Lease on to our authority

This is not dispatch, and the difference is the whole page

Under dispatch, you keep your authority and we work for you. Under a lease, the load runs on this company's authority, this company is the motor carrier of record, the broker pays this company, and this company settles with you under the lease. Those are different legal relationships with different obligations on both sides, and anybody who describes them as the same product does not understand one of them.

Neither is better. They suit different trucks. If you have your own authority and want to keep it, you want dispatch. If you would rather not carry an authority, the filings and the liability policy that go with it, a lease is the arrangement that exists for exactly that.

What a lease actually is

It is a regulated document, not a handshake and not a generic contractor agreement. Federal leasing rules set out what has to be in it: that the carrier takes exclusive possession and responsibility for the equipment for the duration, which equipment is covered, how and when you are paid, every deduction that can be taken from your settlement disclosed in advance, how insurance is allocated between us, and what happens to any escrow when the lease ends.

Those rules exist to protect the owner-operator, and they are enforced. A lease that is vague about deductions, settlement timing or escrow return is vague about precisely the things drivers end up in disputes over. You get a signed copy before the equipment moves, because that is also the rule.

Who insures what

While you are under dispatch on our authority, our liability and cargo coverage applies to the unit. That is what being the carrier of record means. You carry non-trucking liability for the time you are not under a load, which is standard and which the lease will require, and the lease states the split rather than leaving you to find out after an incident.

How you get paid

The broker pays this company, because this company holds the load. We settle with you under the lease: on stated documents, on a stated schedule, with every deduction disclosed in advance. Under a lease that timing is a contractual term rather than a marketing line, which is why it is written down before anyone promises a number.

This is the exact opposite of how the dispatch side works, and the difference is not stylistic. There, we are your agent and must never touch your money. Here, we are the carrier and handling the payment is the arrangement, not a compromise of it.

What we ask of you

A truck that will pass an inspection and a record that will survive one, because under our authority your driving becomes our safety record. Non-trucking liability. And the same paperwork discipline we commit to on our side: settlement runs on documents, and a settlement cannot be fast if the documents are slow.