Percentage of What? Linehaul, Fuel Surcharge, Accessorials and the Agent Cut

The fraction is the easy part

This page is about how a percentage-pay row is built on the statement, not about whether a given fraction is a good deal. What drivers earn under different pay structures is a rate question and it lives on truckerpro.ca. What this page asks is narrower: once a fraction is in the lease, what number is it applied to, and does the printed row let you check it.

Every percentage row needs three visible numbers: the base, the fraction, and the result. Missing any one of the three turns the row into a vibe. A row that shows only the result is asking you to trust the office. A row that shows the result and the fraction but not the base is asking you to guess which of several possible bases was used.

The how-to-read guide in this set covers the rest of the page around this row. Accessorials that pay outside the percentage, and deductions that apply to the period rather than to the load, are not part of this arithmetic. Mixing them into the base is the usual way a percentage row stops matching the freight bill.

Four common bases, and they are not interchangeable

Linehaul only. The percentage is taken of the linehaul rate on the customer invoice (or the contract rate). Fuel surcharge, detention, stop-off and the rest sit outside, either paid in full, paid in some other stated share, or not paid to you at all. This is the cleanest statement to audit, because the base is one number.

Linehaul plus fuel surcharge. The surcharge is inside the base, so a movement in the diesel index moves both the surcharge treatment and the percentage result. The fuel-surcharge guide in this set covers the formula; this page only cares whether that formula’s result is inside or outside the percentage.

Gross including accessorials. Detention, layover, lumper, stop-off and the rest are inside the base. That sounds generous until you notice it also means a lumper the customer paid you to pass through is being cut by the same fraction. Whether that is intended is a lease question. Whether it is happening is a statement question, and you only see it if the accessorials are itemised before the percentage is applied.

Rate after an agent or broker cut. The customer paid one number; an agent or a broker took a slice; your percentage is of what remains. The row then has to show the customer rate, the cut, the remaining base, the fraction, and your result. Collapsing that into a single “freight” number is how an agent cut becomes invisible.

The freight bill is the source document

A rate confirmation is the contract for the load between you and the carrier. A rated freight bill (or the contract-carrier equivalent) is the document the carrier uses to bill the customer. Percentage pay is a claim that those two documents share a base. If they do not, the row is wrong, even if the fraction on your lease was applied perfectly to the wrong number.

In the United States, when a lessor’s compensation is a percentage of gross revenue, the federal truth-in-leasing rules require the lease to say that the carrier will give you, before or at settlement, a copy of the rated freight bill — or, for a contract carrier, the document actually used that contains the same information. Names of shippers and consignees may be deleted. The right is to the numbers, not to the customer list. The truth-in-leasing guide in this set covers the rest of that part; use it when the bill is not in the packet.

Canada does not copy that federal rule. What you are owed in Canada is whatever the lease and the applicable provincial or federal law say you are owed. Practically, you still cannot audit a percentage row without the base, so ask for the billed rate in writing as a documentation request. A carrier that will not show the base is a carrier whose percentage you cannot check, which is a reason to treat every row as unreconciled rather than as agreed.

Amendments, split loads, and the base that moved after dispatch

An extra stop, a reconsignment, a bumped rate, a truck-ordered-not-used that became a live load: each of those changes the customer bill and should change the base. If the confirmation was amended and the freight bill was not, or the other way around, the percentage row will match one of them and not the other. The source of truth for the percentage is the document the lease says the percentage is of — usually the billed customer rate, not the first confirmation.

Split loads and team turns add a second fraction: the load’s percentage, then the split between the people who ran it. The team-split is a different question from the carrier-percentage, and it should print as two steps, not as one reduced number. A single row that already has the team-split baked in, with no pre-split base, is a row neither driver can check.

Corrections to earlier percentages belong in block two as prior-period adjustments, with a reference to the original statement and load. A silent restatement of an old load on a new statement, at a new base, is how a dispute gets laundered into a current week. The shortage guide in this set is the procedure once you have the two documents that disagree.

What a readable percentage row shows

Load or pro number. Origin and destination. The named base (and which of the four kinds it is). The fraction. The result. Fuel surcharge treatment in words or in a separate column: inside, on top, or none. Accessorials itemised, each marked inside or outside the base. If an agent or broker cut applies, that cut as its own figure.

If you produce statements rather than read them, this is the argument for generating the row from the same invoice record that billed the customer. Retyping a percentage of a number pulled from a confirmation, while the customer was billed a different number, is the most common honest error on percentage pay, and it is also the one a freight-bill request will catch every time.

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