be reported while the driver is still on site. "Detention or lumper fees must be approved upon delivery or will not be paid" is a standard clause. If a driver waits six hours and the first the broker hears about it is on the invoice two weeks later, they have grounds to deny it regardless of how long the wait actually was.

The math isn't on the invoice. Sending an invoice that says "$250 detention" with no supporting calculation — no arrival time, no departure time, no rate applied — gives the broker every reason to push back or simply not respond. Documented claims get paid. Undocumented ones get ignored.

The driver signed off without noting the delay on the BOL. A signed clean BOL with no notation is used as evidence that everything was normal. If the driver waited four hours but the paperwork doesn't reflect it, the carrier is arguing against their own documents.

What Carriers Who Actually Recover Detention Do Differently

They capture timestamps at every stop. Arrival time, time in, time out. This doesn't require sophisticated software — a notes field, a text message to dispatch, anything that creates a time-stamped record outside the driver's memory. The carriers who get paid for detention treat this as a standard part of every stop, not something that only happens when there's a problem.

They notify the broker before free time expires. The ones who win disputes don't wait until the invoice to raise detention. They send a message to the broker or dispatcher once free time is up — something as simple as "Driver has been at the dock since 10:00, free time expired at 12:00, detention clock is running." This does two things: it satisfies the rate confirmation's notification requirement, and it puts the broker on notice before the amount gets large.

They include the full calculation on every detention line. Arrival 10:00. Loaded 15:30. Free time 2 hours. Billable time 3.5 hours. Rate $75/hr. Total $262.50. No ambiguity, nothing to dispute on the math. A broker can still push back on whether detention applies, but they can't claim confusion about where the number came from.

They follow up on the same billing cycle, not the next one. Detention claims that sit unpaid for 60+ days are dramatically harder to recover. The broker has moved on, the dispatcher who was on site doesn't remember the day, and the claim gets treated as stale. Same-cycle follow-up — chasing detention on the same invoice where it appears — keeps it from falling into a second collection process.

The Real Barrier: Volume vs. Effort

For a carrier running 10 trucks, there might be 40-60 stops a week. Manually tracking detention across all of them — recording timestamps, calculating billable time, drafting notifications, adding line items to invoices — is real administrative work on top of everything else dispatch is already doing.

This is why most carriers either don't chase it at all, or only chase the large ones where the amount is big enough to justify the effort. The problem with that approach is that moderate detention — an hour here, two hours there — adds up significantly over a month and goes almost entirely uncollected.

The carriers who have the best detention recovery rates are the ones who've made it routine rather than reactive. Timestamp every stop by default. Notify the broker before free time expires by default. Include the calculation on every invoice by default. The individual transactions become low-effort once the process is consistent.

A Note on Canadian Cross-Border Loads

Detention on cross-border loads — Canada to US or US to Canada — has the same mechanics but an added complication: currency. If the rate confirmation is in USD and the detention is invoiced in CAD without a clear note, you'll spend more time arguing about the exchange rate than the wait time. State the currency explicitly on every detention line for cross-border loads, and match whatever currency the rate confirmation used.

What Brokers Actually Respond To

Brokers pay detention when the claim is clean, documented, and submitted on time. They dispute or ignore it when any of those three are missing. This isn't a relationship problem most of the time — it's an administrative one. A well-documented claim from a carrier they've never worked with will get paid faster than a verbal dispute from one they've been doing business with for years.

The documentation is the argument. Everything else is noise.

FleetOS is a dispatch platform built for Canadian LTL carriers that automates detention tracking and recovery.