Any number you are quoted describes somebody else’s operation. Here is the arithmetic that describes yours.
Key takeaways
There is no published Canadian figure for this, and any number you are quoted — twenty loads, forty, sixty — describes somebody else’s operation. What you can measure is the work each load demands of a dispatcher, and once you have that, the ceiling calculates itself. This article shows you how to measure it in a fortnight rather than argue about a benchmark.
Two things drive the answer far more than headcount: how many touches a load requires, and how many of those touches carry a regulatory or commercial decision that cannot be batched, deferred or automated.
A dispatcher handling pre-booked, single-stop, domestic dry-van round trips on contracted lanes is not doing the same job as a dispatcher handling multi-stop, cross-border, temperature-controlled loads with appointment windows. Those are different occupations with the same title. Any figure quoted without stating mode, stop count, border exposure, appointment discipline and after-hours arrangement is not information.
So rather than adopt a number, count the touches. A useful starting list, adjusted for your operation:
Multiply by the minutes each genuinely takes in your operation, add the interruption cost of unplanned calls, and divide into the working day. That is your ceiling. It will be lower than the number you were quoted, and it will be true.
Some of the work on a dispatch desk carries legal weight, and this is the part that is systematically underestimated when people talk about dispatcher capacity.
First, the dispatch decision itself is regulated. Section 4 of the federal Commercial Vehicle Drivers Hours of Service Regulations provides that no motor carrier, shipper, consignee or other person shall request, require or allow a driver to drive, and no driver shall drive, if driving would be likely to jeopardise safety or health, if the driver is subject to an out-of-service declaration, or if in doing so the driver would not be in compliance with the regulations. Assigning a load to a driver who does not have the hours is not a scheduling error.
Second, the hours themselves are a hard constraint on what can be planned. The regulations cap a driver at 13 hours of driving time and 14 hours of on-duty time in a day, with driving prohibited after 16 hours have elapsed since the last period of at least 8 consecutive hours off duty, within cycles of 70 hours of on-duty time in any 7 days on cycle 1, or 120 hours in any 14 days on cycle 2. And crucially, on-duty time includes time spent waiting before and while a commercial vehicle is serviced, loaded, unloaded or dispatched — so a dock that runs long consumes the plan as well as the day.
Third, monitoring is a duty with an output. Section 87 requires a carrier to monitor the compliance of each driver, take immediate remedial action where there is non-compliance, and record the dates and the action taken. On a small fleet that work usually lands on the dispatch desk, and it is real minutes that nobody counts.
Cross-border work is not simply “a bit more admin”. It adds a hard, per-load deadline the dispatcher does not control: in the highway mode the CBSA requires advance commercial information at least one hour prior to arrival at a port of entry so that the data can be validated, and warns that once pre-arrival data has been sent, changes do not restart the clock — only cancelling and re-submitting a transmission restarts it. A load whose departure slips is not only a service problem; someone has to correct the transmitted arrival estimate, and that someone is usually the dispatcher.
Four changes move the number, roughly in order of how much they move it:
What does not raise the ceiling: telling the dispatcher to work faster, and buying software without removing any touches. If you are weighing the second of those, what AI actually does in trucking dispatch is the honest version.
Three decisions should never be automated, whatever the sales deck says. Whether a driver is fit and legal to be sent — because section 4 makes that the carrier’s liability. Which customer waits when two cannot both be served. And what a delay reason says in writing to a shipper, because that is an explanation with commercial consequences. Software can surface the conflict, rank the options and draft the message; a person decides and the record shows who decided.
Worked example: measuring the number in two weeks
A carrier running nineteen power units across domestic and cross-border lanes wanted to know whether to hire a second dispatcher. Instead of benchmarking, it measured.
For ten working days, every load was tagged with a touch count and a rough minute count, in four buckets: planning, appointments, status, exceptions. Cross-border loads were counted separately from the start, because the one-hour advance data rule makes them a different animal.
The result was uncomfortable and useful. Status updates were the largest bucket by volume and the smallest by value — almost all of it was re-typing information the telematics system already held. Exceptions were the smallest by volume and the largest by minutes, and they clustered in two lanes with chronic appointment problems.
The carrier did not hire. It automated the status reporting for its three largest customers, renegotiated the appointment arrangement on the two problem lanes, and moved the desk to an exception view. It hired the second dispatcher eleven months later, at a materially higher load count, with the measurement to justify the decision. The measurement, not the automation, was the valuable part.
None that we can source, which is why this article does not quote one. Load counts per dispatcher vary by mode, stop count, border exposure and how much of the status work is automated, and no published Canadian figure controls for those. Measure your own; it takes a fortnight.
Yes, usually downward per load, because sourcing is itself a touch. If a material share of your volume is sourced rather than contracted, count the search and negotiation time explicitly — load boards Canadian carriers use covers the trade-off.
Both carry extra mandatory touches. Temperature-controlled work adds monitoring and a compliance edge (monitoring reefer temperature on a load), and drayage runs on terminal windows you do not control (scheduling drayage around terminal windows). Count them as separate categories or your average will be meaningless.
When the touch count times the minute count exceeds the working day on a normal week, not a peak week, and after you have removed the touches that automation can genuinely remove. Hiring to absorb re-typing is the expensive way to solve an integration problem.
A short call is enough to design the two-week measurement and tell you whether the answer is a hire or an integration.
