Detention & Lumper Fee Calculator
Calculate what you're owed for detention and lumper fees.
Get More Out of the Detention & Lumper Calculator
Document Arrival and Departure the Moment They Happen
A time stamp from a check-in call, a BOL, or your ELD is worth far more at invoicing time than a rough memory of when you got there and left.
Lumper Reimbursement Depends on Your Rate Con
Whether a lumper fee gets added back to what you're owed comes down to what your rate confirmation actually says. Read it before you pay, not after.
Detention Pay Isn't Automatic
You almost always have to invoice for it separately with documentation, since brokers and shippers rarely add it without being asked and shown the math.
Detention & Lumper Calculator: Formula, Benchmarks, and a Worked Example
Every hour spent waiting at a shipper or receiver past your scheduled free time is an hour you aren't earning miles, and unless you track it precisely and bill for it, that time just disappears from your bottom line. Lumper fees add another layer, since whether they're reimbursable often depends on exactly what your rate confirmation says. This calculator turns your actual arrival and departure times into the detention and lumper amount you're owed, so you have a clean number to put on an invoice instead of an estimate you have to defend.
What Detention and Lumper Pay Actually Cover
Detention pay compensates you for time spent waiting at a shipper or receiver beyond the free time your rate confirmation allows, since that's time you could have spent driving and earning instead. A lumper fee is a separate charge paid to a third-party loading crew to load or unload the trailer, which is sometimes built into your rate and sometimes billed back to you as an unreimbursed out-of-pocket cost, depending entirely on what was agreed to before you accepted the load.
The Formula Behind This Calculator
Total hours on site is simply your departure time minus your arrival time, with a wraparound adjustment added if departure appears earlier than arrival, which happens when a stop crosses midnight. Billable detention hours is total hours on site minus your free time allowance, floored at zero so a stop that finishes within free time never generates a negative number.
Detention owed is billable detention hours multiplied by your detention rate per hour. Lumper owed is the lumper fee you paid if it's marked reimbursable, or zero if it isn't. Total owed is simply detention owed plus lumper owed added together.
Realistic Industry Benchmarks
Two hours of free time is the most common allowance in rate confirmations, after which detention typically runs $25 to $75 an hour depending on the broker and equipment type, with reefer and flatbed often commanding the higher end because of the added handling involved. Lumper fees typically run $100 to $400 per stop depending on load size and whether it's hand-unloaded or palletized.
A Worked Example
This calculator's own defaults are an 08:00 arrival, an 11:30 departure, 2 hours of free time, a $50 per hour detention rate, $0 in lumper fee paid, and lumper reimbursement marked true. Total hours on site is 11:30 minus 08:00, which is 3.5 hours.
Billable detention hours is 3.5 minus the 2-hour free time allowance, which is 1.5 hours. Detention owed is 1.5 hours times $50 an hour, which is $75. With $0 in lumper fee paid, lumper owed is $0 regardless of the reimbursable flag. Total owed comes to $75, all of it from detention.
Why Documenting This Immediately Matters
Brokers and shippers are far more likely to pay a detention claim backed by a specific arrival time, departure time, and a BOL or check-in call log than a claim based on a driver's general recollection days later. Send the invoice with documentation attached while the load is still fresh, since disputes get harder to win the longer you wait.
Common Mistakes With Detention and Lumper Claims
The most common mistake is assuming detention pay happens automatically once you're over free time, when in reality almost every broker requires a separate invoice with supporting documentation before they'll pay it. The second is paying a lumper fee without checking whether the rate confirmation marks it reimbursable, which means the driver eats a cost that should have gone back to the broker or shipper.
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What Owner-Operators Say
“I used to just eat the wait time because I didn't have exact numbers to back up a claim. Now I log the times the second I check in and it's an easy invoice.”
“Found out the hard way a lumper fee wasn't reimbursable on one load. I read the rate con line by line now before I ever pay a lumper crew.”