A Docket shipment flagged critical: demurrage in 7 days, EPR registration missing and a fumigation stamp query, above the invoice, route, free-time and CHA details. — A container against its clock — free time ends 14 Jul, two documents unresolved.

Carrier tariff: where your free time is actually written

A carrier tariff is a common carrier's published schedule of rates, charges, rules and practices. Free time is not a courtesy and not a number your forwarder invented: it is a rule inside that document, which the carrier must publish and keep open for public inspection. The US regulator publishes a list of where every carrier's tariff lives, so your terms are readable before the box ships.

Carrier tariff: A common carrier's published schedule of its rates, charges, classifications, rules, regulations and practices, kept open for public inspection. It is where free time, demurrage and detention terms are stated, and it is a different thing from a customs tariff, which is a schedule of duty rates.

Two schedules, one word Both are called a tariff. They are found in different places, decide different debts and are read by different people on the desk.

Ask a desk where its free time comes from and the answer is usually a person: the forwarder said seven days, or the last shipment on this lane had five. Ask where it is written and the room goes quiet.

It is written in the carrier’s tariff, and that document is public.

What a carrier tariff is

The US regulator’s definition is worth reading slowly, because it is broader than most people expect. A tariff is “a publication containing the actual rates, charges, classifications, rules, regulations and practices of a common carrier or a conference of common carriers”. The word “practices” is then defined too, and it reaches further still: “those usages, customs or modes of operation which in any way affect, determine or change the transportation rates, charges or services provided by a common carrier or conference”.

So a tariff is not a price list. It is the rulebook, and the prices are one chapter of it. The chapter your desk needs is the other one: rules, defined as “the stated terms and conditions set by a common carrier or a conference of common carriers which govern the application of tariff rates, charges, and other matters”.

Free time is exactly that — a term governing the application of a charge. It is not a favour and not a rounding convention. It is a published rule, and the obligation to publish it is explicit: “Carriers and conferences must publish in their tariffs any rule that affects the application of the tariff.”

The terminal side of the same container has a document of its own, defined in almost identical words one chapter away in the same regulations. What differs is the duty: a terminal schedule is published at the operator’s discretion, where a carrier’s tariff must be kept open for public inspection. Same definition, opposite obligation. Which is why a desk can usually read the carrier’s free time and often cannot read the terminal’s.

The word does double duty, and it costs desks time

A customs tariff and a carrier tariff share a name and nothing else.

From the bill of lading to the free time that governs it Four steps, each one a published document rather than a phone call.

A customs tariff is a schedule of duty rates, reached by classifying goods under an HS code; it decides what the importer owes the state. A carrier tariff is a transport document; it decides what the importer owes the line, including demurrage and detention. Someone sent to “check the tariff” for a free-time figure will find a duty schedule if they start from the goods, and the right document only if they start from the carrier.

Where to find it

The published part is the useful part, and in US trade the route is mechanical rather than relational.

Every common carrier and conference must submit Form FMC-1 to the Commission before it begins service. The form carries the organisation’s name and home office address and, the operative line for a desk, “the location of its tariffs, and the publisher, if any, used to maintain its tariffs”. Any change to that goes in within 30 calendar days. The Commission then publishes “a list of the locations of all common carrier and conference tariffs” on its own website.

That is a lookup, not a negotiation. Take the carrier’s name off the bill of lading, find where its tariff is published, and read the free-time rule yourself.

Two details that decide whether the number you find is the one that governs you:

A service contract beats the tariff. Where you have negotiated free time, the contract is the governing term and the published tariff is the fallback. Desks that have a contract often still count from the tariff, which is conservative, and desks that assume they have one when they do not are the other way round. The catch is that the contract is filed confidentially and free time is not among the nine terms the statute makes essential, so unlike the figure on this page, nobody outside your company can look it up.
The carrier on the bill of lading may not own a ship. A non-vessel-operating common carrier issues its own bill of lading and is, in the regulator’s words, “a shipper in its relationship with an ocean common carrier”. Its free time is its own. The rule even names the consequence of not publishing it: failure to maintain a tariff “will result in revocation of an NVOCC’s license”, or suspension of registration for a foreign-based unlicensed one.

Why the tariff is also the document you check the invoice against

The same publication that binds you is the one that proves an invoice wrong.

A US demurrage or detention invoice has to state “The allowed free time in days”, “The start date of free time” and “The end date of free time”, alongside the total due, “the applicable rule or contract” and the specific rate. Every one of those is a claim about the tariff. When the invoice names a rule, the rule is readable; when the free-time dates on the invoice do not match the rule the invoice cites, that gap is the whole argument, and it is an argument made out of two public documents rather than out of recollection.

That is also why the dated record matters more than the dispute process. A demurrage invoice arrives weeks after the week it bills, and the only way to answer it is to hold which day each document actually landed. Document packs routinely run about eight days late against free time, and a week of demurrage on one container has cost US$12,000 — which is a lot of money to concede because nobody wrote down when the certificate of origin arrived.

What this means for the desk

Three practical consequences, in the order they bite:

Free time belongs in your records per carrier and per lane, sourced. Not one figure for the trade. Two lines calling the same port publish different periods, and the last free day you count back from is only as good as the tariff row behind it.
Check the tariff before the first shipment on a new lane, not after the first invoice. It is a published document. The cost of reading it is twenty minutes; the cost of not reading it is a charge you cannot argue with because you never knew the term.
Hold the rule next to the dates. Software sold as demurrage and detention software that stores one free-time number per shipment, with no note of which tariff or contract it came from, cannot answer the only question an invoice raises.

Questions traders ask

What is a tariff in shipping?

A publication, not a duty rate. The US regulator defines a tariff as "a publication containing the actual rates, charges, classifications, rules, regulations and practices" of a common carrier. The word does double duty in trade: a customs tariff is a schedule of duty rates keyed to an HS code, and a carrier tariff is the shipping line's own rulebook. The second one is where your free time is written.

Where is my free time written?

In the carrier's tariff, or in a service contract that overrides it. Free time is a rule governing the application of the carrier's charges, and a carrier must publish in its tariff any rule that affects the application of that tariff. So the figure your desk counts back from is a published term, not an estimate — and where a service contract gives you something better, the contract governs and the tariff is the fallback.

How do I find a carrier's tariff?

In US trade, through the regulator. Every common carrier and conference must submit Form FMC-1 before beginning service, giving its organisation name, its home office address, "the location of its tariffs, and the publisher, if any, used to maintain its tariffs", and any change within 30 calendar days. The Commission then publishes a list of the locations of all common carrier and conference tariffs on its own website. Start from the carrier name on the bill of lading, not from the vessel.

Is a carrier tariff the same as a customs tariff?

No, and conflating them is how a desk ends up looking for free time in the wrong document. A customs tariff is a schedule of duty rates, found by classifying the goods under an HS code; it decides what you owe the government. A carrier tariff is a transport document that decides what you owe the carrier, free time and demurrage included. One word, two unrelated schedules.

Does the tariff bind me if I never read it?

That is the practical point of publication. The terms are open for public inspection precisely so that they apply without being negotiated, and a US demurrage or detention invoice has to name "the applicable rule or contract" it was charged under along with the specific rate. So the tariff is both the thing that binds you and the thing you check the invoice against.

What happens if a carrier does not maintain a tariff?

For a non-vessel-operating common carrier the consequence is named in the rule: failure to maintain a tariff results in revocation of its licence, or suspension of registration for a foreign-based unlicensed NVOCC. That is worth knowing when the carrier on your bill of lading is not the line operating the ship — the obligation to publish readable terms is the same.

Related terms

Free time — The grace period allowed before demurrage or detention begins to accrue, measured in calendar days from discharge and set by the carrier's tariff or by the importer's service contract.
Bill of Lading — The transport document a carrier issues for goods received, which works at once as a receipt, as evidence of the contract of carriage, and, when made out to order, as the document of title to the cargo.
Demurrage — The charge a carrier or terminal levies when a container remains inside the port past its allotted free time, accruing daily per container until the box is collected.
Detention — The daily charge a carrier levies for keeping its container outside the terminal beyond the agreed free period, running from gate-out until the empty is returned to the depot the carrier nominates.
Last Free Day — The last day of an allowed free time period, after which demurrage or detention begins to accrue on a container. It is derived from an event such as discharge from the vessel or gate-out, plus the number of free days allowed by the applicable tariff or service contract.
Terminal storage charge — The charge a marine terminal operator levies for an import container occupying terminal ground beyond its free dwell time, set out in the terminal's published scale of rates and identical for every importer at that terminal, as distinct from the carrier's demurrage.
Terminal schedule — A marine terminal operator's published set of actual rates, charges, classifications, regulations and practices for handling and storing cargo at its terminal, including the free time allowed before terminal storage begins to accrue.
Billed party — The person who receives a demurrage or detention invoice and is responsible for paying the charge on it. In US trade the invoice must state the basis for why that person is the proper party of interest and thus liable.