Sydney port storage charges: Port Botany's three free days

This page is about Port Botany, the container port of Sydney, UN/LOCODE AUSYD. It is the second Australian gateway on this site after the Port of Melbourne, and it is the first anywhere on the site where the interesting number is not the one that punishes you.

Three working days, and the first of them is today

Patrick’s Sydney schedule states the free period in one sentence:

Storage charges will be payable on all import containers/goods not collected within three (3) working days including day of availability. A minimum of one Yard Handling Fee will also be applicable on day one, along with all relevant surcharges.

Two things in that sentence decide a date. The days are working days, so a weekend or a New South Wales public holiday does not spend one. And the day of availability is included, so the clock does not start tomorrow. It started the moment the box was yours to collect.

That is the same wording Patrick uses at its Melbourne terminal, and Melbourne’s other terminal counts calendar days instead, with the first of them set by whether discharge finished before six in the morning. Port Botany does not have that second tariff to disagree with, because only one of its three container terminals publishes one.

What the days cost

Exclusive of GST, from day one of storage onwards:

Patrick prices per TEU, so a 40-footer is two of them: AUD 511.20 a day. There is no tier step at all: the rate on the fifteenth day is the rate on the first, which is unusual on this site. Nhava Sheva, Mundra, Jebel Ali, Khalifa, Los Angeles and Melbourne’s VICT all escalate.

Run a 40-footer out, including the one-off handling fee:

The first day is AUD 701.95 against a headline rate of AUD 511.20, because the yard handling fee lands on it. Multiply late days by the daily rate and you understate day one by 37%. That is the ordinary shape of a terminal storage charge: the tariff is a schedule of several charges and the one with “per day” against it is only the largest.

The finding: one price for your mistake, three for your compliance

Patrick publishes a storage schedule for each of its Australian terminals. Pull Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane for 1 January 2026 and they are the same document with a different port name on it. AUD 255.60 per TEU. AUD 190.75 yard handling. AUD 353.60 for dangerous goods. AUD 185.00 and AUD 92.55 for reefers. Three working days including the day of availability. Not approximately, but to the cent, and on the same effective date, from advisories issued on the same day.

Then pull the Landside Terminal Charge for the same three terminals, the flat fee “applicable on all laden container movements into and out of” each one, whether or not anybody is late:

Those differ. Sydney is AUD 17.10 under Melbourne and AUD 18.60 under Brisbane on an import box, and the spread on exports runs the other way.

Patrick’s fourth Australian terminal is the exception that sets the limit on this reading. Fremantle’s storage charges hold the AUD 255.60 storage line to the cent and then depart from the eastern schedule twice in opposite directions: a landside charge of AUD 96.13, under half of Sydney’s, and a reefer surcharge of AUD 369.80 a day against AUD 185.00 here. So the storage line is national; the schedule around it is not.

So the same stevedore, on one date, charges a national price for being late and a local price for doing nothing wrong. Every previous port page on this site has found the variable charge varying: by terminal at Nhava Sheva, by evacuation mode at Mundra, by consignment size at Jebel Ali, by the unit of a day at Melbourne. Sydney is the first where the variable charge is fixed across the country and the fixed charge is what moves.

For a desk, that inverts where the attention goes. You cannot negotiate your way out of AUD 255.60 per TEU by shipping to Brisbane instead, and you cannot avoid AUD 224.90 by being quick. The only line on either schedule your own work touches is the number of days.

Two documents, two sets of terms, one terminal

The two schedules come from the same terminal on the same day and do not agree on how they are paid or how they change.

On payment, the storage schedule says:

Credit Terms; payment is required prior to release of any import containers/cargo.

The landside schedule says:

Payment Terms; payment is required within thirty (30) days consistent with the Vehicle Booking System rules.

So the unavoidable charge runs on thirty-day terms, and the avoidable one has to be cleared before the box moves. The charge that holds your cargo hostage is the one with no credit.

On notice, the landside schedule commits to a period:

Rates, Terms and Conditions are subject to change with 60 days’ notice.

The storage schedule, issued the same day, does not:

Rates, Terms and Conditions are subject to change with notice in accordance with Patrick’s Standard Conditions of Contract.

Sixty days to plan for the fee you cannot influence; an unstated period on the one you can. In Victoria the whole landside review runs under a state pricing protocol with a sixty-day and then a thirty-day industry notice, which is why Melbourne’s rate was knowable two months out. Sydney’s storage rate carries no such commitment on its face.

Free time moves a liability, not only a meter

The dangerous-goods schedule is the one Patrick document that covers Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Fremantle together, and it says something the storage schedule does not. For import containers in the delivery stack:

1. Free storage period – charge to Container Operator.

2. In excess of free storage period – charge to Beneficial Cargo Interest; charge of AUD 353.60 per container per calendar day or part thereof.

The expiry of free time does not merely start a charge. It moves one, off the shipping line and onto the cargo owner. Up to the last free day the hazardous surcharge is the container operator’s; past it, it is yours. “Beneficial Cargo Interest” is the tariff’s name for you, and no shipping regulation anywhere defines it: see beneficial cargo owner.

And note the unit. The free period that decides when the charge becomes yours is counted in working days; the charge then accrues per calendar day. Two different clocks inside one terminal’s own paperwork, which is exactly why free time stored as a bare number prints the wrong answer.

The same schedule also carries a charge most desks never see coming: if a risk assessment or a local rule forces an under-hook receival or delivery of hazardous cargo, AUD 780.35 per container, to the container operator.

What this means for a desk

Port Botany is the easiest port on this site to hold in a system and the hardest to argue with.

Easy, because there is one published rate, no tier, and a free period stated in one sentence. Hard, because nothing about it is negotiable and the only variable is whether your document pack is finished. The three working days run from the day the box became available, the AUD 190.75 lands on the first chargeable day whatever happens next, and the hazardous surcharge changes owner at the same instant.

That is an argument for counting backwards rather than forwards: from the last free day to the date the pack has to be complete, with the counting basis stored beside the number because Patrick’s is working days and the surcharge beside it is calendar days. It is what demurrage and detention software that counts working days and calendar days on the same box has to do, and what a single free-time field per port cannot.

The figures above are Patrick’s own, published, and current as of the 1 January 2026 editions. The carrier’s free time on a Sydney lane sits in a service contract and is not published anywhere, which is the next thing to go and find.