What is Accessorial Charges?

Accessorial charges are fees a carrier bills for work its line-haul rate does not cover: liftgate service, inside delivery, waiting time, storage.

A freight invoice has two halves. One is the move that was quoted: origin, destination, weight, rate. The other is what the driver or the warehouse did that the quote did not buy — a liftgate off the truck, an hour in a dock queue, a second delivery attempt. Those are the accessorials.

Where the charge appears, and who owes it

An accessorial is agreed in one document, evidenced in a second and priced in a third, rarely the same file. The rate confirmation carries the line-haul rate and, if written carefully, names which extras may be billed and at what price. The bill of lading evidences the movement: a for-hire, non-exempt motor carrier moving property in interstate commerce issues a receipt or bill of lading showing consignor and consignee, origin and destination, the number of packages, a description of the property, and the weight or measurement it is rated on^[bol]. Read that list for what is absent. No charge appears on it: the document the receiver signs is proof of service, never proof of price.

Who owes the charge is settled by the contract rather than by fault. The carrier bills the party that hired it — the bill-to on the rate confirmation — even where the cost was created by another company's dock or a customer who was not at home. A shipper pays its carrier's detention charge first and recovers it from the receiver only if a second contract says it can.

How the number is set, and when it has to be billed

Accessorials take three shapes, and the shape decides what has to be recorded.

Where the rate lives has a blunt answer: your agreement. General-freight tariffs are no longer filed with any federal agency, and the ones left on file were declared null and void by statute^[usc]. What it gives instead is a lever: on request, a motor carrier of property must hand the shipper a written or electronic copy of the rate, classification, rules and practices its rate is based on^[usc]. A charge nobody can trace to such a document is a number rather than a rate.

There is also a clock. Outside household goods and noncontiguous domestic trade, a carrier that bills charges beyond those originally billed must issue that bill within 180 days of the payer receiving the original to keep the right to collect, and a shipper has 180 days from receiving a bill to contest it^[usc]. Accessorials are the charges most likely to surface late, which makes that window theirs.

What a dispute turns on

An accessorial argument is rarely about what the word means. It is settled on three questions.

Was the service performed, and where is that written? A charge stands on what was captured at the stop: an arrival and a departure, a status code, a signature, a photograph. Where nothing was recorded, the charge rests on recollection, and recollection loses.

Does the charge follow from the agreement? Applicability is the formal question — whether this rate reaches this shipment at all — and it is answered from the rate document. The trigger, the free time, the increment, any cap: either the total rebuilds from those terms or it does not.

Is anyone still in time? The window above closes on carrier and payer alike.

The Surface Transportation Board can determine whether a challenged motor-carrier charge is reasonable, or applies at all^[usc] — a backstop rather than a plan, since accessorials are settled or dropped on records. Recording the event where it happens, and rating the completed service against the contract's own rate table, is what turns an accessorial into a line somebody can check: the work automated freight billing exists to do.

The limits of this definition

The contract outranks the dictionary. Whether a charge is accessorial at all, how much free time precedes it, what it costs and whether it can be raised after the fact are set by the rate confirmation, the carrier's schedule or the master agreement. Where those and this page disagree, the paperwork wins.

There is no closed list. No federal rule enumerates what a general-freight carrier may charge for. The names are trade conventions: "limited access" means whatever the schedule using it says.

The word moves with the mode. This entry is written for road freight, which is all Shyftbase covers — no air, no ocean, no port or customs work. On the water the same vocabulary is regulated: under Federal Maritime Commission rules, an ocean carrier's demurrage or detention invoice has to identify the free time allowed, the dates charged, the rule or contract the rate comes from, and how to ask for a waiver^[fmc]. Nothing equivalent binds a motor carrier's accessorial invoice — which is why demurrage and detention are separate entries in the freight glossary.

A definition does not raise an invoice. Naming the charge is the easy half; the event still has to land somewhere the rate table can read it, or the bill goes out quietly short.