Houston port storage charges: seven free days, two fees

This page is about one American gateway: Port Houston, UN/LOCODE USHOU, and it is the second US port on this site after Los Angeles. Both publish their own tariff rather than leaving storage to a terminal operator, so both can be checked before you book. Houston is the one with an extra charge in it.

Seven free days, and the 6 a.m. rule

A loaded import container is stored free of charge for seven days. If the unit requires delivery and receipt to the terminal’s authorised freight handler for U.S. Customs examination and/or USDA inspection, it gets three more, for a total of ten.

The start is a single daily cut, and it is worth reading twice: “Free time will begin with the first 6:00 a.m. after receipt.” Not at discharge, and not at midnight. One consequence is comfortable: the hour your box comes off the ship is almost irrelevant, so an evening discharge does not quietly cost you a day. The other is not: the seven days are plain days. Nothing in the subrule excludes a Saturday, a Sunday or a holiday, and the tariff’s own definition of a day is “a consecutive 24-hour period or fraction thereof”. A box received on a Thursday before a long weekend has spent three of its seven days before anyone could have collected it.

That is the opposite convention from Los Angeles, where the four free days are counted exclusive of Saturdays, Sundays and fourteen named holidays. Two US ports, two free time rules, and the same arithmetic applied to both gives the wrong answer at one of them.

What the clock costs once it starts

After free time expires, per container per day:

Those days include days when the truck gates are closed for scheduled terminal closures. The tariff states it against each rate and then again in its own paragraph: the closure days “shall be counted toward the commencement and assessment of demurrage for loaded import containers”. A charge you cannot avoid by collecting, on a day you cannot collect.

The fee nobody counts: day eight

Here is the part a desk that has only ever cleared at Los Angeles or Jebel Ali will not expect. A second charge begins on the eighth day after free time expires, and it runs alongside demurrage rather than replacing it.

The Sustained Import Dwell Fee is $48.53 per unit per day, flat — no length bands, so the same figure attaches to a 20-footer and a 53-footer. The tariff leaves no room to read it as an alternative: it “will be charged in addition to the demurrage for loaded import containers provided for in Subrule 093” and “does not replace those charges.”

So a 40-foot import container collected fifteen days late carries $71.55 a day across the whole overstay and $48.53 a day for the last eight of it. That is a terminal storage charge and a dwell fee on one box from one custodian, before the carrier’s own detention on the equipment is counted at all.

The word itself is doing two jobs across this site’s port pages, and it is worth holding them apart: see dwell time for why one container carries a different day count at the terminal, at the carrier and on a fee like this one.

Two features of the dwell fee matter more than its rate.

It is payable at the gate. “Accrued Sustained Import Dwell Fee charges assessed against a unit must be paid before it leaves the Terminal gate,” and the tariff disapplies its own payment-guarantee provision to these fees. An unpaid dwell fee is not an invoice to argue with later; it is a box that does not move.

The liability is yours, by name. Demurrage at most ports lands on the party the tariff bills, which is usually the line, and reaches the importer through the carrier. The dwell fee skips that: “The owner of the cargo and its authorized agent will be jointly and severally liable for payment of the charges set forth in this subrule, and storage of the cargo on the Terminal shall be deemed an acceptance and acknowledgement of this liability.” Leaving the box there is the acceptance. Nobody signs anything.

The escalation the tariff keeps in reserve

Port Houston can swap the sustained fee for an Excessive Import Dwell Fee, on thirty days’ public notice, and once in it stays for at least sixty days:

Note where that table starts. The sustained fee waits until day eight; the excessive one bites from day one, so switching it on does not merely raise the rate, it moves the start. While it is in effect the sustained fee stops accruing, which is the only mercy in the subrule.

One detail to ask your broker about rather than assume: those four bands are measured in “Gate Days”, and neither tariff defines the term anywhere: not in the definitions section, not in the subrule. The same subrule’s charging note says the fee applies “including on days when Terminal truck gates are closed for scheduled terminal closures,” which reads as though closed days count. If the excessive fee is ever switched on, the difference between a gate day and a calendar day is worth a phone call before the fourteenth one.

One outage, two credits, two different payees

Both tariffs give a day back when the terminal cannot work. Any occurrence that leaves the authority unable to provide container services for 24 consecutive hours or more earns a credit of one day, on application, with a further day for each further 24 hours, and the application expires at six months.

But the demurrage credit goes “to the steamship line’s account”, and the dwell-fee credit goes “to the cargo owner’s account”. One closure, one box, two applications, two payees — and only one of them is you. An importer who claims the dwell-fee day and assumes the demurrage day followed will be short, and the line has no reason to pass on a credit it has to apply for itself.

The export side has a seven-day rule of its own

Houston charges storage on exports too, and in a shape that catches a rolled booking. A loaded standard export container stored more than seven days that then departs on a different vessel or outbound carrier is charged an export storage fee of $211.28 per unit, $279.95 at 53 feet, with another fee each time a further seven-day period passes. The initial seven days begin at the same first 6:00 a.m. after receipt.

And early delivery is not a hedge: “Loaded export containers delivered to the terminal more than seven (7) days ahead of their Vessel’s expected arrival date will not be accepted into the terminal.”

What this means for a desk

Three dates, one box. The day the free time runs out, the day the dwell fee starts eight days later, and the day the carrier’s own clock begins when the box leaves the gate. Miss the first and you are paying one charge; miss the second and you are paying two, one of which has to be settled before the gate will open.

None of those dates is on an invoice. They are derived: from the receipt date, the terminal, the tariff edition in force, the length of the box and whether the unit was pulled for examination. Working them backwards from the last free day is the whole job, and it is what demurrage and detention software that counts every meter on the box is for. The figures above are Port Houston’s, published, and current as of the 1 September 2026 edition. The carrier’s half is not published anywhere, because it is a service contract term rather than a tariff one, which is the next thing to go and find.