Articles · Road haulage

Haulage overtime keeps rising. The drivers are not to blame

12 October 2026

The payroll sheet shows overtime again, and most of it against the same driver as last time. The owner of a sixteen-truck firm draws the conclusion anyone would: the drivers are taking their time, and perhaps padding their hours as well. A vendor is already at the door with an AI route planner.

Sørvåg Bil og Frakt is an invented Norwegian company from our sample reports; the report on its data was written by our AI agent. The easiest way to show what it found is to follow one working day at the firm, from the morning run to the customer's invoice.

In the morning the truck sits in a queue, and that is not the driver's choice

The firm has a regular morning run to the central warehouse. There is a queue there every morning, and it lasts anything from a quarter of an hour to well over two hours — the transport planner and the driver say the same thing. The firm has no agreed bay slot. The second site of this kind is the container port.

At ordinary customers the truck is in and out within a quarter of an hour. So the time is not being lost at the loading bays. It is lost in front of two gates, where nothing depends on the driver.

A typical shift is seven hours, and the tachograph does the counting

The firm's hours are taken from the tachograph, as both the driver and the office confirm. The drivers do not record them themselves, so there is nothing to pad. A typical driver day is 7.04 hours, and 64% of days are shorter than 7.5 hours.

That does not look like a firm where work is being stretched out. It looks like a firm where most days run to plan and a few come apart. What remains is to find out which.

By evening, overtime builds up where there was a queue in the morning

The firm pays for 53.5 overtime hours a month. Days when the truck had a stop at one of the two queue sites make up 33% of all driver days. They account for 75% of the overtime hours.

A third of days have a queue. Those days account for three-quarters of the overtime.

Overtime is worked on 43% of queue days, against 12% of other days. And the driver with the most overtime has that very run: the regular morning trip to the central warehouse. His articulated truck, as it happens, uses the least diesel of the firm's five.

The owner's mistake is easy to understand. The payroll sheet shows overtime by person: who, how many hours, how much money. No document shows the queue. When a number can be broken down only one way, by driver, the driver comes out as the culprit.

At the end of the week, waiting time does not reach the invoice

The owner believed waiting time went straight from the driver app to the customer's invoice. The app sends nothing. Waiting time is only entered when the driver phones in and the transport planner has time.

Over three months the invoices carried 13 waiting-time lines, 15,680 NOK in all. In the same period 379 jobs had a stop at the two queue sites. The driver's explanation is simple: he does not phone every time, because it happens almost daily. On top of that, customers have disputed lines the firm could not back up.

So an hour in the queue hits the firm twice: it pushes the shift into overtime, and it never makes it onto the invoice. How much is lost this way, the report does not say. The stop log sits with the supplier of the driver app, and until its history has been pulled, any sum is guesswork. By the owner's own account, getting it costs 6,000 NOK and takes three to four weeks.

A route planner cannot drive round this queue

All the firm's overtime costs 21,795 NOK a month. The route planner costs 14,900 NOK a month plus 85,000 NOK to set up. If it removed a fifth of the overtime, that would be 4,359 NOK a month. And it is hard to see where even that would come from: software can plot the road to the warehouse, but not a place at the bay.

The promise of managing with one truck fewer is quicker still to check. All 16 trucks are out every day. On 9 of 59 working days only 15 went out, because a driver was absent and the relief driver was already busy — and on those days the transport planner pushed jobs back or turned them down. The firm has no spare capacity to give up.

What to do instead of buying, in order:

• Ask the central warehouse for a fixed bay slot for the morning run. It costs nothing, and in our example nobody had asked.
• Enter waiting time once a week from a list, not whenever someone phones. Decide that queuing time will be invoiced, and tell the customers. The free time is already defined: 30 minutes for standard customers, 60 for those on a framework agreement.
• Order the stop-log history: without it, uninvoiced waiting time cannot be calculated.
• Only if doing it by hand becomes too much: the reporting module in the driver app, at 690 NOK a month with no minimum term.

None of this frees up anybody's hours. Today the transport planner spends about five minutes a week on waiting time; a fixed routine will take more. Nor does the report promise lower overtime.

And a word about "rising". The owner in the example is certain that overtime and diesel have gone through the roof. Nobody had last year's figures: the timesheets stayed with the firm's previous accountants. Before looking for someone to blame for an increase, it is worth seeing the increase.

Three numbers a haulier can look at today

1. Where the truck was on overtime days. From your time records or tachograph data, take the twenty days with the most overtime in the quarter. For each one, open the job list in your transport system and write down the addresses. The warning sign is two or three addresses that recur on most of those days. Then the overtime belongs to the site, not the person. If the addresses are different every time, your case is not the one in the example.
2. Waiting-time lines on invoices, set against runs to those addresses. The lines are in the invoices issued over the quarter, the runs in the job list. In the example it is 13 lines against 379 jobs. If your gap is of that order, put the same question to your transport planner and to one driver: how does waiting time get onto the invoice? "From the app" and "when I phone in", taken together, mean that it does not.
3. A month's overtime in money. One line from the payroll. This is the ceiling: no software can save more on overtime than the overtime costs. Put the monthly fee for whatever you are being offered next to it. In the example that is 14,900 NOK against 21,795 — the software would have to remove more than two-thirds of the overtime just to cover its own monthly fee.

In our example all three numbers pointed at two queues. The first step there is not software but a conversation with the warehouse, one that nobody had started.

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