Working days or calendar days: how free time is counted

A working day, in a port tariff, is a day that counts against your free time only because the terminal worked it. A calendar day counts whatever happened. Which of the two your free days are written in decides when the last free day falls, and the tariffs of the world do not agree.

Two Indian terminals make the point without leaving the coast. At Nhava Sheva, NSICT allows three free days from the day following the day of landing, and the period is exclusive of customs notified holidays and port non-working days. At Mundra, up the same west coast, the tariff allows two and settles the question in a single note: the storage period “shall be reckoned from the day of landing up to the day of loading/delivery/removal of container and will include Sundays and holidays.”

Same country, same customs administration, opposite conventions. A desk that learned to count at one of them and then imports through the other will be wrong by days.

The two conventions, and how to tell which you are in

Tariffs say it plainly when they say it at all, in one of a few recognisable forms.

Working days. Patrick Terminals grants the free period at Fremantle and Sydney as “three (3) working days including day of availability”. Two things are decided in that one line: weekends and public holidays do not count, and the day the box becomes collectable is one of the three rather than the day before them. Patrick’s own schedules are identical at Fremantle and at Sydney, while Western Australia keeps a holiday calendar the eastern states do not, so the same wording expires on different dates on the two coasts.

Exclusive of named days. Los Angeles allows four free days on an inbound containerised foreign-trade container, “Exclusive of Saturdays, Sundays and the legal holidays named in Item No. 100(n) of this Tariff”, and Item 100(n) names fourteen. One note reverses it: a Saturday or a Sunday does count if a terminal operator has announced that its gates will be open for container delivery that day. So the count depends on a gate announcement, which is a published fact about one terminal on one weekend.

Plain days. Houston allows seven on a loaded import container and excludes nothing at all. Its only concession to the hour of discharge is where the clock starts: “Free time will begin with the first 6:00 a.m. after receipt.” Mundra, Khalifa and Jebel Ali count the same way, from the day of landing or the date of discharge, with no weekend relief written anywhere.

The calendar a port had to publish

The clearest evidence that this is not arithmetic you can do in your head is that the Port of Los Angeles publishes a calendar for it. The 2026 Demurrage and Storage Free Day Calendar is a single page of twelve months with the non-counting days shaded, and its only instruction is this:

To calculate free time count only unshaded days on calendar

A port does not print that unless desks were getting it wrong.

Free time and the charge after it can run on different calendars

This is the part that surprises people who have read their tariff once. At Los Angeles the free days are counted exclusive of Saturdays, Sundays and holidays under Item 720. Wharf demurrage, five pages later in the same section, is charged “In cents per day or fraction thereof, Saturdays, Sunday and holidays included”.

Houston states the same asymmetry about its own shutdowns rather than about weekends. Demurrage there is charged per day “including days when truck gates are closed for scheduled terminal closures”, and the subrule repeats it for the avoidance of doubt: “The days on which the terminals are closed for scheduled terminal closures shall be counted toward the commencement and assessment of demurrage.”

So the generous reading of a working-day free period does not extend past its last day. The days the terminal does not work are days you were not charged for while the cargo was free, and days you are charged for once it is not.

Why this is a document problem rather than a counting problem

Knowing the rule only helps if the dates are in one place. The counting basis sits in the terminal’s carrier tariff or scale of rates; the holiday list sits in another item of the same document, or on the customs administration’s notification; the discharge or availability date comes off the arrival notice; and the carrier’s own free time is a term of your service contract and counts on its own rule. Four documents and one date, and most desks derive the last free day from whichever of them is nearest to hand.

The demurrage calculator on this site asks for the free days and the per-diem bands rather than publishing them, for exactly this reason: your lane’s counting rule is in your lane’s tariff, and a number we printed would be wrong for somebody.

What Docket does with it

It stores the counting basis next to the number, per terminal and per carrier, so a last free day is derived rather than guessed: which event the count starts from, whether weekends and notified holidays drop out, and whether the day of availability is counted. It is demurrage and detention software that counts the calendar each tariff names, and the practical value is boring. The document deadlines come off the right date, so the chasing starts early enough to matter. Document packs routinely run about eight days late against free time, and a week of demurrage on one container has cost US$12,000.