Los Angeles port storage charges: four free days, two clocks

This page is about one American gateway: the Port of Los Angeles, UN/LOCODE USLAX, and it is the first US port on this site. It is also the first one where the tariff belongs to the landlord rather than to a terminal operator, which changes what you can look up before you ship, and changes it in your favour.

The tariff is the port’s, not the operator’s

At Jebel Ali and Khalifa the storage tariff that matters is the terminal operator’s own schedule. At Los Angeles it is Port of Los Angeles Tariff No. 4, an ordinance of the Los Angeles Harbor Department, and it is assessed against merchandise remaining on “a municipal wharf or wharf premises.” Every container terminal in the port sits on those premises. So one published document, with page-by-page effective dates and a revision history, covers the lot.

The same is true on the Gulf: the Houston port storage charges are the Port of Houston Authority’s own, published per terminal, and they run on a different convention again: seven plain free days where Los Angeles allows four excluding weekends.

Two consequences for a desk. The figures below are checkable before you book, by anyone, without asking a line for a rate. And the port calls its own storage charge wharf demurrage. That is a trap for anyone who learned the word anywhere else, because in most of the world demurrage is the carrier’s charge and the port’s is a terminal storage charge. In Los Angeles both charges are called demurrage and they are two different bills from two different parties.

The tariff is explicit about it, in a note tucked into the assembly-time item: equipment owned or leased by ocean carriers “is subject to demurrage (or detention) charges and free time provisions provided for in individual ocean carrier tariffs.” The port is telling you, in its own document, that it is only charging for one of the two clocks.

Four free days, and the day they start

An inbound containerised shipment in foreign or offshore trade gets four free days. Coastwise trade gets five. Non-containerised foreign cargo gets seven.

The start is the part that costs money. For a container, free time commences at 3:00 a.m. after the container is discharged from a vessel. Not at the first midnight, which is the rule for breakbulk, and not at discharge itself. A box that comes off at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday is on free time from 3 a.m. Wednesday; one that comes off at 4 a.m. Wednesday is on free time from 3 a.m. Thursday. Twenty-three hours of lifting order decides which day the four start from.

Then the four days are counted exclusive of Saturdays, Sundays and holidays, and the tariff names fourteen of them, from New Year’s Day through Thanksgiving, including Cesar Chavez’ Birthday on the last Monday in March and Bloody Thursday on 5 July. The fourteenth is open-ended: “every day proclaimed by the President of the United States or Governor of the State of California to be a legal holiday.” Your deadline can move on a proclamation.

The weekend rule that runs the other way

Note 1 under the free-time table is the single line on this page most worth reading twice:

Either Saturdays, Sundays or both shall be included in the Free Time Allowed on Inbound Containerized Merchandise if a containerized terminal operator announced or published that its gates will be open for container delivery on such days.

So the weekend is excluded from your four free days, unless the terminal announced weekend gates, in which case it is included. Whether your last free day falls on Thursday or on Monday is decided by somebody else’s gate notice, published by the operator, not by the port, and not sent to you. The free-day calendar the Wharfinger Division publishes each year says to “count only unshaded days,” which is correct and silent on this.

What the clock costs once it starts

Wharf demurrage is by the container’s overall length in metres, in three rising bands, at rates effective 16 April 2026:

And here the day definition flips. Free time was counted excluding weekends and holidays; the rates are “in cents per day or fraction thereof, Saturdays, Sunday and holidays included.” One page apart, in the same section, two different kinds of day. A desk that applies either rule to both halves gets the last free day wrong in one direction and the invoice wrong in the other.

The Wharfinger Division’s own cumulative table shows where that lands on a forty-footer: $211.08 by day 4, $791.20 by day 10, and $5,009.80 by day 30, from the port alone, before the carrier’s per diem on the same box.

The cheaper charge nobody applies for

Wharf storage is the other half of Section Seven and it is a different animal: a flat rate of $13.33 a day for a 20ft container and $26.66 for a 40ft, with no escalation. Against a day-11 demurrage rate of $210.93 on the same forty-foot box, that is a factor of eight.

The catch is in the definition. Wharf storage is assessed against merchandise that “has been accepted for storage” — it is a status the port grants, not a rate you fall into, and the grantee of a berth assignment has to apply in writing to the Executive Director to use it. Demurrage is what happens if you do nothing. Storage is what happens if someone asks in time.

What this means for a desk

Three of the four numbers that decide a Los Angeles storage bill are not on any document you receive: the 3 a.m. discharge boundary, the operator’s weekend gate announcement, and which of the four length bands your box falls in. The fourth, the day count, flips its own definition halfway through the section.

That is the ordinary condition of this charge and it is why the honest tool for it is not an alert. An alert tells you the clock is running on a day your desk already knew about. What a desk needs is the discharge time, the gate notice and the band held against the shipment from the day the vessel berths, so the deadline is a date rather than a reconstruction: demurrage and detention software that counts the terminal’s clock rather than only the carrier’s.

Related: wharfage, the once-per-crossing charge whose measurement basis these per-day rates are assessed on, and free time for the general shape of the allowance.