A redelivery fee freight dispute comes down to a single question: who caused the first delivery attempt to fail. If the receiver turned the driver away, the dock was closed, or nobody had the paperwork, the fee is real work and it is owed. If the driver arrived four hours outside the appointment window, showed up without the appointment the tariff required, brought the wrong equipment, or carried a partial shipment the receiver was entitled to refuse, the failure is the carrier’s and the charge should come off.
That is the causation test, and it is worth being precise about what backs it. There is no federal rule that says a carrier cannot bill a redelivery. Entitlement to any accessorial is contractual: your transportation agreement, the rate confirmation, and the rules tariff that agreement incorporates. What the causation test gives you is the argument the tariff language itself almost always contains, because redelivery provisions are written to cover a failed attempt “through no fault of the carrier.”
Storage is the charge that rides behind redelivery, and it is the one that actually hurts. Redelivery is a flat fee. Storage is a per-day, per-hundredweight or per-pallet meter that runs until somebody notices. Every day you spend arguing about the redelivery is a day the storage line grows, which is why the two have to be worked together and worked fast.
What redelivery and storage charges are
Redelivery and storage both appear in the standard practitioner taxonomy of accessorial charges alongside liftgate, layover, limited access, and detention. Neither has a regulatory definition. Both are defined by the carrier’s rules tariff.
Redelivery is the charge for dispatching a second delivery attempt after the first one failed. It is typically a flat amount per attempt, sometimes with a mileage component on truckload, and on LTL it often carries a minimum plus a per-hundredweight rate.
Storage (sometimes billed as warehousing, terminal storage, or holding) is the charge for keeping the freight at the carrier’s terminal between attempts. It usually starts after a stated free period, commonly measured from the morning after the failed attempt, and accrues per day until the freight is delivered, picked up, or disposed of.
The two are separate charges with separate triggers, which matters for the dispute. You can win the redelivery and still owe storage if the delay after the failed attempt was on your side. You can also win both, when the carrier caused the first failure and then held the freight while the parties sorted it out.
The causation test, applied
Work it in this order. Name the reason the first attempt failed. Find the document created on the day it failed. Compare that reason against what the agreement and the tariff actually require of each party.
| Reason the first attempt failed | Who caused it | What usually decides it |
|---|---|---|
| Receiver closed, no one at the dock during posted hours | Consignee | Delivery receipt exception, driver arrival time, receiver’s posted hours |
| Driver arrived outside the appointment window | Carrier | Rate con appointment time vs. arrival timestamp on the delivery attempt record |
| No appointment was made and the tariff or rate con required one | Carrier | Rate con appointment clause, carrier’s appointment records |
| Consignee refused for damage or shortage | Depends on cause of damage | Delivery receipt notation, inspection report, claim file |
| Wrong or missing paperwork on the carrier’s side (no BOL copy, no seal record) | Carrier | Driver paperwork, BOL, seal log |
| Payment terms unmet on a collect or C.O.D. shipment | Shipper or consignee | Freight bill terms, credit arrangement |
| Wrong equipment dispatched (no liftgate where the rate con required one) | Carrier | Rate con equipment line, dispatch record |
| Address wrong on the BOL | Shipper | BOL as tendered vs. actual address |
| Freight was not ready, or the receiver moved the appointment late | Whoever moved it | Email or portal record of the change and its timestamp |
Read the middle column carefully. “Depends” appears once and it is honest. A refusal for damage is not automatically the carrier’s fault: damage can occur before tender, and a refusal that turns out to be unjustified leaves the consignee holding the redelivery. That case belongs in the claims process rather than the accessorial dispute, and the two run on different clocks.
The rows that flip the charge back to the carrier share a structure. Something the carrier committed to do (arrive in the window, book the appointment, bring the equipment named on the rate confirmation) did not happen, and the failed attempt followed directly from that. State it that way in the dispute: the condition the tariff requires for a redelivery charge, a failure not attributable to the carrier, is not satisfied.
The evidence that decides it
Three documents carry almost every redelivery argument, and they are the same three that decide detention. The positional research on freight detention charge disputes identifies them as the rate confirmation, the BOL or POD with facility timestamps, and the carrier’s own documentation of the event. Redelivery uses the identical set.
The rate confirmation. What time was the appointment, and who was responsible for making it. Whether an accessorial schedule is incorporated by reference. Whether redelivery appears at all, and at what rate. If redelivery is not named anywhere and no schedule is incorporated, the carrier is billing outside the agreed scope before you even reach causation.
The delivery attempt record. This is the document most shippers never ask for and every carrier has. It shows the date, the arrival time, the driver, and the reason code for the failed attempt. Ask for it by name. A reason code entered at the dock on the day of the attempt is real evidence. A reason typed by a billing clerk three weeks later is not, and the difference is usually visible in the timestamps.
The BOL and the delivery receipt. The BOL shows the address as tendered, the appointment or receiving instructions, and any equipment requirement. The delivery receipt, when the second attempt succeeds, often carries a driver notation about the first one.
If you keep gate logs or receiving logs at your own facility, pull them. A receiving log showing the dock staffed and open at the attempt time, against a carrier arrival record showing 5:40 p.m. on a facility that closes at 4:00, ends the conversation. The same evidence discipline is laid out for the adjacent charge in the six documents that win a detention dispute.
The storage clock and why it compounds
Storage is where a $90 redelivery fee becomes a $600 problem.
Free time before storage begins is a tariff term, typically counted in business days from the morning after the failed attempt or after notification. Then it accrues daily. On LTL it is often a rate per hundredweight per day with a daily minimum, which means a light shipment bills the minimum and a heavy one bills real money. On truckload, freight sitting on a trailer usually stops being storage and becomes detention or layover, which is a different charge with a different rate.
Two practical consequences.
First, disputing the redelivery does not pause the storage meter. Get the freight moving, then argue. Authorize the second delivery, pay the undisputed portion, and contest the redelivery line on the invoice afterward. Holding the freight hostage to the argument is the single most expensive mistake in this category, and it is the one that turns a clean dispute into a settlement negotiation.
Second, ask for the notification record. Most storage provisions run from the date the carrier notified the consignee that the freight was at the terminal awaiting disposition. If the carrier cannot show when it notified you, the start date of the storage accrual is unsupported, and that is a narrower and more winnable argument than the redelivery itself.
On the container side the analogous charge is demurrage, and there the rules are genuinely regulatory rather than contractual. Under 46 CFR 541.7, a billing party must issue a demurrage or detention invoice within 30 calendar days from the date the charge was last incurred, and under 46 CFR 541.8 the billed party gets at least 30 calendar days from issuance to request mitigation, refund or waiver. Do not import those deadlines into a motor carrier storage argument. They apply to ocean demurrage and detention billing, not to an LTL terminal storage line.
What the invoice has to show, and what it does not
Do not claim more than the rule gives you. No regulation requires a motor carrier to prove a redelivery was justified before billing it.
What regulation does require is a legible bill. Under 49 CFR 373.103, a freight or expense bill must show the consignor and consignee names, the shipment date, origin and destination, package count, freight description, weight or volume, the exact rates assessed, and the total charges due with the nature and amount of each charge, plus the route, participating carriers, transfer points, and remittance address.
“The nature and amount of each charge” is the operative phrase. A line reading “REDEL 125.00 / STOR 240.00” with no dates, no attempt count and no per-day rate does not describe the nature of the charge. Ask for itemization: the attempt dates, the storage start date, the daily rate, the number of days, and the tariff item number relied on. That request is reasonable, it has a rule behind it, and it very often surfaces the arithmetic error on its own.
Timing matters too. Redelivery and storage frequently arrive as a supplemental bill weeks after the original invoice. Under 49 U.S.C. 13710, a carrier must bill charges additional to those originally billed within 180 days of your receipt of the original bill to preserve its collection rights, and you must contest a bill within 180 days of receipt to preserve your right to challenge it. Both clocks, with the rest of the set, are in every freight billing deadline that can cost you money.
If you already paid, the posture changes. It is no longer a dispute, it is an overcharge claim, and under 49 CFR 378.8 the processing carrier must pay, decline, or settle a written overcharge claim within 60 days of receipt absent a written agreement to extend.
What the carrier will argue back
“The consignee refused the delivery.” Ask why, in writing, with the delivery receipt notation. A refusal for damage is a claims matter. A refusal because the driver arrived at 6 p.m. is a carrier-caused failure wearing a consignee-caused label.
“No appointment was on file.” Then establish who was supposed to make it. If the rate confirmation says the carrier calls for an appointment, the absence of one is the carrier’s gap. If it says the shipper provides the appointment and you did, produce the confirmation.
“Our tariff permits the charge.” Ask for the item number and effective version, then read it. Redelivery provisions are usually conditioned on a failure not caused by the carrier, and the carrier’s own language is the strongest thing you can quote back. If the tariff genuinely allows redelivery at the carrier’s discretion regardless of cause, you have learned something real about that contract, and the fix is at renewal.
“The freight was ready and the driver was there.” Fine: send the arrival timestamp and the reason code from the attempt record. Most of the time this argument evaporates when the record is produced, and occasionally it holds up and you pay the charge. That outcome is not a loss. Knowing which of your failed deliveries are actually yours is how you stop generating them.
Be fair here. A large share of redelivery charges are correctly billed. Receivers do close early, appointments do get missed on the shipper side, and a wasted delivery attempt is a real cost the carrier absorbed. The point of the causation test is to sort the correct charges from the reflexive ones, not to contest every line.
If you are the shipper
Your leverage is the BOL and the receiving record. Put the appointment time and the receiving hours on the BOL every time. Keep a receiving log at your own docks with arrival timestamps, because it is the only document that contradicts a carrier arrival record. When a redelivery appears, pull the attempt record before you write anything: half the time it tells you the charge is correct and you save yourself the letter.
Watch for redelivery stacked with detention on the same load. A driver cannot be simultaneously detained at your dock and turned away from it. If both charges appear for the same date, one of them is wrong, and the attempt record will say which. The same sequencing problem across delay charges is worked through in layover fee trucking vs detention.
If you are the broker
You are between two parties and the redelivery lands on you first. Two rules.
Get the cause documented on the day it happens, not at settlement. A note in your TMS at 4:15 p.m. that says “receiver closed, driver on site 15:50, per driver call” is worth more than anything reconstructed later.
Then decide pass-through before you pay. If the consignee caused the failure, the charge belongs downstream to your customer, and it needs to be presented with the same attempt record you would use to contest it. A redelivery you absorb quietly because it was under your review threshold is exactly the leak described in the rate confirmation versus carrier invoice reconciliation procedure. Run the same field-by-field check here.
The checklist
- Get the freight delivered first. Arguing while storage accrues costs more than the redelivery.
- Name the stated reason for the failed attempt and get it in writing from the carrier.
- Request the delivery attempt record: date, arrival time, driver, reason code.
- Pull the rate confirmation and check the appointment clause, the equipment line, and whether redelivery appears or a schedule is incorporated by reference.
- Pull your own receiving or gate log for the attempt window.
- Apply the causation test. Carrier-caused failures fail the tariff’s own condition.
- Ask for the storage notification record and the per-day rate; check the free-time start date against the tariff.
- Demand itemization under 49 CFR 373.103 if the invoice shows only a lump sum.
- Check timing against the 180-day windows in 49 U.S.C. 13710, and use the 60-day clock in 49 CFR 378.8 if you already paid.
- Pay the undisputed balance and contest the single line.
Step ten is the habit that keeps this cheap. Releasing everything except the contested charge removes the carrier’s past-due leverage and keeps a routine billing correction from becoming a relationship problem. Most redelivery charges are process artifacts, not bad faith, and they resolve fastest when you treat them that way.
Sources
- Top 20 accessorial charges, practitioner taxonomy (Zipline Logistics)
- 49 CFR 373.103, Freight or expense bills (Cornell LII)
- 49 U.S.C. 13710, billing and contesting windows (Cornell LII)
- 49 CFR 378.8, overcharge claim resolution within 60 days (Cornell LII)
- 46 CFR 541.7, 30-day demurrage and detention invoicing deadline (Cornell LII)
- 46 CFR 541.8, request and resolution timeframes (Cornell LII)
- Freight detention charge disputes: the three documents (Laneproof)