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Detention time is the time commercial motor vehicle operators spend waiting at shipping and receiving facilities. This extra space of time is created due to delays in loading and unloading cargo. The unfortunate nature of this time is it usually goes unpaid for drivers. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, of FMCSA, will soon collect information regarding this time gap to gain a better understanding of how it affects safety and trucking operations. 

The study was approved by the White House Office of Management and Budget to formalize it to be allowed by FMCSA. FMCSA plans to collect data from the survey, analyze it to see trends in the frequency and length of times of detention time, and then explore options to reduce detention time based on their findings.

The survey will be sent out at random to approximately 80 carriers and 2,500 commercial motor vehicle drivers.

Notices will be sent to those randomly selected and they will have until October 23rd to respond. The FMCSA will then take time to analyze the responses and conduct research to find a proper solution to improving detention time waits.

Currently, there is no definitive length of time that identifies a wait as detention time. However, several do operate with a certain idea in mind. Generally, most in the CMV industry, as well as several U.S. government organizations, operate under the idea that when dwell time, the total amount of time spent at a facility, is more than two hours, there is detention time.

Detention time is unpaid time for the drivers, so higher detention times result in lost revenue.

FMCSA released a statement discussing the fact that lowering this detention time would help drivers' pay increase and likely lower costs for carriers as well. It would also benefit trucking schedules overall as there would be fewer delays in deliveries and drivers would have a higher likelihood of arriving on time.

This would be the second FMCSA study on detention time.

In 2014, the agency sent a survey out on detention time as well. They learned a lot about detention time but also learned a lot about how to send out a better and more accurate survey. The previous survey was sent out mostly to larger carriers and excluded the experiences of many smaller CMV drivers. Also, the survey did not include a long enough length of time, only covering a few months. They are taking what they learned from this survey and using it to improve this upcoming study.