Terminal schedule: the document your storage clock lives in

Every port page on this site rests on one document, and it is not the carrier’s tariff. It is the marine terminal operator’s own publication of what it charges and how it counts — the terminal schedule. When a desk cannot find out how many free days a box has on the ground at a given berth, the reason is almost always that this document either was not published or was published somewhere nobody links to.

In the United States the rule that governs it is short and contains one asymmetry worth the whole page: nobody has to publish a terminal schedule, and a published one binds you whether or not you read it.

What the document is

Schedule means a publication containing the actual rates, charges, classifications, regulations and practices of a marine terminal operator.

Note actual. Not indicative, not a guide. And the definition goes on to say what “practices” reaches, which is wider than a price list:

The term “practices” refers to those usages, customs or modes of operation which in any way affect, determine or change the rates, charges or services provided by a marine terminal operator.

A gate-opening pattern, a rule about which day counts as day one, an appointment system that decides whether you could have collected at all. Each of those is a practice that changes what you pay, so each belongs in the schedule. That is why the useful part of a terminal tariff is rarely the rate table. It is the notes.

The schedule also has to define ten named terminal services, and the list itself is instructive: free time, terminal storage and wharf demurrage sit in it alongside wharfage, handling and dockage. Free time, in a terminal schedule, means something narrower than the phrase does in conversation:

Free time means the period specified in the terminal schedule during which cargo may occupy space assigned to it on terminal property, including off-dock facilities, free of wharf demurrage or terminal storage charges immediately prior to the loading or subsequent to the discharge of such cargo on or off the vessel.

Cargo occupying space. Not your right to keep the container. The container side is free time under the carrier’s tariff, a different allowance on a different document, and an importer who clears late pays both.

Discretionary to publish, binding once published

46 CFR 525.2(a) is the sentence that explains a frustration the port layer meets at almost every gateway outside the United States, and at some inside it:

A marine terminal operator, at its discretion, may make available to the public … a schedule of its rates, regulations, and practices.

At its discretion. There is no published-tariff duty. What there is instead is a retention duty: a complete and current set must be kept for five years “whether or not made available to the public, and shall promptly be made available to the Commission upon request.” The document exists for every terminal. The regulator can get it. You may not be able to.

Then the other half of the asymmetry. If the operator does publish:

Any schedule that is made available to the public by the marine terminal operator shall be enforceable by an appropriate court as an implied contract between the marine terminal operator and the party receiving the services rendered by the marine terminal operator, without proof that such party has actual knowledge of the provisions of the applicable terminal schedule.

Without proof of actual knowledge. The terms applied to your container on the day it was discharged, and “we were never sent it” does not reach them. For a desk, the practical consequence is that reading the schedule once, when you start calling at a terminal, is cheaper than meeting it for the first time on an invoice.

One lever does exist, and it is the next paragraph: an actual contract covering the same services displaces the implied one. “An existing terminal schedule covering those same services shall not be enforceable as an implied contract.” So on a storage dispute the first question is not what the tariff says. It is whether anything you signed covers that service.

The clause that catches scrap

Five commodities sit outside part 525 altogether: the rules do “not apply to bulk cargo, forest products, recycled metal scrap, new assembled motor vehicles, waste paper and paper waste in terminal schedules.” An importer of metals and scrap therefore cannot assume the schedule machinery applies to its cargo at all.

The following paragraph then reverses it in a way that rewards checking. An operator that voluntarily publishes a schedule covering one of those commodities “thereby subject their services with respect to those commodities to the requirements of this part.” The exemption belongs to the cargo, but the operator can waive it by publishing. So the question is never “is scrap exempt”, it is “did this terminal publish rates for scrap”.

Finding it, and dating it

Where a public schedule exists it has to be online, at a static address, and it has to carry an identification number, an effective date and an expiration date if there is one. Operators notify the Commission of the location on Form FMC-1, and the Commission publishes those locations itself.

Two details reward attention. The access clause permits a charge: “The public may be assessed a reasonable nondiscriminatory charge for access to the terminal schedules; no charge will be assessed against the Commission.” And the definition of effective date settles the question of which version governed your box when two landed together:

Where there are multiple publications on the same day, the last schedule or element of a schedule published with the same effective date is the one effective for that day.

Which means the version matters as much as the rate, and a screenshot without a date on it settles nothing.

Where Docket sits

The schedule is a document about a place, and it changes on its own timetable rather than yours. What Docket holds per shipment is which allowance was in force for that box: the terminal and the berth, the free days the schedule gave, the date it took effect, the counting basis it used, and the date the cargo actually came off. When a terminal storage charge appears, the comparison is already made rather than reconstructed.

That is the argument for demurrage and detention software that stores the terminal schedule behind the number: the rate on an invoice is checkable only against the version of the document that was in force on the day, and nobody remembers which that was three months later.