FMC charge complaint: a demurrage refund with no deadline

On 1 September 2026 the Federal Maritime Commission published a four-page final rule with no new obligations in it. Charge Complaint Procedures, 91 FR 56053, changes no substantive standard and, in the Commission’s own words, is “informational only”. It is still the most useful thing published about demurrage this year, because what it corrects is a misreading that has been sitting in the category’s explainers since 2022.

Here is the correction, in the Commission’s own sentence: its July 2022 industry advisory “incorrectly stated that Charge Complaints filed as a formal or small claims complaint could be filed under 46 U.S.C. 41301(a).”

That sounds like a footnote about paperwork. It is not. It decides who has to prove what.

The burden runs the other way

Bring an ordinary complaint to the Commission under 46 U.S.C. 41301 and you are the one who has to establish the violation. That is the normal shape of an adjudication and it is why most importers never start one: proving that a carrier’s charge was unreasonable means reconstructing the terminal’s operations from outside the terminal.

Section 41310 inverts it. OSRA 2022 provides that the respondent carrier “bear[s] the burden of establishing the reasonableness of any demurrage or detention charges pursuant to [46 CFR] 545.5”. You allege the charge is non-compliant. The carrier has to show it was reasonable against the Commission’s own interpretive rule, the one that asks whether the charge served its incentive purpose. That is hard to answer for a box nobody could collect because the terminal had no appointment.

The September rule’s holding is that this burden shift is a property of the claim, not of the door you came in through. A filing is a charge complaint “regardless of whether the filer submits it to the Commission under the Interim Procedure or under traditional complaint processes”, and it “must be resolved under the terms of 46 U.S.C. 41310, including the required burden shifting for demurrage or detention charges”.

And there is no clock

This is the line an import desk should read twice.

Section 41301 complaints must be filed within three years after the claim accrues in order to obtain reparations, 46 U.S.C. 41301(a). Section 41310 of title 46 of the United States Code, however, does not contain a statute of limitations for Charge Complaints.

The only date that bounds it is the front end. OSRA 2022 does not apply retroactively, so the charge has to have been assessed on or after 16 June 2022, the day the Act was signed. Everything from that day forward is still live.

Four years of demurrage invoices on US-bound containers are therefore not closed files. They are a stack of claims on which somebody else carries the burden of proof, and which cost nothing to lodge under the interim procedure. The Commission confirms there is currently no fee for it, against $387 for a formal complaint under subpart E and $176 for small claims under subpart S.

What the claim requires

The statute’s entry test is short enough to quote, and it is documentary rather than argumentative:

So long as the submission includes the applicable bills of lading numbers and invoices, and alleges violations of 46 U.S.C. 41104(a), 46 U.S.C. 41102 (or both), 46 U.S.C. 41310 directs the Commission to consider such a submission as a Charge Complaint.

Read that as a specification for your own records, the same way the buyer’s checklist for choosing a D&D tool reads 46 CFR § 541.6 as one. Two things have to be retrievable per container, years after the shipment closed: the bill of lading number, and the invoice. Not a screenshot of a portal that has since been decommissioned. Not an email thread with the attachment stripped. The numbered document and the bill.

Most import desks can produce the invoice, because finance filed it to pay it. Far fewer can produce, for a container that moved in 2023, the dated record of when each item in the document pack arrived. That is the evidence that answers the carrier when it says the delay was yours, and the gap is not a filing problem. It is what happens when the chase lives in a mailbox.

Where this sits next to disputing the invoice directly

It sits after it. The separate post on disputing a demurrage invoice covers the first move: the carrier’s own mitigation and waiver process, which in US trades runs on the 30-day windows in 46 CFR part 541. That is faster, cheaper and settles most bills that are going to settle.

The charge complaint is what exists when that answer is no. The two are sequential and the Commission keeps them apart: a charge complaint cannot run under the interim procedure and before an administrative law judge at the same time, and a claim already decided on the merits cannot be refiled.

One more separation worth knowing before anyone gets their hopes up. If the Commission orders a refund, a civil penalty proceeding may follow under 46 U.S.C. 41107 and 41109, but penalties are “payable, if assessed, to the U.S. Treasury’s General Fund”. They are not yours, they do not count toward the $50,000 small claims limit, and a claimant may not request them. The refund is the money.

The unglamorous part

A desk that wants to use any of this has to hold, per container and for years: the bill of lading number, the carrier’s invoice, and a dated record of when the document pack was complete. The first two are filing. The third is the one nobody has, and it is the one that answers the carrier’s defence.

That record is the by-product of demurrage and detention software that keeps the dated record rather than a thing you set out to build: every chase, every reply, every document with the date it arrived and who sent it. Docket works the checklist backwards from the last free day so the charge does not happen; what it leaves behind, when the charge happens anyway, is the file.

And the preventable half is still the larger one. A week of demurrage on one container has cost US$12,000, and document packs routinely run about eight days late against free time. No refund route recovers the eight days. It only argues about who should pay for them.

What this post is not

I am not a lawyer and this is not advice on your invoice. The rule is four pages of procedure and the parts quoted here are the parts an importer would act on; the Commission’s own text is linked above and is short enough to read.

The jurisdiction limit is real and it is narrow. This is the US foreign trades. If your demurrage is at Nhava Sheva or Jebel Ali, none of it applies, and the argument you have is the one in your contract.

What travels is the shape. The regulator wrote down what evidence turns a charge into a refund, and it is the bill of lading number and the invoice, kept, findable, and attached to the dates. Whether or not you ever file anything, that is a reasonable test of whether your desk is keeping the right things.