A forty-foot box sitting 49 days past discharge at Mundra runs up somewhere between $6,300 and $12,600 in demurrage. That is the worst case in Xeneta's data, not a typical one, but it makes the point better than a typical one would: the charge scales linearly with a delay you often cannot control, and there is no ceiling on it.
Meanwhile the freight rate on that lane moved a few hundred dollars and everyone spent the quarter talking about it.
Where the money actually goes
Demurrage is time the container spends inside the terminal after discharge and before you collect it. Detention is time you keep it outside the terminal after collection and before you return it empty. Different charges, different meters, frequently confused on the same invoice.
Free time is typically three to seven days, depending on carrier, port and what you negotiated. After that, the standard published range at major ports in 2026 is $150 to $300 per container per day, escalating in tiers the longer the box sits.
Two details in that paragraph cause most of the damage. The clock starts at discharge, not at the point the box becomes available to you — so a container that sits three days in a congested yard before it is even findable has burned half a five-day allowance before anyone could have collected it. And weekends count at most ports. A vessel discharging on a Thursday with five days of free time is really giving you three working days.
Why this matters more this month than last
Roughly 3.92m TEU was sitting in congestion at the start of September, with North Asia accounting for 54% of it and berth waits at Shanghai and Ningbo running to ten days. Congestion on the load side arrives at the discharge side as bunching — several ships landing together into a terminal and a trucking market sized for a normal week.
That is the condition under which free time gets consumed by the terminal rather than by you. And it is why demurrage exposure rises in a peak that is driven by capacity constraint rather than by volume: the boxes are not more numerous, they are more concentrated.
The scale of this as an industry item is not small. The US Federal Maritime Commission tracked $15.4bn in detention and demurrage billing across nine major carriers between April 2020 and March 2025.
The three documents that decide a dispute
Most demurrage invoices get paid because contesting one takes longer than the amount is worth. That calculation changes if you keep the evidence as a matter of routine rather than assembling it after the invoice lands.
- The availability timestamp. Not the discharge time — the time the box was actually released and appointable. If those differ, the gap is the carrier's or the terminal's, and in the US the FMC's billing rules put the burden on the invoicing party to show the charge served its incentive purpose.
- The appointment record. Every attempt to book a slot, including the ones refused. A refused appointment during free time is the strongest single document in a dispute, because it demonstrates you could not have collected the box.
- The hold history. Customs, terminal or line holds suspend your ability to collect, and in many tariffs suspend the meter with it. Screenshots dated at the time, not a summary written afterwards.
Send them within days, not weeks. Carriers apply discretion far more readily before an invoice ages into a receivable that somebody has to write off.
What to change before the next arrival
Negotiate free time in working days rather than calendar days if you can get it, and negotiate it per port rather than globally — you will get further asking for two extra days at one congested terminal than asking for a network-wide concession.
Then track availability rather than ETA. The number that determines your exposure is when the box becomes collectable, which is neither the vessel ETA nor the discharge time. That is what container tracking is for, and setting an alert on the availability milestone rather than on arrival is the single change that recovers the most free time.
I would not push the "sue the carrier" line that gets thrown around after every FMC ruling. The realistic win is administrative: proving the meter should have been suspended for part of the period. That gets you a partial credit reliably, which beats a full dispute you lose slowly.
