Layover
Also: Layover fee · Overnight
A layover is the charge a carrier bills when a driver is held overnight, or for a full day, through no fault of the carrier, typically because a receiver cannot unload until the next day; it is priced per day, commonly $150 to $350, and sits alongside detention as the accessorial for lost time.
Detention pays for hours; layover pays for days. A driver who arrives on time and is told the dock will take him tomorrow has lost a full driving day, and the layover fee is the carrier’s compensation for it.
When it applies: the delay is on the shipper’s or receiver’s side, the driver arrived within the appointment window, and the wait crosses into the next day or exceeds the number of hours at which the contract converts detention to a layover (some contracts cap detention at a certain number of hours and switch to a day rate). It does not apply when the driver was late, when the driver’s own hours ran out, or when the delay came from weather or a breakdown.
Documentation is the same as for detention, and the same problems apply: the times have to be on the paperwork, the shipper has to be told while it is happening, and the claim has to reach the shipper before its cutoff. Layovers are less frequent than detention but larger, and a broker with a shipper contract that does not mention layover will absorb them.
Guides that use this term
Updated September 11, 2026 · All terms