How much is demurrage per day?

How demurrage is charged

A loaded import container gets a set number of free days at the terminal once it is discharged and available for pickup. The day after its last free day, demurrage starts: a charge for every day the box stays inside the terminal, per container, until it leaves the gate. The ocean carrier or the marine terminal bills it, depending on the port, and it often reaches you as a line on your forwarder’s invoice.

The daily rate comes from the carrier’s tariff, the terminal’s schedule or your service contract, and it usually climbs in tiers: a lower rate for the first days past free time, then higher rates for each later band of days. A box that sits a week past its free time can cost several times what the first day’s rate suggests.

What a day costs on real invoices

Most demurrage is billed as one lump sum for the whole stay, so the daily rate isn’t on the invoice. In Freight Benchmarks’ invoice data, the demurrage bills that do state the days put a day at about $100 to $245 per container, over a longer window than the other figures on this site. Those itemized bills were smaller than the lump-sum ones, so a typical day of demurrage likely costs more than that range.

The whole bill is the more useful number for a budget. On single-container shipments that paid demurrage, the median bill was $404 per container, and 1 in 10 was over $1,360. Counted per shipment across all shipments, the median was $490, because shipments with several containers carry bigger bills. For comparison, per diem (detention), the charge for keeping the carrier’s container outside the terminal, ran a median $172 per container per day where bills state the days: see how much detention costs per day.

How often it happens

Most shipments never pay it. 2.4% of the shipments in the data paid demurrage. The usual causes are paperwork and timing rather than bad luck: a customs hold, a freight release waiting on payment or an original bill of lading, no trucking appointment before the last free day, or a warehouse that can’t take the delivery yet. Rates by port are on the demurrage fee page.

Check the days on the invoice

Under the Federal Maritime Commission’s billing rule, a demurrage invoice from an ocean carrier or a marine terminal has to show the free time, the dates the charges cover and the rate, among other details, and one that leaves any of them out doesn’t have to be paid. That makes the days on the invoice worth checking against your own pickup and appointment records. The steps are in how to dispute a demurrage or detention invoice. This is general information, not legal advice.