How to File a Freight Claim That Does Not Get Denied

To file a freight claim, send the carrier a written demand within nine months of delivery that identifies the shipment, states the carrier is liable for the loss or damage, and asks for a specific dollar amount. Those three things are the claim. Everything else, the photos, the packing list, the repair quote, the salvage discussion, is evidence supporting a claim that already exists. Get the three elements wrong and the carrier can decline to treat your email as a claim at all, and the clock keeps running while you wait for a reply that is not coming.

That last sentence is the whole reason this post exists. Most denied freight claims never reach the merits. They are denied because the filing was late, the amount was not determinable, the wrong party filed, or the value could not be proven. Each of those is preventable in about ten minutes if you know what the rules require.

This is a claim for loss, damage or delay to the goods. It is a different process, with different deadlines and a different legal basis, than disputing a charge on the freight bill. Readers conflate the two constantly, and the conflation is expensive because filing the wrong one means missing the deadline on the right one.

What a freight claim is, and what it is not

A freight claim asserts that the carrier is liable for physical loss of, damage to, or delay of the goods it carried. The liability comes from the Carmack Amendment, codified for motor carriers and freight forwarders at 49 U.S.C. 14706, which makes the carrier liable for the actual loss or injury to the property it receives.

An invoice dispute is different. That is an argument about the charges: a liftgate you did not authorize, detention with no timestamps, a fuel surcharge computed off the wrong week. Those run on the billing clocks in 49 U.S.C. 13710 and, once you have already paid, the overcharge claim process in 49 CFR 378. We keep the full set of clocks in one place in every freight billing deadline that can cost you money.

Practical version: if the pallet arrived crushed, that is a claim. If the pallet arrived fine but the bill has a charge you never agreed to, that is a dispute. If both happened on the same load, you file both, separately, because they go to different people inside the carrier and they have different deadlines.

The four elements of a valid claim under 49 CFR 370.3

The federal regulation that governs how carriers process claims sets out what a communication has to contain before the carrier is obliged to treat it as a claim at all. Under 49 CFR 370.3, a claim must be in writing, must be filed with a proper carrier within the time limits in the bill of lading or contract, must contain facts sufficient to identify the shipment, must assert carrier liability for the loss or damage, and must make a demand for payment of a specified or determinable amount of money.

The same section says what does not count. A bad-order report, an appraisal report, or a notation of shortage or damage on a freight bill or delivery receipt is not a claim on its own. Neither is a number written as “about $100” or “$100 more or less,” because that is not a determinable amount.

Two of those deserve emphasis. “Determinable” does real work: you do not always need the final repair invoice on day one, but you do need to state an amount the carrier can compute from what you gave it, such as unit cost times units damaged. And “proper carrier” matters on interlined moves, where the delivering carrier and the originating carrier are different companies and both may be liable.

The full anatomy of a compliant claim, including the language that makes each element unambiguous, is worked through in valid freight claim requirements under 49 CFR 370.3.

Where the nine months actually comes from

Nine months is the number everyone in freight knows, and almost everyone states it slightly wrong. There is no federal rule saying “you have nine months to file a freight claim.” What the statute does is put a floor under what the carrier is allowed to impose.

49 U.S.C. 14706(e)(1) bars a carrier from providing, by rule, contract or otherwise, a claim-filing period shorter than nine months, or a period for bringing suit shorter than two years running from the date the carrier gives written notice disallowing any part of the claim.

So the operative deadline is whatever your bill of lading and the carrier’s rules tariff say, and that document simply cannot go below nine months. Most standard bills of lading sit exactly at the floor, which is why the number feels statutory. Some contracts give you longer. Read yours before you assume.

The practical rule is to treat nine months from delivery as your deadline and to file long before it, because the carrier’s investigation clock does not start until you file, and a claim filed at month eight leaves you no room. If the shipment never arrived, the clock generally starts from a reasonable delivery date rather than an actual one, so do not let a missing shipment sit unclaimed while you keep tracing it. The interaction between the nine-month filing floor, the two-year suit floor, and the separate limitation periods in 49 U.S.C. 14705 is untangled in Carmack Amendment time limits.

The document package that decides the claim

The regulation tells you what the carrier will go looking for, which is a useful way to decide what to attach. Under 49 CFR 370.7, the carrier must promptly and thoroughly investigate, obtaining the bill of lading, evidence of the freight charges, and either the invoice or certified copies showing the destination value of the property. For a full-loss claim it must also obtain a certified statement of non-receipt from the consignee.

Send those with the claim rather than waiting to be asked. The claim moves faster and the carrier loses the easiest stall.

The core five, on every claim:

1. Bill of lading. Establishes what was tendered, in what condition, to whom. If the BOL says “shipper load and count,” expect that to come up.
2. Delivery receipt or POD with the exception noted. Damage noted at delivery, in the driver’s presence, is the single strongest fact in a damage claim. Clean signature with no notation is the single hardest fact to overcome.
3. Original invoice for the goods. This proves value. Destination value, not what you hoped to sell it for.
4. Paid freight bill. Establishes the freight charges, which are often recoverable as part of the loss.
5. Photographs. Of the packaging before opening, the pallet as received, the damage itself, and any load-securement condition visible in the trailer.

Add, where relevant: the repair estimate or replacement quote, the packing list for a shortage, the inspection report if the carrier inspected, the temperature record for reefer freight, and a written statement of the disposition of the damaged goods.

Building a claim file is the same discipline as building a detention file: contemporaneous records beat reconstructed ones every time. The document hierarchy we use for dwell disputes, described in the six documents that win a detention dispute, applies here with different documents and identical logic.

The value question, answered before you file

Claim amounts get cut more often than claims get denied outright, and it is usually about value. The measure is the actual loss at destination, typically your invoice cost plus freight, not your selling price and not replacement at today’s market. Carrier liability can also be limited by a released value or a tariff limitation tied to the commodity, which is why a full-value claim on a low-value-per-pound item sometimes was never going to pay in full regardless of how clean the file was. State your number, show the arithmetic, and expect the released value question.

The carrier’s clock, which is enforceable

Once you file, the carrier is not free to sit on it. Part 370 puts three dated obligations on the processing carrier, and almost nobody invokes them.

Two honest caveats. First, these are claim-processing obligations. Missing them does not automatically mean the carrier owes you the claim; it means the carrier is out of compliance with the processing rules, which is leverage, not a judgment. Second, a written disallowance is significant beyond the money: under 14706(e)(1), the two-year period for bringing suit runs from the carrier’s written notice disallowing the claim, so the denial letter starts a clock you want on your calendar.

Use the deadlines the way you would use any documented obligation. At day 31 with no acknowledgment, send a one-line email asking for the claim file number and citing 370.5. At day 121 with no disposition, ask for the status report required by 370.9. Both requests are cheap, polite, and change how a claim file gets prioritized.

Why claims get denied, in rough order of frequency

• Filed late. Past the period in the bill of lading. Unrecoverable.
• Not a claim under 370.3. An emailed photo with “this came in wrecked, what can you do” is a notice, not a claim. The carrier may open a file anyway, but it is not obligated to treat it as filed.
• Clean delivery receipt. Nothing noted at delivery, damage reported days later. This is the concealed damage problem and it is winnable, but only with immediate notice and preserved packaging.
• Insufficient packaging. The carrier’s most common substantive defense. Photographs of the packaging as tendered are the answer.
• Excepted cause. Act of God, act of the shipper, inherent vice of the goods, public authority. These are real defenses under Carmack, not carrier inventions.
• Value not proven. No invoice, or a claim priced at retail.
• Wrong party filed. On a prepaid shipment where title has passed, the party with the risk of loss is the party with the claim. Sort this out before filing, not after.
• Released value limitation. The claim was always capped by the applicable liability limit.

Most of that list is process, not fraud. Claims desks are volume operations working from an incomplete file, and a complete file removes most of the reasons to say no.

If you are the shipper

Your leverage is the record you create before anything goes wrong. Put the receiving instruction in your standard operating procedure: count, inspect, note exceptions on the delivery receipt in the driver’s presence, photograph before the pallet is broken down. Then keep BOL, POD, commercial invoice and freight bill together per shipment so that assembling a claim is retrieval rather than archaeology. Track claim filing dates and the carrier’s 30 and 120 day marks in the same place you track invoice disputes.

If you are the broker

Two exposures, and they are different. First, on a load where you are the contracting party, your customer files against you and you file against the carrier, and those two claims can have different deadlines if your customer contract and the carrier’s bill of lading say different things. Reconcile the two windows at contract time, not at claim time. Second, a claim in process is frequently used as a reason to hold carrier settlement, which is a real remedy but one with limits under your carrier agreement. Document the offset the same way you would document any deduction, which is the same discipline described in rate con versus carrier invoice reconciliation.

The filing checklist

1. Confirm this is a claim (loss, damage, delay to the goods), not an invoice dispute.
2. Find the filing period in the bill of lading or contract. It cannot be shorter than nine months.
3. Identify the proper carrier, including on interlined moves.
4. Write the claim so it contains all four 370.3 elements: shipment identification, assertion of liability, specified or determinable amount, in writing.
5. Attach the core five documents plus anything commodity-specific.
6. State the value basis explicitly and show the arithmetic.
7. Send it in a way that creates a receipt date you can prove.
8. Calendar day 30 and day 120 from the filing date.
9. On a written disallowance, calendar two years from the date of that notice.
10. Keep the claim file separate from the invoice file, because the two processes will not resolve on the same schedule.

The pattern underneath all of it is the same one that governs every other freight document argument: the party with the contemporaneous record wins. That is true whether you are proving a pallet arrived crushed or proving the same invoice was submitted twice under two different numbers. Write it down while it is true, and the claim writes itself later.

Sources

• 49 CFR 370.3, Filing of claims (Cornell LII)
• 49 CFR 370.5, Acknowledgment of claims (Cornell LII)
• 49 CFR 370.7, Investigation of claims (Cornell LII)
• 49 CFR 370.9, Disposition of claims (Cornell LII)
• 49 U.S.C. 14706, Liability of carriers under receipts and bills of lading (Cornell LII)
• 49 U.S.C. 14705, Limitation on actions by and against carriers (Cornell LII)
• 49 U.S.C. 13710, Information and records, billing and contesting windows (Cornell LII)
• Freight claim time limits, practitioner summary (FreightClaims.com)