What “net 30” actually means on a rate confirmation
Not necessarily thirty days from delivery. If your rate confirmation ties payment to paperwork, it is thirty days from the moment that paperwork is complete and in their hands — and the difference is where carriers lose weeks.
The clock can start on a document, not on a delivery
Check what your rate confirmation ties payment to — for example, receipt of a complete invoice packet: the signed proof of delivery, the rate confirmation itself, and the invoice. If it does, deliver on Monday and send the POD on Friday, and net 30 means thirty days from Friday. Send a POD that is missing a signature and the clock has not started at all — nobody is obliged to tell you that.
- Read what the document says starts the count: “from receipt of” is very different from “from delivery date”.
- Check what the packet must contain. Lumper receipts and scale tickets can be required too — and they are easy to forget.
- Note where it has to arrive. An invoice sent to the dispatcher instead of the billing address can sit unread for weeks.
Quick pay is a loan, and you can price it
Quick pay trades a percentage of the load for getting paid in a day or two instead of thirty. That is not a fee — it is interest, and the honest way to look at it is annualised.
| Quick pay | Paid ~28 days early | Same as, per year |
|---|---|---|
| 1% | yes | about 13% |
| 2% | yes | about 27% |
| 3% | yes | about 40% |
| 5% | yes | about 69% |
The arithmetic: the discount divided by what you actually receive, multiplied by 365 over the days saved. Three percent to be paid 28 days early is 0.03 ÷ 0.97 × (365 ÷ 28) ≈ 40% a year. Sometimes that is worth it — a truck that cannot move without fuel money earns nothing at all. But it should be a decision with a number attached, not a habit.
The clause that is easy to skip. A broker must keep a record of every transaction — what the shipper paid, what the broker kept, what and when it paid you — and under federal rules each party to that transaction has the right to review it. Some rate confirmations ask you to waive exactly that right. Sign it and you give up the only lawful way to find out what your load was really worth.
Four things to find before you sign
- The trigger. What starts the thirty days, and what has to be in the packet.
- The quick-pay percentage. And what it costs you per year, not per load.
- Charge-backs and offsets. Language that lets them deduct from this load for something that happened on another one.
- The records waiver. The clause above, in whatever wording it hides behind.
Our reader finds all four
Paste the rate confirmation and it pulls out the payment terms, the quick-pay percentage, charge-back language and the records waiver, and quotes each one from your own document so you can check it against the page. It runs in your browser; the document is not uploaded. Free, no account.
Read the payment terms in your rate con →Home · Broker or carrier? · Detention pay · Cost per mile