You sat six hours at a receiver. The rate confirmation says detention pays $50 an hour after two hours free. You emailed the broker, somebody said "we submitted it," and forty days later the settlement shows the linehaul and nothing else.
This is the most commonly abandoned money in trucking, and here's the part that should annoy you: it almost never gets denied on the terms. You already won that fight on the rate call. It gets denied on the proof — because nobody can show, in a form the broker's customer will accept, exactly when you arrived and exactly when you left.
What six hours at a dock actually costs
Run the standard numbers. Two hours free, $50 an hour after, six hours on site:
(6 − 2) × $50 = $200 billable.
On a 550-mile load, that's:
$200 ÷ 550 = $0.36 per mile — the gap between a good load and an average one.
But $200 isn't what those six hours cost you. It's what you got back. Six hours off an 11-hour driving clock is roughly 300 miles you can't run today. At $2.40 a mile, that's about $720 of revenue capacity gone, and detention replaced $200 of it. Detention pay never makes you whole. It slows the bleed. Which is exactly why you bill every hour of it.
And it compounds. One detained load a week that you never invoiced:
$200 × 52 = $10,400 a year. Over 100,000 miles that's $0.10 per mile, straight off your rate — bigger than most fuel-price swings you lose sleep over.
If you'd rather have your true cost per mile — unbilled detention counted against it — scored on every load before you book, that's what we're building: get on the Haitruck waitlist.
The four timestamps that win the claim
Almost every denied claim traces back to one missing timestamp. You need four, and none of them can depend on your memory:
- Arrival at the gate — not the dock. The clock starts when you're on the property and checked in.
- Check-in acknowledged — guard shack log, receiving office signature, or the facility app's confirmation.
- Released from the dock.
- Departure through the gate.
Get each one from something that isn't you: a BOL stamped in and out, a photo of the guard log with your truck number visible, the facility's own check-in app, or your ELD's geofence entry and exit. Your text messages are evidence, but they're weak evidence. A stamped BOL is what a broker's customer actually pays on.
Bill it — don't ask for it
The second mistake is tone. Most drivers ask for detention: "hey, I sat six hours, can you do anything?" That's an invitation to negotiate you down, and it works every time.
Detention is a line item you earned under a signed contract. Invoice it. Same invoice as the load, same day you deliver, timestamps attached, rate confirmation number referenced, and the detention clause quoted back verbatim. Don't round in their favor either — if you sat 6 hours 20 minutes, know before you send whether the contract pays partial hours (4.33) or full hours only (4).
The five-step routine
- Notify while you're still sitting. Most rate cons require notice at the two-hour mark. Miss it and the claim is dead no matter how clean your paperwork is. Put it in writing — email or the broker's app, not a phone call.
- Photograph the BOL with in and out times stamped. If the receiver won't stamp it, write the times yourself and photograph the clerk's window with the wall clock in frame.
- Capture the gate times separately. ELD geofence screenshots cost nothing and are timestamped by someone other than you.
- Invoice within 24 hours of delivery — detention as its own line, docs attached.
- Chase it on day 7, not day 40. One short email — "following up on detention for rate con #12345, docs attached" — gets it in front of a human before the settlement closes. After the settlement runs, you're asking for a correction instead of a payment, and those go to the bottom of the pile.
Detention is money you already earned sitting in somebody's inbox. The terms were the negotiation. The timestamps are the collection. Most owner-operators start winning this the day they stop treating detention as a favor and start treating it as an invoice.
We're building Haitruck so your real cost per mile — detained hours included — is scored on every load card automatically. Join the waitlist at haitruck.us/join-waitlist to get it first, and follow the road stories on TikTok at @haitruck.