Charge · demurrage, and the clock it runs on · tariffs read 07/28–07/29/2026

Demurrage charges are avoided by knowing whose clock is running and when it started

⚑ The short answer

Demurrage is the charge for leaving a container inside the terminal after free time expires. Detention is the charge for holding the carrier's box outside the terminal. Terminal storage is a third charge, billed by the terminal under its own tariff. One statement can carry all three for the same days.
Demurrage advice on the open web is almost entirely tips. Twelve of the twenty-six pages ranking for these queries are titled tips, ways or strategies, and the top answer is to track your allowed port free time. Not one of them says what your free time is or the hour it starts on.
Demurrage costs between $125 and $390 for the first paid day across eight of the nine carrier tariffs we read in full, then rises in tiers. Which day counts as the first paid one is worth more than the rate, because carriers number days differently.
Demurrage clocks start at three different hours in the three tariffs we read directly: the first 12:01 AM after discharge at Savannah, 3:00 AM at Los Angeles and Long Beach under Maersk, and 08:00 of the first working day under Seaboard Marine.

Nine carrier tariffs read in fullTwo tariffs worked through line by lineNo filing procedure here — that is the next page

Demurrage, detention and terminal storage are three charges, not two

Demurrage is what an ocean carrier charges when your container stays inside the terminal past the free time in its tariff. Detention is what the same carrier charges when the box has left the gate and you still have it. Terminal storage is a third charge, from a different party — the terminal itself — for the same days the container sits on its ground.

The published answers to this question almost always give you two of those three. The third is the one that arrives on a separate invoice from a party you never booked with, and it is the reason two storage-like charges for the same week can both be correct.

What each line on the invoice is, one page per charge: what each charge on the invoice is.

Which of the three is on your statement, and who issued it

Demurrage on your statement may be one of three charges with different billers, and telling them apart decides who you argue with.

How this page is built · what we are paid

Every rate on this page is read from a carrier’s own US import tariff, with the date we read it. No figure comes from a summary of a tariff.
Where a document does not publish something, the cell says so. A charge we have not read is never rendered as zero and never left blank.
This page is about the charge and the clock. What to do once an invoice has arrived lives on its own page, and nothing here duplicates it.
No carrier, port or terminal has paid to appear here, and no link on this site is a referral link.

The three charges that get called demurrage, plus the one that arrives with them.
Charge	Billed by	Owed by	Where the box is	Amount
Demurrage	Ocean carrier	Consignee or the counterparty named on the invoice, not both	inside the terminal, past the carrier’s free time	$125–$390 first paid day8 of 9 tariffs · read 07/28–07/29/2026
Detention, or per diem	Ocean carrier	Whoever holds the box outside the gate	outside the terminal, in your yard	$170–$250 per daycarrier tariffs · read 07/28–07/29/2026
Terminal storage	Marine terminal operator	Cargo interest, usually via the carrier	inside the terminal, past the terminal’s own free time	not checked yetabout 80 terminal tariffs unread — gap A
Chassis per diem	Chassis pool or carrier	Motor carrier, passed through to you	wherever the chassis is	not checked yetgap G

What an empty-looking cell means: not checked yet — we have not read the document yet

Two clocks, and they can expire on different days. The carrier’s free time and the terminal’s free time are set in different documents. When the carrier’s runs out you get demurrage; when the terminal’s runs out you get storage; and neither party publishes the other’s number.

How a demurrage charge is actually calculated, with two real tariffs

Demurrage is not a daily rate. It is a sum of days-in-tier multiplied by that tier’s rate, and the tiers are different in every tariff. Two documents, worked through exactly as they are written:

ZIM — tiers that widen as they go, effective 04/20/2025.
Days	Per container per day	Running total for a box that stays that long
days 1–4	$165	$660 after four paid days
days 5–8	$200	$1,460 after eight
day 9 onwards	$230	$2,150 after eleven

ZIM US import tariff, effective 04/20/2025 · read 07/28/2026

Hapag-Lloyd — fixed three-day blocks for the group the document itself calls “all ports except listed below”, effective 01/01/2026.
Days	Per container per day	Running total
first block of three days	$250	$750
second block of three	$300	$1,650
third block onwards	$350	$2,700 after nine

Hapag-Lloyd US import demurrage tariff, effective 01/01/2026 · read 07/28/2026

The box decides more than the port, and the reefer decides most of all. Across the fifteen ports we price, the median first paid day is $265 for a dry box, $405 for special equipment, $415 for a tank and $505 for a container with its refrigeration running. Special and tank sit within ten dollars of each other because 58 of their rate lines are literally one figure: those tariffs print a single rate headed “Special and Tank”, covering both. The reefer is the outlier twice over — twice the rate, and half the free time, four working days against two — so a week of delay on a reefer costs roughly three times what it costs on a dry box. That multiplier barely moves between ports: 1.78 to 2.18 across all fifteen. For comparison, the whole national spread of the dry median is 1.40. Which box you ship decides more than which port you ship to. Six of the nine tariffs price a reefer separately and five price a tank; Yang Ming, ONE and HMM do not split the rate by equipment at all, and MSC publishes special equipment without ever naming a tank. A reefer with the unit switched off is a dry box in every tariff we read, and each of them says so in as many words.

Everything on this site is the import direction, and export is priced differently. One tariff of the nine publishes export rates — CMA CGM, on pages 13 to 19 of the same file that carries its import tariff — and on every port group that appears in both, export is cheaper and gives more free time: $170 after five free days against $270 after four at all US ports, $155 against $245 at Boston, $275 against $360 at New York. Alaska is the exception, identical at $150 after forty-five days. Detention, meanwhile, is the same number in both directions. So the direction moves the charge for time on the terminal and does not move the charge for the box away from it. MSC passes export demurrage through at cost, ZIM sends export to the terminals’ own tariffs, and the other six tariffs do not mention export at all — which is why every other figure on this site is an import figure and says so.

There is a fourth place a box can stand, and one tariff prices it. Demurrage is the box on the terminal, detention is the box out on the road, terminal storage is the terminal’s own charge for the same ground demurrage covers. The fourth is the box parked in a trucker’s yard — off the terminal, not moving — and one tariff of the nine publishes a rate for it: CMA CGM, on a page of its own in each half of the same file, at $175 per container per day after one free day. That rate is flat in three directions at once. It is the same for 20, 40 and 45 feet. It is the same for a dry box, a switched-off reefer, a running reefer and a flat rack — and that is the only place in this entire reading where what is in the box does not move the price, against 96 reefer rows elsewhere that are never once equal to their dry counterpart. And it is the same on import and on export, which demurrage is not. It also does not escalate: one tier, $175, where 67 of the 71 demurrage and detention tables in that same document climb through two, three or four steps. Watch the clock, though — the free day here is counted in calendar days while the demurrage pages of the same file count free time in working days, so a box dropped in a yard on Friday afternoon is on charge by Sunday. Why storage is billed separately here at all is printed on the other pages: thirteen of the document’s nineteen say in as many words that a US water-port demurrage charge already includes storage. The two storage pages do not say it. Neither does Baltimore, and Baltimore is the one port where this carrier bills line demurrage only and the terminal invoices its own storage on top.

Detention is the other charge, and the port does not move it at all. Demurrage is the box’s time on the terminal; detention is the use of the carrier’s box after it leaves. Four of the nine tariffs publish a detention rate — ZIM at $160, Yang Ming at $170, CMA CGM at $180 and MSC at $185 for the first paid day on a dry box — and every one of the four gives exactly four working days of free time. Not one of them names a port. Yang Ming writes “All / All”, ZIM “all ports”, MSC “ALL TERMINALS”; CMA CGM alone varies by geography, for California and Hawaii, and only from the second tier. So the choice that moves a demurrage bill from $80 to $625 does not move a detention bill by a dollar. One warning about the word: MSC uses “detention” for the box inside the terminal, which every other tariff here calls demurrage. Same word, different charge, and both invoices can arrive for the same container. What MSC calls per diem is the box outside the terminal — which is what the other eight call detention. Its two tables carry identical rates to the dollar; only the free time differs, two days for special equipment and reefers under detention against three under per diem. Per diem for the chassis is a different charge from a different biller, and no document we hold carries its rate.

The trap is not the rate, it is which day is day one. Maersk, CMA CGM and COSCO number their tiers from the day of discharge with free time included. ONE, ZIM, HMM and Yang Ming number from the first paid day. Hapag-Lloyd does not number the days at all, it counts blocks. The same box in the same week lands in a different tier depending on which convention your carrier uses, and no invoice explains which one it applied.

What each of the nine carriers charges after free time, tariff by tariff: what each ocean carrier charges after free time.

Your rights under US federal rule

The rule the charge answers to, in one paragraph

Demurrage billed in US trade answers to a Federal Maritime Commission rule codified as 46 CFR Part 541, in force since 05/28/2024. The rule has been before the D.C. Circuit twice since, and the decision of 09/29/2025 changed who may be billed — which is why this page states where the rule lives rather than reciting conditions from a two-year-old announcement.

How to test an invoice against it, and what to do if it fails: the federal rules your invoice has to meet.

Descriptive, not legal advice.

Keeping the clock from starting, in the order the days actually run

Demurrage is avoided in the four days before anyone mentions it. Every published list of tips starts at what is step five here.

Find out whose tariff governs your box, before it sails. Demurrage comes from the ocean carrier’s tariff and storage from the terminal’s. Ask your forwarder for the carrier’s US import tariff by name — it is a public document, and eight of the nine we read publish their free time in it.
Ask which terminal the service calls at, not just which port. Rates differ between berths inside one port: at Los Angeles and Long Beach the same carrier charges $210 at four named terminals and $270 everywhere else.
Find the hour the clock starts, not just the number of days. Savannah’s rule starts the count at the first 12:01 AM after discharge; Maersk starts at 3:00 AM in California; Seaboard Marine at 08:00 on the first working day. A box landing before a weekend can lose a whole billable day to that difference alone.
Check whether your days are calendar or working days. Over a two-week stay the two conventions differ by roughly 40%, which is larger than most of the differences between carriers.
Then do the usual things — with the dates you now have. File customs early, book the collection appointment before free time ends, and have the delivery order and the release in hand. These are the steps every article starts with, and they only work if the four above have been done.
Watch the last free day, not the invoice. By the time a demurrage invoice arrives, the tier has already stepped up at least once in most tariffs.

How many free days each carrier actually gives, and which of them names the hour: how many free days each port allows.

When the tips do not work

The steps above fail in five situations, and in four of them the delay was never yours.

The vessel skips your port. Your box lands elsewhere and a different tariff applies to it — when the ship skips your port.
The box is held by customs or another agency. Free time keeps running while it sits; the clock does not pause for a hold — what to do when the box will not move.
The terminal has no appointment inside your free time. No carrier guarantees one, and no tariff we read treats an unavailable slot as an excuse.
The chassis is the thing you are waiting for. Then the charge accruing is not only demurrage — what the chassis adds to the bill.
Your carrier bills line demurrage only. The figure on that invoice is half the story and the terminal’s storage arrives separately.

Six of the pages telling you how to avoid this charge predate the rule that changed it

Advice about this charge is abundant, dated badly, and in six cases older than the rule that changed the subject. These are our own counts across the five queries this page answers.

What the pages answering “how to avoid demurrage” actually are, captured 07/26/2026.
What we measured	Value
Unique addresses across the five queries	26
Titles offering tips, ways or strategies	12 of 26 — 46%
Pages carrying a date at all	15; the other 11 carry none
Dated pages published before the current rule took effect on 05/28/2024	6, the oldest dated 01/15/2019
What the quick answer gives for “demurrage charges seem too high”	an answer about who pays, not about why the amount is what it is

our own capture of the five demurrage queries, Google US, 07/26/2026

Advice written before 05/28/2024 is not automatically wrong, but it was written about a different regulatory position, and none of those six pages says so.

What this page cannot tell you. It cannot give you a free-time table for US ports: terminal tariffs are unread — gap A — and twenty-nine of the thirty port authority rules are unread too, gap B. It cannot give you a chassis figure, gap G. It does not recite the conditions of the federal rule as current law, because the rule has been litigated since our source was written — gap P. And it publishes no count of what other pages do or do not contain beyond the dates above, because that measurement is not reproducible from the files we still hold — gap 0.

How each figure on this site is sourced, what each status means, and the full list of what has not been read: how every figure here is sourced.

Not legal advice. A description of a federal rule is a description of it, and the rule as in force on your date governs.
Not a quote. The tariff and the bill of lading in your own file decide what you owe, not a number on this page.
Not a filing service. We do not act for you, contact your carrier, or take a share of anything recovered.

Questions about the charge and the clock

How do I avoid paying demurrage charges?

Establish four things before the ship arrives: whose tariff sets your free time, the hour the count begins, whether the document counts from discharge or from the first paid day, and whether the days are calendar or working. Every tips article on this subject starts after those four.

Who sets how many free days I get?

Set by the tariff of your carrier or terminal, not by the port, and no consolidated table exists for US ports. We have read the rule for one port so far and publish it as one row rather than as a national figure.

What is the grace period for demurrage?

Grace period is not a term the tariffs use. What people mean by it is free time, and free time is a defined quantity in a specific document with a stated start hour. Asking for the grace period gets you an average; asking for the tariff gets you your number.

Why is demurrage so expensive?

Because the rate is tiered and climbs with the days. ZIM moves from $165 to $230 per container per day across three tiers; Hapag-Lloyd moves from $250 to $350 in fixed three-day blocks. The charge is designed to escalate, not to price storage.

How much does demurrage cost per day?

Between $125 and $390 for the first paid day across eight of the nine carrier tariffs we read in full, rising in tiers after that. The ninth, MSC, publishes no general US import demurrage rate at all.

What is the formula for calculating demurrage charges?

The sum of days in each tier multiplied by that tier's rate, with the tier boundaries and the starting point taken from your carrier's tariff for your dates. Two worked examples from real tariffs are above; the trap is what the document counts from.

Who usually pays demurrage charges?

The party named on the invoice. Demurrage and detention come from the ocean carrier, terminal storage from the terminal operator, and chassis per diem from the pool. The table above shows who issues each line and who owes it.

Is 14 days free demurrage and detention combined a standard?

No. It is a negotiated concession that appears in some contracts, not a norm. Free time is set per tariff and varies by carrier, by port and by equipment type, so a combined-day figure describes one arrangement rather than the market.

Demurrage is the charge before the invoice arrives. Once one has arrived, the question changes from how the clock ran to whether the bill meets its requirements, and that is a separate page linked above.