How much is demurrage per day? Real port and carrier rates, and the 30-day clock that decides whether you owe it

Any single per-day number you read online is wrong for your box. Here is what actually sets the rate, why the same container can cost several times more on one line than another, how the counting rule quietly doubles the bill, and the federal clock that can make the charge unpayable altogether.

Reviewed: August 2026  ·  Scope: United States container imports  ·  Not legal advice — verify every figure against your own tariff and contract.

One disambiguation first, because half the pages answering this question answer a different one. Container demurrage is a charge on a container that overstays its free time at a marine terminal. Vessel or charterparty demurrage is what a charterer pays a shipowner for exceeding agreed laytime. They share a name and nothing else. This page is about the container.

Demurrage is the box inside the terminal past free time; detention is the box outside it and not yet returned. For what these charges are and how to avoid them, see our demurrage guide. This page is about one thing only: what it costs, and whether you actually owe it.

There are four charges on one box, not two

Nearly every guide frames this as demurrage versus detention. That framing is why forwarders get blindsided: a single container can accrue four separate charges, billed by up to three different parties, and two can run on the same day.

The overlap is where the money hides. A box gating out on day nine stops accruing demurrage and starts accruing detention the same day, while terminal storage may already have been billed separately for part of that period and the chassis clock runs straight through both.

Figure 1. The four clocks a single import container can run, and where they overlap. Original diagram — drawn from published tariff mechanics, not from any one carrier’s schedule.

Figure 2. Four charges, up to three billing parties, one container. Terminals will tell you plainly that carrier demurrage is per each line’s tariff and direct you to the line — because the storage they bill is not the same charge.

What actually sets your per-day rate

Every guide on this subject quotes the same range — roughly seventy-five to three hundred dollars per container per day — and none of them tells you where that number came from. It is not a rate. It is a blend of different lines, ports, equipment types and tier bands averaged into a figure that applies to nobody’s actual container. You cannot argue an invoice with it, and you cannot quote a customer from it.

Your real number is the product of five variables, and every one of them is published:

Figure 3. The five inputs that determine a per-day demurrage rate. Every one is published — which is why a generic average is never the answer.

How to pull your own number, in four lookups

1. Your service contract. Contracted free time and rates override the tariff. Check here first — most forwarders skip this and argue from the tariff by mistake.
2. The carrier’s US demurrage and detention tariff, for the correct region and effective date. Match on container type, import or export, and the day band your box has reached.
3. The terminal or port tariff, which bills storage separately from the carrier’s demurrage. This is a different document from a different party.
4. The chassis provider’s per diem schedule, if the chassis is not the carrier’s.

Figure 4. Four lookups, in the order that decides. Original diagram.

If your container is in Long Beach or Los Angeles

San Pedro Bay — the adjoining ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles — is the largest container gateway in the United States, and it is where this question gets asked most. The answer is still not a number, but the reason is specific and worth knowing: neither port authority sets your demurrage. The Port of Long Beach is the landlord. Your bill comes from two other parties.

The first is your ocean carrier, under its California or US West Coast schedule — a different document, with different day bands, from the same carrier’s New York and New Jersey schedule. The second is the marine terminal that actually holds the box. San Pedro Bay has multiple independent container terminals, each publishing its own storage tariff and its own free time, so two containers discharged on the same day at the same port can sit under different terminal numbers simply because they came in on different services. That is why a single “Long Beach rate” does not exist, and why a page that prints one is guessing.

Figure 5. Who bills you for a container sitting in San Pedro Bay, and who does not. Original diagram.

So for a box on the ground in San Pedro Bay, the two documents to open are your carrier’s West Coast demurrage schedule and the tariff of the specific terminal named on your arrival notice — in that order, after your service contract. Everything below about counting rules, tier bands and the 30-day clock applies to both bills.

The counting rule is the hidden multiplier

Two containers, same port, same seven-day delay, can produce materially different invoices because of how the days are counted — and this is the mechanic almost nobody explains.

The common pattern in the US trade is that free time is calculated on working days, while chargeable days after free time expires accrue on calendar days. Five working days of free time can still leave you billed for the Saturday and Sunday that follow. This is not a quirk; carriers publish it. Hapag-Lloyd’s US detention and demurrage tariff guide, published 26 September 2024, states that “Detention and Demurrage are applicable on a calendar / continuous day basis after free time has expired,” and that unscheduled closures of terminals and depots are treated as shutout days and excluded from the charge. Other lines publish their own equivalent of that sentence, and it is the sentence that decides whether your Saturday is billed. Find it in your carrier’s schedule for your region before you accept the invoice — and note that the free-time side and the chargeable side are frequently counted on different bases.

Treatment varies again by region, not just by carrier: a schedule may assess nothing on days a terminal is closed in one state while the same carrier’s schedule elsewhere bills straight through the weekend. There is no way to know which applies without opening the schedule for that region.

Figure 6. Why the counting rule moves the bill more than the headline rate does. Original diagram. Whether weekends are billed depends on the specific carrier schedule for that region — check yours.

A worked example, and how to run it on your own tariff

The rates below are illustrative on purpose — substitute your own tariff’s numbers and the method is identical. What matters is the shape: free days consumed on working days, chargeable days accruing on calendar days, and the rate stepping up as the box crosses tier boundaries.

Scenario. One 40ft standard dry import container. Discharged Monday. Four working free days. Picked up on day 12.

Figure 7. The calculation method. Two of the twelve days are billed purely because the chargeable clock runs on calendar days while free time was consumed on working days. Rates A and B come from your carrier’s tariff for that region, container type and direction.

The 30-day clock: 46 CFR Part 541

This part is missing from essentially every page ranking for this question, and it is worth more to you than the rate itself. Federal regulation governs how and when a demurrage or detention invoice may be issued in the US trade — and if the billing party gets it wrong, the charge may not be payable at all.

The invoice must arrive within 30 days — or you are not required to pay it

Under 46 CFR 541.7(a), a billing party must issue a demurrage or detention invoice “within thirty (30) calendar days from the date on which the charge was last incurred.” If it does not, “the billed party is not required to pay the charge.” The same rule applies under 541.7(d) when the wrong person was invoiced first: a corrected invoice to the correct party still has to issue within thirty calendar days from the date the charge was last incurred, and if it is late, the correct billed party is not required to pay it either.

If you are the NVOCC, your clock starts at issuance — not receipt

This one detail is worth reading twice, because it is where forwarders lose money. Under 541.7(b), where the billing party is a non-vessel-operating common carrier, its thirty days run from “the issuance date of the demurrage or detention invoice it received” — not from the day the invoice landed in your inbox. Those two dates routinely differ by several days, and the difference decides whether your own re-bill downstream is valid.

There is relief built in. Under 541.7(c), an NVOCC that is both billing and billed party on the same charge can notify its own billing party that its billed party has disputed — giving the NVOCC “an additional thirty (30) calendar days… to dispute the charge.” That is a lever you must pull; nobody offers it to you.

You get 30 days to ask for mitigation, refund or waiver

Under 46 CFR 541.8, the billed party has at least thirty calendar days from the invoice issuance date to request fee mitigation, refund or waiver. The billing party must then attempt to resolve that request within thirty calendar days of receiving it, or by a later date both parties agree.

The invoice itself must contain eight specific items

46 CFR 541.6(b) sets the minimum timing content of a demurrage or detention invoice. Hold your invoice against this list — anything missing is a dispute lever:

1. The invoice date
2. The invoice due date
3. The allowed free time in days
4. The start date of free time
5. The end date of free time
6. For imports, the container availability date
7. For exports, the earliest return date
8. The specific date(s) for which demurrage and/or detention were charged

Figure 8. The eight timing items an invoice must carry under 46 CFR 541.6(b). Original diagram, drawn from the regulation text.

Figure 9. The three statutory windows, with the NVOCC’s parallel leg. Original diagram, drawn from the regulation text linked in Sources below.

What changed in September 2025 — and what did not

On 23 September 2025 the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit decided World Shipping Council v. Federal Maritime Commission, No. 24-1088. The court set aside one section of the rule — 46 CFR 541.4, the provision defining who a demurrage or detention invoice may properly be sent to — holding that the Commission failed to reasonably explain who it had chosen. The Commission excluded motor carriers, who are in a contractual relationship with the ocean carrier, while apparently including consignees, who need not be. In the court’s own words, the Commission “left out entities who are in such a contractual relationship while seemingly including others who are not.”

In the FMC’s own words, the court set aside “just one section of the Rule – 46 C.F.R. 541.4”, and “apart from section 541.4, the rest of the Rule remains in effect and is not impacted by the court’s decision.”

What that means in practice for a forwarder: who may be invoiced is unregulated again. How and when are not. The invoice content requirements of 541.6, the thirty-day issuance clock of 541.7 and the dispute procedure of 541.8 all remain in effect and enforceable. If anything, the vacatur sharpens the middle party’s exposure — which makes the timing and content rules more useful to you, not less.

How this work runs in Linbis

Everything above is arithmetic and dates. It goes wrong in practice because it lives in four tariff documents, an email attachment, and somebody’s head. Here is how a forwarder runs it as a system instead.

Figure 10. The workflow, with the two points where a person decides. Original diagram.

1. The arrival notice is read, and you see the diff before anything is writtenLinbis reads the carrier’s arrival notice and shows the operator a field-by-field comparison against the file. Each row is bucketed ON-FILE, NEW or CONFLICT, and on a conflict you choose which value wins. Nothing is overwritten silently.
2. One approval stamps the file and offers you the clockAccepting writes the arrival fields — arrival date, terminal, last free day, vessel and voyage — onto the shipment. In the same action you can tick start the clock, and the clock opens pre-filled with the free days and tariff reference the notice itself quoted. It never arms itself: if you do not tick it, no clock starts. Linbis works out which type is eligible — an ocean FCL import offers a carrier demurrage clock, an air import a terminal storage clock, exports none.
3. Free time and the daily rate resolve from your own rate catalogueThe resolver matches a rate card on carrier, lane, equipment class, direction and effective date, returning free days, daily rate, currency and tariff reference. When nothing matches it says so — no card for this lane — rather than guessing.
4. Four clocks run independently, per containerCarrier demurrage, carrier detention, terminal storage and chassis per diem each carry their own free days, daily rate and tariff reference. The database enforces at most one open clock per container per type, so you cannot double-count by accident.
5. The accrual is computed in exact decimal, with a seven-day projectionEach clock reports elapsed days, free days consumed, chargeable days, amount accrued, and what the next seven days cost if nothing changes. Money stays exact decimal throughout — no float drift on a figure you will re-bill.
6. Cost figures are withheld at the API, not hidden in the pageUsers without cost visibility never receive the dollar fields from the server — they are stripped server-side by role, not hidden with CSS. A viewer cannot read your exposure out of the network tab.
7. A background sweep prices the whole book and drafts — never sendsThe Sentinel check scans every container past or approaching last free day, prices the exposure with an estimated daily cost, raises the charge idempotently so a rerun cannot duplicate it, and where exposure exceeds $500 or the box is three or more days overdue it drafts a customer notice into the approval queue. It never sends unattended.

How to check the invoice on your desk right now

If a demurrage invoice just arrived, work this list before you pay or re-bill it.

1. Find the date the charge was last incurred, and count thirty calendar days forward to the invoice issuance date. If the invoice issued later than that, under 541.7(a) you are not required to pay the charge.
2. Run the invoice against the eight items in 541.6(b). Missing free-time start or end dates, or a missing container availability date on an import, are dispute levers.
3. Check the free-time start and end against the counting rule in that carrier’s schedule for that region — working days or calendar, weekends in or out, terminal closures charged or not. This is where over-billing usually hides.
4. Confirm the tier bands were applied correctly, and that terminal storage has not been billed to you twice — once by the terminal, once inside a carrier line item.
5. If you are the NVOCC, start your own thirty-day clock from the ISSUANCE DATE of the invoice you received, not the day it arrived. If you are both billing and billed party on the same charge and your customer has disputed, notify your billing party to secure the additional thirty days under 541.7(c).
6. File the mitigation, refund or waiver request inside your window under 541.8, in writing, and keep the date. The billing party then owes you an attempt to resolve within thirty days.