Back at the Dock: A Driver Wait Time Update

There hasn’t been a lot of talk about driver wait time lately, so does that mean it’s no longer an issue? Sadly, no. It hasn’t gotten much better since the last time I wrote about this in Jan 2025, it’s just dropped down the priority list in this current trucking hellscape we’re all dealing with. Are drivers still concerned about wait time? Yes, but they’re more concerned about several other issues that have gotten a lot louder in the last 18 months. So let’s revisit trucking wait time: how the numbers have changed, what governments have done to try and deal with it, what tech could do to help, and what concerns are trumping this very costly issue.

Let’s start with the numbers, because they’re not great. American Transportation Research Institute’s (ATRI) Operational Costs of Trucking report, which came out in July, found that in 2025, trucks spent an average of 1 hour and 49 minutes at every pickup and delivery. That’s up from the year before and only 11 minutes short of the two-hour mark where detention charges usually kicks in. Reefer and flatbed carriers are already averaging more than two hours a stop, and tankers saw their wait time jump 24% in a single year. All that waiting costs real money. ATRI estimates truckload carriers lost about $5,392 per truck in 2025, and drivers lost about $962 each, due to wait time. And are detention charges even getting paid? When ATRI tracked it, fewer than half of carriers’ detention charges were actually paid. Mathieu Vagogne of HaulClaim says a lot of that comes down to paperwork: “A lot of detention goes unpaid simply because nobody has time for the paperwork. The driver has to log his times, warn the broker before the clock starts, get the BOL signed, build an invoice and then chase it for weeks. After a long day most drivers don’t bother, so the money stays on the table.” It’s costing carriers their drivers too, since every extra 30 minutes a fleet’s trucks sit at the dock lines up with a 5.4-point jump in that fleet’s driver turnover.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) has been studying detention since 2023 and said it would share findings in 2025, but as of this May it was still signing up fleets to collect data. What it has moved forward on is a pilot that lets drivers pause their 14-hour clock for up to three hours a day while they’re sitting at a dock. Nine drivers tested it this summer, and the full version launches in 2027 with 256 drivers. Critics suggest that shippers could take advantage and this could cause more wait time. A three-hour pause on top of a 14-hour window also means a workday could stretch to 17 hours. FMCSA says it will keep an eye on shippers during the pilot so the extra flexibility doesn’t turn into longer waits, but nothing in the pilot makes anyone pay for holding a driver, so it seems like a gap in the study.

Europe went a very different way and started charging for it. In Italy shippers get 90 minutes of free time, and after that it’s €100 for every hour or part of an hour, with both the shipper and whoever is responsible for loading on the hook for paying. Carriers can prove when they arrived with GPS or tachograph data, so the classic “we have no record of you checking in” doesn’t fly anymore. Spain starts compensation after one hour at distribution centres. Portugal caps waits at two hours, bans drivers from doing the loading themselves, and makes receivers provide waiting areas with actual toilets. Before anyone thinks Europe has it all figured out, though, Italian haulier groups were already calling out logistics and port operators for dragging their feet on paying.

That’s where private companies come in, developing infrastructure to manage and chase down detention time charges. HaulClaim’s approach is to take the paperwork off the driver’s plate. “Our app reads the detention terms on the rate confirmation, timestamps arrival and departure from the driver’s phone, and sends the broker the notices the rate con asks for,” Vagogne says. “When the truck leaves, the driver adds the BOL, approves the claim, and we send it and follow up with the broker.” Most of the other options out there handle the first half of that job. Apps like DockClaim and Detention Gun also use a driver’s phone’s GPS to timestamp the stop and build the detention invoice, but sending it and chasing the broker is still on the carrier or driver. These are all newer players built for US freight, so it’s early days, but it’s the first time drivers have had literally any viable options for actually collecting what they’re owed. And as Vagogne puts it, “Detention will only get paid at scale when claiming it takes less time than the wait itself.”

So why isn’t anyone talking about this anymore? In 2024, drivers ranked detention as their third biggest concern in ATRI’s annual Top Industry Issues survey, and by the 2025 edition it had fallen out of their top three, behind driver pay, truck parking, and English language proficiency. After three straight years of freight recession, the industry overall was most worried about the economy, lawsuit abuse, insurance costs, and parking. And many of these studies were done before diesel hit over $6/gallon. Meanwhile wait times went up that same year, so the problem didn’t get fixed, it just got drowned out by everything else going on.

When I wrote about this in January 2025, a big retailer told me their seven-to-nine-hour unloads were just “it is what it is,” and nearly two years later nothing in the US has forced anyone to change that answer. Wait time is still costing carriers thousands of dollars per truck, and it’s costing them drivers too. ATRI is set to release its 2026 list of the industry’s top concerns later this month, and we’ll see if detention moves back up the list or not.