Melbourne port storage charges: three free days, two ways

This page is about one Australian gateway, the Port of Melbourne, UN/LOCODE AUMEL, and it is the first Australian port on this site. It is also the first where two terminals in the same port publish the same free period and mean two different things by it.

Three days, and three days

Both tariffs say three.

VICT’s notice reads: “Import Storage charges apply to full and empty import containers held at the Terminal after the Free Storage Period of 3 days,” and then, in its own notes, “Storage – charged per calendar day after the expiry of the Free Storage Period.”

Patrick’s reads: “Storage charges will be payable on all import containers/goods not collected within three (3) working days including day of availability.”

Three calendar days and three working days are the same deadline only in a week with no weekend in it. Put a box on the quay at each terminal on the Thursday before the Melbourne Cup long weekend and VICT’s free period is gone by Sunday while Patrick’s has barely started counting. The site has shown this gap before between two ports: Mundra counts calendar days “including Sundays and holidays”, Singapore’s ONE tariff counts working days. It has never shown it between two berths you could see from each other.

And Patrick’s three days include the day of availability. VICT’s do not say so; they say the first free day is decided by the hour discharge finished.

The 06:00 rule

VICT’s clock has a detail that no other tariff on this site carries. Two notes, one after the other:

First Availability – Commences from vessels ATA.

First Free Day (discharge complete before 06:00 = 1st day, discharge completed after 06:00 = 1st day is the following day).

So the first of your three free days is set by whether a crane finished before or after six in the morning. Finish at 05:30 and that day is day one; finish at 06:30 and day one is tomorrow. One hour of someone else’s work decides whether you have three days or close to four, and the event that decides it is not on any document that reaches the importer. It is the same class of problem as Houston’s “first 6:00 a.m. after receipt” rule, read the other way round: Houston’s hour is fixed and yours moves to it, Melbourne’s hour is the ship’s and your date moves with it.

That is why the container availability date matters more here than the discharge date, and why a desk that files the discharge date and stops has filed the wrong one.

What the days cost

VICT, per container per day, exclusive of GST, after the free period:

Plus a yard handling fee of AUD 205 (AUD 396 on over-dimension) charged once, on the first chargeable day, and AUD 195 or AUD 233 a day on live reefers.

Patrick, for the same effective date, prices one line: AUD 255.60 per TEU per day or part thereof, from day one of storage onwards, with out-of-gauge at AUD 511.20 per TEU. The yard handling fee is AUD 190.75 per ISO container, a minimum of one on day one.

Two things follow from the shape rather than the level.

Patrick charges per TEU, so a 40-footer is two of them, AUD 511.20 a day, while VICT has a 40ft column. And Patrick has no tier: its rate on the fifteenth day is its rate on the first, while VICT’s steps up by 94% on the third.

Which terminal is dearer depends on how late you are

Take the 40-footer and run both tariffs out, including the one-off handling fee:

The lines cross on the third day. Patrick is the dearer terminal to be one day late at and the cheaper one to be a week late at, and nothing about the box, the cargo or the paperwork changes between those two statements. Only the tariff does.

Both columns are arithmetic on the published rates, with a 40ft container taken as two TEU, which is what the unit means. Neither terminal publishes a worked example of its own.

Day one is never the daily rate

Read the two tariffs for a 20-footer one day past free time and the headline rates, AUD 208 and AUD 255.60, are both wrong by about three quarters.

VICT’s yard handling fee is “a single charge applied to the first day after the expiry of the Free Storage Period”: AUD 208 plus AUD 205 is AUD 413. Patrick’s is AUD 190.75 with “a minimum of one Yard Handling Fee … applicable on day one”: AUD 255.60 plus AUD 190.75 is AUD 446.35.

A spreadsheet that multiplies late days by a daily rate gets the first day wrong at both terminals and only comes right if you are late enough for the error to wash out. The same shape as a terminal storage charge anywhere: the tariff is a schedule of several charges, and the one with “per day” next to it is only the largest of them.

Dangerous goods, and the empty that still counts

VICT charges AUD 825 a day on a hazardous container, on top of storage, and the note extends it past the obvious case: “charged per calendar day in addition to the daily storage charges on all hazardous containers (including empty hazardous with residue)”. Patrick’s dangerous goods surcharge is AUD 353.60 a day.

Two things worth holding. The same drum of cargo accrues at more than twice the rate at one Melbourne berth as at the other. And at VICT an empty box with residue in it is still a hazardous container for charging purposes, which is a charge that runs after the cargo has gone: the empty container return problem with a price on it.

The rate is knowable before the ship sails

One thing Melbourne does better than most ports on this site. VICT’s 1 January 2026 rates arrived in a 30-day final industry notice dated 1 December 2025, itself following a 60-day notice, and the notice says why:

In line with the Victorian Department of Transport’s Voluntary Pricing Protocol for Stevedore Landside Charges, VICT will implement its annual landside pricing review effective 1 January 2026.

Patrick’s Melbourne schedule for the same date is an Industry Advisory issued 31 October 2025, 62 days ahead.

So in Victoria the terminal storage rate a box will meet is published about two months before it meets it. That is the opposite of the carrier side, where the rate sits in a service contract and differs between two importers on the same vessel. If you are costing a Melbourne shipment in November for a February arrival, the terminal half of the number is already on the internet and the carrier half is not.

What this means for a desk

The useful finding here is not a rate. It is that “three free days at Melbourne” is not a fact a system can store.

It is three calendar days at one berth and three working days including the day of availability at another, with the first of the three at the first berth decided by the hour a crane finished. A tool that holds one free-time figure per port, or even one per terminal without the unit attached, prints the wrong deadline for one of these two terminals every long weekend, and free time that is wrong by a day is a charge that starts a day before anyone is watching for it.

That is the argument for demurrage and detention software that stores the counting basis as well as the number, and for working the document pack backwards from the last free day rather than forwards from the vessel. The figures above are the two stevedores’ own, published, and current as of the 1 January 2026 editions. The carrier’s free time for a Melbourne lane is not published anywhere, which is the next thing to go and find.