Estimate what slow dock turns cost in detention. Enter your truck volume, average dwell time, free time, and detention rate. Everything runs in your browser: no signup, nothing stored.
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Arrival to departure, averaged across trucks.
Two hours is the common industry norm.
Per year
$169,000
50 billable truck-hours a week past free time.
Defaults: 20 trucks a day, 2.5 hours average dwell, 2 hours free time, $65 an hour, 5 days a week. The two-hour free time matches how ATRI defines detention (waits of more than two hours), and $65 an hour is close to the $63.71 average hourly detention fee ATRI found fleets charging. Your contracts may differ.
The formula
Dwell time is how long a truck spends at a facility, from the moment it arrives (gate-in or check-in) to the moment it leaves (gate-out). It covers everything in between: waiting for a door, backing in, loading or unloading, paperwork, and pulling out. In trucking it is usually measured per stop; a warehouse usually tracks it as an average across all the trucks it served in a day or week.
For one truck, subtract the arrival time from the departure time. A truck that checks in at 8:10 a.m. and leaves at 10:55 a.m. has a dwell time of 2 hours 45 minutes, or 165 minutes. For a facility, add up every truck's dwell minutes and divide by the number of trucks. Use the same two events every time (for example, check-in and departure) or the numbers won't be comparable from week to week. Splitting the visit into stages, such as arrival to door and door to departure, shows where the time actually goes.
For a carrier, dwell time is unpaid time: a driver sitting at a dock is burning hours of service without moving freight. That's why carriers bill detention once a stop runs past its free time. ATRI found drivers were detained at 39.3% of all stops in 2023, and estimated the industry lost $3.6 billion in direct expenses and $11.5 billion in productivity to detention that year. It is also a safety issue: the U.S. DOT Inspector General estimated that a 15-minute increase in average dwell time raises the expected crash rate by 6.2%.
Detention is what a trucking company charges when its truck and driver are held at a shipper or receiver past the agreed free time, usually billed by the hour. Demurrage applies to ocean and rail containers: it is charged, usually by the day, when a container stays at the port or terminal past its free days. (In ocean shipping, "detention" also refers to keeping a carrier's container outside the terminal too long.) This calculator estimates truck detention, the charge that dock dwell time drives directly.
It takes your average dwell, subtracts the free time, and bills the remainder at your hourly rate for every truck on every operating day. That is a simplification. Detention is charged truck by truck, so a facility whose average is under free time can still pay detention on its slowest trucks, and many contracts bill in 15-minute or full-hour increments. Read the result as a floor on your exposure, not an invoice forecast.
Most dwell is lost waiting, not loading. Spreading arrivals across the day with appointment slots keeps trucks from stacking up at shift start. Collecting PO, BOL, and trailer numbers at booking removes paperwork delays at the door. Driver check-in tells the dock who is on site and who is running late. And measuring dwell per truck, per carrier, and per appointment type shows which part of the visit to fix first.
SimpleDock records arrival and departure for every truck. Free for one location.
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