Freight Benchmarks

Methodology

Where the numbers come from, how each one is calculated, and what they cannot tell you.

Source

The data is the line-item invoices a licensed US freight forwarder (NVOCC) and customs broker billed to importers for ocean container shipments. The forwarder shares anonymized records with Freight Benchmarks. We receive no importer names, addresses, bills of lading or container numbers, and we never publish any record, only aggregates.

A shipment is one ocean freight booking. Where the container count is on file, 91% of shipments are a single container; fees for multi-container shipments are counted per shipment, not per box. Amounts are what the importer was billed, in US dollars: unit price times quantity on each invoice line. Credits and reversals are left out.

Which shipments count

  • Mode: ocean, containerized. LCL, air and truck-only shipments are excluded.
  • Period: shipments first invoiced from July 2024 to June 2026, 8,298 shipments in all. The window ends about three months before each refresh, because demurrage and detention are often billed weeks after delivery: in our data 97% of them are invoiced within 90 days of the shipment's first invoice.
  • Ports: the discharge port, or the inland rail hub for containers railed inland under a through bill of lading. US mainland, Puerto Rico and Canada.
  • Trucking fees (chassis, chassis split, chassis extra days, pre-pull, driver waiting time, overweight) are measured only on shipments whose final drayage the forwarder arranged. When the importer's own trucker collects the box, those fees never reach the forwarder's invoice.

How each figure is calculated

  • How often is the share of shipments charged the fee at least once, with a 95% interval (Wilson method, using the weighted effective sample size).
  • Bills (median, middle half, 90th percentile) cover only the shipments that paid the fee: the total of that fee across all of the shipment's invoices.
  • Paid a delay fee means demurrage, per diem, storage or chassis extra days at least once.
  • Extra fees per shipment is the average of all accessorial charges (everything except base chassis rental and wharfage) across every shipment, including those that paid nothing. The top 1% of totals is capped so one disastrous shipment cannot set the average.
  • Trends group shipments by the year of their first invoice. Only fees whose billing codes stayed constant since 2021 are trended. Chassis split, chassis extra day, pre-pull and yard storage codes were introduced in 2024 and 2025, so earlier years would undercount them.

Publication rules

A few large importers ship a large share of the volume through some ports. Left alone, a port's figures would describe one company's business. So these rules are built into the code that produces the data:

  • Importer cap. No importer carries more than 25% of the weight behind any figure. Larger importers are weighted down until they meet the cap.
  • Minimum diversity. A port is published only with at least 50 shipments from at least 10 importers, and an effective sample of at least 50 after the cap. 10 ports with enough shipments fail this and are not shown.
  • Small counts. When fewer than 5 shipments paid a fee, we publish an upper bound ("under 1.2%") instead of a rate.
  • Costs need payers from at least 5 importers and an effective sample of at least 30.
  • No regional rollups, because a region made mostly of one unpublished port would reveal that port's figures under another name.

Limits

  • This is one forwarder's customer base, not the whole market. Its mix of importers, origins and goods shapes the results, which is why we publish the sample behind every figure.
  • Some importers pay a carrier, terminal or trucker directly. Those charges never reach a forwarder's invoice, so frequencies here are a floor for importers who pay through a forwarder.
  • Customs exam figures are the exam charges only. The demurrage and storage that build up during an exam hold appear under those fees.
  • Pre-pull frequency is not published, because that charge code came into use partway through the window. Its cost is published.

Updates and versions

The data refreshes monthly. The version on every page is the refresh date, and the download page always has the current files. If a figure changes because of a correction rather than new data, we say so on that page.

Questions or a correction? hello@centrevilletech.com.