Why Estimated Cost doesn't match your Relay pay

Estimated Cost is the closest thing the Relay trips export has to "what this load should pay", so it is the natural column to check your invoice against. It is also the column most likely to send you chasing money that was never missing.

Here is what it actually records, and when a gap between it and your pay means something.

On tours, it is the accessorials — not a share of the base rate

This is the big one. On a multi-load tour, Estimated Cost reflects the load's own accessorials, not any portion of the tour's base pay.

A load on a tour paying $4,235 in base rate may show an Estimated Cost of $0.65 — which is its fuel surcharge, and nothing else.

That is not an error and it is not an underpayment. The tour's base pay is real money; it is simply recorded at the trip level rather than split across the loads, on a separate TOUR - COMPLETED row on the invoice. See TOUR rows vs LOAD rows for how the invoice side of this works.

The consequence for reconciling: comparing a load's Estimated Cost against its Gross Pay on a tour is an accessorial-to-accessorial comparison. It tells you nothing about whether the base rate was right, and a tour whose base pay is entirely missing can still show every load matching its estimate perfectly.

It is an estimate, and it can be blank

Two smaller things worth holding onto:

• The column may be empty on some rows. A blank estimate is not a signal of anything; it just means there is nothing to compare against.
• It is estimated. It is never used to match a load to an invoice line — matching is on Load ID — and it should not be treated as a figure Amazon committed to.

When a gap is actually worth a look

LoadRecon compares each paid load's Gross Pay against its Estimated Cost and flags gaps over 10%. Two caveats keep that flag honest:

On tours it compares accessorials, for the reason above. It is not a check on the base rate, and it cannot be made into one from these files.

A percentage test is noisy on small amounts. A load estimated at $1.13 that pays $1.70 trips the 10% rule on a 57-cent difference. Sorting variance flags by dollar gap rather than percentage puts the ones worth your time at the top.

Read the flag as "look at this", not "you are owed money". The gaps worth investigating are large in absolute terms and on single-load trips, where the estimate and the pay are describing the same thing.

The short version

If your totals do not tie out and the variance flags are not explaining it, the cause is almost always tour rows rather than this column — start there.