A truck is booked in for 09:00. It clears your gate at 08:50. The driver is released at 14:10. Three weeks later a line appears on the invoice: waiting time, 3 hours 10 minutes, at a rate nobody remembers agreeing.
The argument that follows is nearly always about the two smallest questions. Was the clock right, and is the rate fair.
The question underneath them is what those hours actually did. And the answer is not that a driver sat around. It is that Thai law puts a hard ceiling on how long a driver's working day can be, and your gate took a third of it.
A waiting charge is rent on a day, not a fine
The useful way to think about a truck movement is that you have hired a vehicle and a driver for a period, and the large share of a truck's cost that does not care whether it moves runs the whole time.
Two things follow, and they change how you should read the charge.
The carrier's loss is not the driver's wage for those hours. It is the share of the day you took, and with it whatever that vehicle would have done next.
Waiting hurts more than distance. An extra 40 kilometres can usually be absorbed somewhere. Three hours standing still is harder, because what it eats is a day whose length is capped by law rather than by the road.
The legal day is shorter than most shippers assume
Land transport work does not run on the ordinary office rules. Section 22 of the Labour Protection Act B.E. 2541 allows agriculture, sea fishing, work taken home, transport work and others to be given different protection by ministerial regulation, and Ministerial Regulation No. 12 (B.E. 2541) is the one that does it for land transport.
| The rule | What it fixes |
|---|---|
| Normal working hours, clause 2 | The employer must set a start and a finish, and a land transport employee works no more than eight hours a day |
| Overtime for a driver, clause 3 | Only with the employee's written consent, and then no more than two hours a day, unless the necessity arises from force majeure, an accident, or traffic problems |
| Rest inside the day, clause 4 | At least one continuous hour of rest, falling no later than four hours into the work. Employer and employee may agree to split it, but no block under twenty minutes and no less than an hour in total |
| The gap before tomorrow, clause 5 | The next working day may not start until ten hours have passed since the last one ended |
| Pay for the extra hours, clause 6 | Remuneration equal to the plain hourly wage rate on a working day, for overtime on working days and on holidays alike, unless the employer has agreed to pay proper overtime rates |
Two of those lines repay a second look.
The two-hour ceiling has three exits, and your dock is not one of them. Clause 3 allows a driver past two hours of overtime only where the necessity arises from force majeure, an accident, or traffic problems. A consignee whose unloading ran long is none of the three. Traffic on the road to you is a reason the regulation recognises. Traffic inside your yard is not.
And the extra hours are cheap in wages. Ordinary overtime is one and a half times the hourly rate under Section 61 of the Act, and overtime on a holiday is three times under Section 63. Land transport pays one times for both, unless the employer has agreed to do better. That settles what a waiting charge is really compensating. If the driver's extra hour is close to the cheapest hour on the payroll, the money is not chasing wages. It is chasing the day.
Alongside all of that sits Section 103 bis of the Land Transport Act B.E. 2522. Within any twenty-four hours, a licensed driver may not perform the duty of driving for more than four continuous hours from the moment he starts; if he takes a continuous break of at least half an hour, he may drive for up to another four continuous hours. Section 127 makes a breach a fine of up to 5,000 baht, and it falls on the driver.
The words most often skipped are the ones the section opens with: it applies subject to the law on labour protection. Read on its own, Section 103 bis looks like permission to spend eight hours a day driving. It is not. It sits underneath the eight-hour working day, and driving is only one of the things competing for those hours.
The ceiling is on the driver, not on the truck
This is the part that decides what your three hours actually cost, and it is the part most shippers get backwards.
Nothing in any of the above attaches to a vehicle. Clause 2 caps the working time of an employee in land transport work. Clause 3 caps the overtime of an employee whose job is driving. Section 103 bis binds the licensed driver. Put a second driver in the cab and the truck itself has no statutory bedtime.
That is not a theoretical loophole. In judgment 5307/2567 the Supreme Court's labour division dealt with a carrier hauling copper ore out of Laos back to Sriracha, running two drivers on every truck, arranged that way, the Court found, precisely so that neither driver's hours exceeded what the law allows. The pair swapped every six to eight hours, and whichever of them was taking the wheel first swiped his own licence through the card reader on the truck.
So the honest version of the ceiling is this. Your three hours do not stop the truck. They make the day more expensive, or they push the work into tomorrow. Which of the two you get depends on whether the carrier has a second driver to spend, and second drivers are not free.
One caveat the arithmetic rests on
Thai law does not define working time, and it is not settled that a driver standing at your gate is working.
The same judgment is the reason to be careful. The Supreme Court held that the hours the claimant spent resting in the truck while his crewmate drove were not work for the employer under the employment contract, reasoning that his driving work began only when he took over the leg he was responsible for. The appeal court's separate finding, that his waiting at the company rest house in Nong Khai was not work for the employer either, was left standing, and the waiting allowance paid for it was treated as a welfare payment rather than wages.
A driver held at a consignee's gate, with a loaded vehicle he cannot walk away from, is a stronger case than either of those. But treat the ten hours as commercial reality rather than a decided rule. The hours are gone from the day whether or not a court ends up calling them work.
One thing that judgment does settle, and it cuts the other way: where an employer pushes a driver past the two-hour overtime limit, the breach of clause 3 does not make the hours free. The Court held that an employee who consented is entitled to remuneration at the hourly wage rate for every hour worked. The cap binds the employer. It does not cancel the pay.
What the day actually looks like
| Hours in the day | Where they can legally come from |
|---|---|
| First 8 | Normal working time |
| Next 2 | Overtime, and only with the driver's written consent |
| Beyond 10 | Nowhere, unless the necessity came from force majeure, an accident or traffic |
Everything that counts as work comes out of that: driving there, loading, unloading, driving back, and the time at your gate.
The statutory hour of rest does not. Under Section 27 of the Labour Protection Act, rest during work is not counted as working time, so that hour sits alongside the ten rather than inside them and stretches the driver's elapsed day past eleven.
Section 27 also narrows one route around the ceiling, though not as completely as it first looks. Rest is not working time except that where the rest periods in a day add up to more than two hours, the excess counts as normal working time. So an employer who parks a three-hour wait as the driver's rest period puts at least an hour of it back into the working day, and more once the statutory hour is added on top. Two things stop that being a closed door, and they cut both ways: it bites only where the wait is treated as an arranged rest period at all, and it is untested whether Section 27's two-hour rule still reaches drivers whose rest is governed instead by clause 4.
The cost you cannot see is tomorrow morning
Clause 5 is the one that quietly does the damage. Ten hours must pass between the end of one working day and the start of the next.
A wait that pushes the finish from 17:00 to 20:00 does not cost three hours. It moves the next legal start from 03:00 to 06:00, which for a long lane can be the difference between one trip and none. That is why a carrier who shrugs at two hours can be immovable about four: somewhere past a certain point, the charge stops being about the afternoon and starts being about the following day.
It also explains a pattern most shippers read as bad faith. Your site slips from a two-hour turnaround to a five-hour one, and suddenly the carrier wants a higher rate rather than a waiting charge. They are not punishing you. They have concluded that your site produces one trip a day where it used to produce two.
Work out what your own day can absorb
Take a lane you actually run. From ten hours of working time, subtract:
- Driving time each way, on a normal day rather than a good one
- Loading at your end
- Unloading at the far end
Then add the statutory hour of rest back on as elapsed time, since it extends the driver's day without being working time.
What is left of the ten is the waiting the day can take before it breaks. On many Bangkok-to-Eastern-Seaboard round trips it is a small number, and on an upcountry lane it can be zero before a single minute is spent at a gate.
Do this once, on paper, before your next rate discussion. It converts "three hours seems a lot" into a number you can defend, and it tells you which of your sites are actually the expensive ones.
Free time is a statement about your dock, not a market constant
Free time is the period before the meter starts. There is no correct national figure for it, and a number copied from a template tells you nothing about your own site.
Get it from your own data instead:
- Measure arrival to release for the last twenty to thirty deliveries, separately for each vehicle type. Arrival means at the gate, not at the dock door
- Set free time near the top of your normal range, not the middle. Free time set at the average means you pay on roughly half your deliveries, for performance you would call normal
- Give a small four-wheel drop and a full trailer different numbers. They are different unloads, and a single figure for both is either generous or punitive depending on the day
What actually moves that number is worth being honest about:
| What drives your turnaround | Why it bites |
|---|---|
| Who unloads, your team or the driver | A driver unloading by hand turns a 40-minute job into a two-hour one |
| Dock door or ground level | Ground-level unloading with no forklift sets the pace regardless of everything else |
| Whether paperwork is ready when the truck arrives | Documents waiting on one signature are the most common invisible hour |
| Whether goods are counted or inspected on receipt | A count against the order is fine. A quality inspection at the tailgate is a different job, and it belongs in the free time you set |
| How many trucks you book into the same slot | Booking four vehicles for 09:00 guarantees that three of them wait |
And free time you never pay for is not free. A carrier quoting a lane with no waiting charge has priced the average wait into every trip, which means your well-run sites subsidise your slow ones and you cannot see which is which. That is the same reason an exclusion has to be priced at the frequency you actually trigger it before two quotes can be compared.
Where the charge stands legally
A waiting charge is not something a carrier invents on the day. Under Section 32 of the Land Transport Act, when a non-fixed-route transport licence is issued, the registrar, with the approval of the control board covering that licence, writes conditions into the licence covering, among other things, (6) service standards, (7) the transport rate and other service charges, and (8) the places for stopping and parking to load and unload people, animals or goods. The licence holder must post conditions (7) and (8) where the Director-General designates.
Above that, Section 19(6) gives the Central Land Transport Control Board the power to fix transport rates and other service charges, with the provincial boards holding the same power inside their own province, and Section 159 makes charging freight or other service charges differently from a rate the Board has fixed an offence, with a fine of up to 10,000 baht.
None of that means a waiting rate has been fixed for hired trucks. Section 19(6) is a power to set rates, not a published tariff you can look up. What it does mean is that the transport rate and the other service charges belong together, in the licence conditions and therefore in the quotation, rather than appearing on an invoice three weeks later.
What the Code gives you when nothing is written down
The carriage title of the Civil and Commercial Code fixes no free time and no waiting rate. Silence is not neutral, though, because the Code hands the carrier levers that have nothing to do with billing.
Section 630 lets the carrier retain the goods as far as necessary to secure payment of the freight and accessories. An agreed waiting charge should count as an accessory to the carriage, though the Code never defines the term, so that is an argument rather than a settled rule. An unagreed charge is only a claim, which is a worse position for the carrier and, oddly, a worse one for you too: a carrier with no priced remedy tends to reach for the base rate instead.
Section 631 is the one to know about before a site starts holding trucks. If the consignee cannot be found, or refuses to take delivery, the carrier must notify the sender at once and ask for instructions. If circumstances prevent that, or the sender fails to reply in reasonable time, or sends an instruction that cannot be carried out, the carrier may deposit the goods at the deposit office. If the goods are perishable and delay risks damage, or their value looks unlikely to cover the freight and accessories, the carrier may sell them by auction. Whether it deposits the goods or sells them, it must tell the sender or the consignee without delay unless it genuinely cannot, and a carrier that fails to is liable in damages. Section 632 then lets the carrier take the freight and accessories out of the net proceeds and hand the balance over promptly.
A gate that stalls a truck for a morning is a commercial argument. A gate that turns into a refusal to take delivery is a statutory process that can end with your own stock in a deposit office.
The clock runs the other way too, and it is smaller than people expect. Section 621 caps compensation for late delivery at the amount that would be fixed for a total loss. If your remedy for a truck that arrives a day late is capped at whatever you would have recovered had the load been destroyed outright, then a delivery window that matters to you is something to write into the contract, not something to enforce afterwards.
On the bigger trucks, the hours are already being recorded
Waiting arguments are usually fought with a driver's handwritten note against a security guard's logbook. On a large part of the Thai fleet that is unnecessary, because a far better record already exists by law.
Announcements issued by the Department of Land Transport on 25 December 2015, which the Department still publishes as the current documents, require a journey data recorder on trucks used to carry animals or goods under both a non-fixed-route licence and an own-account licence: vehicles of characteristics 1, 2, 3 and 5 from three axles, six wheels and ten tyres upwards, and vehicles of characteristic 9, which the Department's own plan describes as tractor units. Trucks brought for registration from 25 January 2016 had to have one from the start. Trucks already on the road had to be fitted before their renewal inspection in 2017, 2018 or 2019 depending on the category.
What the device has to record and send is the useful part:
- Position in earth coordinates, with a horizontal error of no more than 20 metres
- Speed, to no coarser than 1 km/h
- The driver's driving hours, to no coarser than one minute
- The date and time each record was made
- The driver's name or driving licence number, taken from the vehicle's driver identification system, which reads the Department's magnetic-stripe driving licence or another data source the Department approves
It transmits to the Department in real time, or at least once every five minutes, and the tracking service provider must keep the usage data for at least six months and hand it over to the Department on request.
That system is not an abstraction, either. In judgment 5307/2567 the licence swipe was part of how the court understood who was working when.
Two things follow for anyone arguing about a waiting line on an invoice. The times are not really in dispute, because a minute-by-minute record of when that vehicle reached your gate and when it left almost certainly exists. And it is not your record: it belongs to the carrier and its tracking provider, and nothing entitles you to see it unless your contract says so. The cut-off is a ten-wheeler, so a four-wheel drop van is outside the requirement and so is an ordinary six-wheeler. This helps you on the ten-wheelers and the tractor units, which are the ones where an hour costs real money.
Write the clause so there is nothing left to argue about
- When the clock starts. On arrival, or at the booked slot, whichever is later. Without the second half, a truck that turns up three hours early bills you for its own timing
- What stops it. Goods released and the receipt signed. Not "when the driver leaves", which pays for his lunch
- How it rounds. Per fifteen or thirty minutes after free time. Whole-hour rounding turns a ten-minute overrun into an hour
- What happens when the day breaks. Name the point at which waiting stops being hours and becomes a second day, and price that separately. A cap of "eight hours of waiting" protects nobody if hour five already forced an overnight
- Which record settles it. Name the vehicle's own journey data record as the deciding evidence, and give yourself a written right to a copy for your own jobs. Two handwritten times on a driver's note is not a record, it is a rematch. Ask early: the tracking provider's duty to hold that data runs for six months
- Both directions. If your dock is measured, so is the truck's arrival. A clause that only runs one way gets renegotiated the first time it is used
What to change on Monday
- Do the subtraction on your two busiest lanes and find out how much waiting the legal day can actually absorb. Ten hours of work is the ceiling, and only eight of them come without written consent
- Ask whether the lane is single-crewed or double-crewed before you decide what a long wait costs. On a single-crewed run, hours are the whole story
- Pull arrival-to-release times for your last twenty to thirty deliveries and set free time near the top of your normal range, by vehicle type
- Ask your carrier for the waiting charge in writing before the next job, alongside the rate. Section 32 puts the transport rate and other service charges among the conditions written into the licence, so this is a number the carrier is already expected to have settled, not one to produce after the fact
- Stop booking several trucks into the same slot. It is the cheapest hour you will ever recover
- Add one line giving you a copy of the journey data record for your own loads, and use it the week the invoice arrives rather than a month later
- Have the paperwork and the unloading team ready at the booked time, and note any damage on every copy of the receipt while you are there, because that receipt is doing two jobs at once
- If a site of yours regularly runs past free time, deal with the site. Paying the charge indefinitely is the most expensive way to leave a dock problem unfixed
Waiting is the only part of a freight bill that both sides can see coming and neither side has priced. Put a number on it before the truck arrives, and the argument disappears along with most of the hours.