Detention Cost Calculator
Waiting is the cheapest thing to ignore and one of the most expensive things to keep doing. This calculator turns hours spent at someone else's gate into an annual figure, then subtracts what you actually manage to bill back.
Your numbers
Arrival to release, not the appointment window.
Loading or unloading time your contract includes at no charge.
Across the fleet, count only stops that regularly run long.
Depreciation, insurance, finance and licensing spread over working hours.
Wage plus employment on-costs, whether the wheels turn or not.
Contracted hourly charge after free time. Enter 0 if you do not bill it.
Of everything you are entitled to bill, how much survives the dispute.
Used to express the lost hours as driver shifts.
Result
Unrecovered detention cost
32,256
Per year, after billing back 40% of 1,008 chargeable hours.
- Gross detention cost
- 50,400 per year
- Recovered from customers
- 18,144 per year
- Chargeable hours
- 1,008 hours/year
- Chargeable hours per stop
- 1.50 hours
- Driver shifts lost
- 112.0 shifts/year
- Cost per detained stop
- 75.00
- Cost per hour of detention
- 50.00
The formula
- Chargeable hours per stop = max(Average time at the dock − Free time, 0)
- Chargeable hours per year = Chargeable hours per stop × Detained stops per week × Operating weeks
- Cost per hour = Vehicle standing cost per hour + Driver cost per hour
- Gross detention cost = Chargeable hours per year × Cost per hour
- Recovered = Chargeable hours per year × Detention rate × (Share actually paid ÷ 100)
- Unrecovered detention cost = Gross detention cost − Recovered
- Shifts lost = Chargeable hours per year ÷ Shift length
- Cost per detained stop = Chargeable hours per stop × Cost per hour
Assumptions and limits
- Free time is treated as costless, which it is not. Two hours of contracted free time still consumes two hours of a paid driver and a financed truck. The model only prices the overrun because the overrun is the part you can argue about.
- The cost per hour is a standing rate, not a marginal one. Delay early in a shift often costs nothing extra; delay that pushes a driver into overtime or forfeits the next collection costs far more than this number.
- Recovery is applied as a flat percentage. Real recovery is lumpy — some customers pay every claim, some pay none, and the average hides which is which.
- The unrecovered figure can go negative if your billed rate exceeds your standing cost and recovery is high. That is arithmetic, not profit; detention income you never wanted is still a schedule you cannot run.
- Knock-on effects are not modelled. A truck released three hours late can miss a delivery slot and lose a whole day, and none of that appears in the hours you were detained.
Why detention never shows up in the accounts
There is no ledger line called waiting. The driver is paid, the truck is insured, the depreciation runs, and all of it is recorded as normal operating cost regardless of whether the vehicle spent the afternoon moving freight or parked behind a closed roller door. The money leaves either way, so nothing looks wrong.
What actually happens is that capacity quietly disappears. The hours exist, they were paid for, and they produced nothing. Costing them separately is the only way to see the size of a problem that is invisible by construction.
The argument you cannot win three weeks later
Detention claims fail on evidence. The driver says four hours, the customer's gate log says two, and the paperwork was signed on release rather than on arrival. By the time the invoice is queried the trip is a month old and nobody involved remembers the afternoon well enough to defend it.
This is why the recovery percentage in this tool matters more than the hourly rate. A generous contracted rate that gets disputed into nothing is worth less than a modest rate backed by an arrival timestamp nobody can argue with. Fix the evidence and the rate starts to mean something.
Detention is a scheduling cost before it is a billing cost
Recovering detention feels like winning, but the money rarely covers what the delay did to the rest of the day. A vehicle held past its release window misses the next slot, and the driver's remaining hours are consumed by sitting rather than driving. You get paid a modest hourly rate for losing a shift.
Which is why the shifts-lost output sits next to the currency figure. Once waiting is expressed as whole driver shifts per year, the conversation moves from invoicing the customer to whether that customer's site should hold the appointments it currently holds.
Frequently asked questions
Time a vehicle and driver spend at a customer site beyond the free loading or unloading period agreed in the contract. The clock normally starts at arrival, not at the appointment time, and stops when the vehicle is released. What is disputed in practice is almost always the start point, which is why arrival evidence decides most claims.
It depends entirely on your own cost base, which is why this tool asks rather than assumes. The floor is the driver's hourly cost plus the vehicle's standing cost, both of which continue while nothing moves. The realistic figure is higher when the delay pushes into overtime or forfeits a downstream job, and lower when the driver would have been on a break anyway.
Because billing and collecting are different things. Set the recovery field to what you genuinely get paid rather than what you are contractually owed, and the gap usually becomes obvious. Most fleets bill a rate that would cover the cost and then recover a fraction of it, which means the contract is fine and the evidence is not.
Padding the plan makes the day survivable and makes the cost permanent. You stop missing slots, and in exchange every vehicle carries an hour of deliberate idleness that you have now agreed to fund. It is a reasonable short-term choice. It is a bad long-term one, because the buffer becomes the new normal and the site never has to improve.
Geofenced arrival and departure timestamps are recorded automatically at every customer site, so the dwell time on the claim is the dwell time the vehicle logged. Trips & Operations reports it per site and per shift, which turns detention from a monthly argument into a pattern you can take to the customer with dates attached.
Stop estimating. Measure it.
Detention Cost Calculator gives you the arithmetic. Trip Management Software gives you the live numbers from your own fleet.