Image: Semi trucks line up to pick by U.S. Department of Agriculture, licensed under CC0 1.0.
A load out of Joliet is running ninety minutes behind at 11:20. Its delivery appointment is 14:00 at a receiver whose dock closes at 15:30, and nobody on your team will open that shipment until the carrier calls at 15:40 to say the driver was turned away.
Six weeks later, three lines arrive on one invoice: a layover, a redelivery, and detention on the second attempt. At 11:20 none of them existed, and moving the booking to the next morning's first slot would have cost you nothing.
Accessorials are timers, not prices
A linehaul rate is a number you agreed to in advance. An accessorial is the output of a timer that started while your freight was moving, and the amount is set by how long it ran before anybody did anything about it.
J.B. Hunt publishes a standard accessorial schedule on its Carrier 360 carrier page, posted in December 2020. The figures are what the broker pays carriers rather than what a shipper gets billed, and the mechanics are the part worth reading. Detention with power begins two hours after the arrival check call and accrues every fifteen minutes. It is capped at five hours, after which the stop converts to a layover at $250 a day.
The truck ordered not used rule on the same schedule is sharper still. J.B. Hunt pays $200 when location services are on, and the charge applies where the load was dispatched with the driver en route or arrived, or where it was cancelled on the day of pickup and tendered more than thirty minutes before the appointment. A cancellation either falls inside that definition or outside it. Half an hour of warning is the entire difference.
Read a schedule like that as a ladder rather than a price list. Every rung has a moment before which stepping off is free, and after which it is not.
| Charge | What starts the timer | The last moment it is still free |
|---|---|---|
| Detention | Arrival at the stop, with free time running | Before free time expires, while a door or a later window is still obtainable |
| Layover | Detention passing its cap, or receiving hours ending with the trailer still loaded | Before the driver commits to sitting overnight, while releasing or rerouting him is possible |
| Truck ordered not used | Dispatch, then the carrier's cancellation threshold | Before the load is dispatched, or inside the notice period the contract names |
| Reconsignment | The destination printed on the tender | Before the driver passes the point where a diversion adds out-of-route miles |
| Redelivery | A refused or missed delivery attempt | Before arrival, while the appointment or the paperwork can still be corrected |
Disputing costs more than preventing and recovers less
The alternative to acting in transit is arguing in accounts payable, and the industry already knows how that ends. The American Transportation Research Institute's detention study, released on September 10, 2024 using 2023 data and reported by trucknews.com, found that 94.5 percent of fleets bill detention fees and that fewer than half of those invoices are paid. Among truckload carriers specifically, 55 percent get paid and 45 percent do not.
Roughly half of all detention billing is therefore a standoff. Each unpaid line represents a carrier that spent time raising it and a shipper that spent time refusing it, and the wait that triggered it happened regardless of who won.
The same research put 9.9 percent of stops past the two hour mark in 2023. That is the population under argument: about one stop in ten, repeating across every facility you ship into, every week.
Evidence decides those arguments, and the market has already priced it. J.B. Hunt's schedule pays $50 an hour for detention when the carrier's updates are automated in Carrier 360 and $40 when they are recorded by hand. Layover pays $250 a day automated against $150 manual. The identical wait is worth more when machine timestamps support it than when a dispatcher's note does, and that asymmetry runs in your direction as well as the carrier's.
An alert is not an intervention
Most execution tooling stops at detection. It raises a flag, drops it in a queue, and leaves the useful part to whoever opens that queue next. A dwell alert cannot tell you why the truck stopped, and it is equally silent on what the next hour is about to cost.
Acting on an exception before it prices itself takes four things. Detection supplies one.
- Time remaining. Not that the load is late, but how many minutes are left before free time runs out, the dock closes, or the carrier's cancellation rule flips.
- The options still open. A later window, a different door, a nearby stop taken first, a cancellation, a reconsignment.
- What each option costs. A layover weighed against a missed must-arrive-by date is a real trade, and it resolves differently on a $2,000 truckload than on a $40,000 order.
- Authority to execute. Somebody has to call the receiver, move the booking or release the driver, inside the window rather than after it.
A coordinator with forty open alerts and a phone can assemble all four. They can do it for two or three loads a day. The rest price themselves.
What Chase does between the alert and the invoice
Chase runs execution: track and trace, exception detection and root cause. On a load in motion his job is to identify the governing timer and act against it while room remains.
Three situations call for three different moves.
- The ETA slips past receiving hours. Chase tests projected arrival against the facility's closing time and its historical last-truck-accepted time rather than against the appointment. When the arithmetic says the trailer will not be unloaded today, he rebooks for the morning and releases the driver before the overnight charge starts, which turns three lines into one.
- The order is pulled after dispatch. Chase cancels against the carrier's own rule instead of a generic one. Where a schedule turns on dispatch status and a thirty minute threshold, 06:40 and 07:10 produce different invoices for the same decision.
- Dwell is building at a door with a history. Chase escalates inside free time, not after it, and records every contact with its timestamp. Where the charge lands anyway, it lands against a timeline rather than a gap.
That third case is where execution pays for the audit. When the line reaches Penny, she compares billed hours against a record written while the driver was still at the dock. Earned charges get approved quickly. Unearned ones get disputed with evidence rather than with an assertion, which is the half of detention billing that currently goes nowhere.
A tight market raises the price of being late
Prevention is worth more in some quarters than in others, and this is one of the expensive ones. FreightWaves reported on October 14, 2026 that the SONAR Tender Rejection Index had reached 14.17 percent, an unusual spike for mid-October, and attributed the move to capacity rather than to demand. Zach Strickland's reading in that piece was that supply is still not sufficient to cover truckload demand.
Two consequences follow for your accessorial spend. A truck lost to an overnight sit is harder and dearer to replace this month than it was last month. A carrier with better alternatives also enforces its schedule more firmly, because walking away costs it less than it used to.
What to do next
Pull last quarter's accessorial lines and group them by charge code. Against each one write two timestamps: when the governing timer started, and the last moment anybody could have acted for free. Then sort by the gap between them.
Those gaps separate your spend into three unrelated problems. Hours of warning means nobody was watching. Minutes means somebody was watching and could not move fast enough. No window at all means the load was committed to the charge before it ever rolled, which is a planning failure wearing an execution failure's clothes.
Book a walkthrough to see Chase work your in-transit exceptions against the clocks that actually price them.