Cargo Insured Value: CIF Plus 10% and the ICC

The insured value of a cargo is the figure the policy pays on a total loss, and for almost every international shipment it is set by one convention: the CIF value of the goods raised by 10%. A consignment that costs $100,000 ex-works, with$4,000 of freight and a few hundred dollars of premium, is insured not for the $100,000 the buyer paid the supplier but for roughly$114,500, because the trade has agreed for more than a century that a buyer who loses a cargo at sea loses more than the invoice price. The 10% stands in for the profit the buyer expected to make and the incidental costs a destroyed shipment leaves stranded. The insured value calculator does the arithmetic, including the small circularity that the premium is itself part of the value the markup applies to, and the marine policy clause-type selector sets the level of peril cover against the Institute Cargo Clauses.

This article explains how the sum insured on a marine cargo policy is fixed, what the Institute Cargo Clauses (A), (B) and (C) actually cover and exclude, how Incoterms 2020 ties a sale term to a minimum level of insurance, and the legal frame the whole arrangement sits in: the Marine Insurance Act 1906, with its rules on insurable interest, utmost good faith, indemnity, and the valued policy. It closes on general average, the claims process, and the survey, the points where the abstract sum insured turns into a real payment.

The insurable value and the CIF plus 10% convention

Insurable value is the maximum amount that a thing can lawfully be insured for. For cargo, the Marine Insurance Act 1906 sets a default in section 16: the insurable value of goods is the prime cost of the property insured, plus the charges of insurance and shipping, and the charges upon the whole. That is the CIF value in all but name: the cost of the goods, the freight to carry them, and the cost of the insurance itself. The Act gives the floor; the market built the convention on top of it.

The convention is CIF plus 10%. The sum insured is the cost of the goods (the invoice or prime cost), plus the freight to the destination, plus the insurance premium, and the whole raised by 10%. A shipment with an invoice value of $100,000 and freight of$4,000 has a CIF base of about $104,000 before premium; add the premium and apply the 10$114,500. The buyer who suffers a total loss collects that figure, not the $104,000 of hard cost, because the convention assumes the buyer would have made money on the goods and incurred expenses getting them home.

The 10% is not an audited number. It’s a round proxy for two things the bare CIF value leaves out. The first is the buyer’s expected profit, the margin the importer would have earned on selling the goods, which a total loss destroys along with the cargo. Insurance is a contract of indemnity, so in principle it restores the insured to the position before the loss and no further; but the trade long ago accepted that a fixed 10% margin is a fair, workable stand-in for that lost trading profit rather than litigating each buyer’s books. The second is incidental expenses: the survey fee, the customs duty that may already have been paid, the bank charges on a letter of credit, the cost and delay of re-ordering, and currency movement between order and arrival. None of these sit in the supplier’s invoice, and all of them fall on the buyer when a cargo is lost.

Ten percent is the customary figure, not a legal ceiling. A buyer who can show a larger gross margin, say on high-value branded goods, can agree a higher uplift with the underwriter, 15% or 20%, and pay premium on the larger value. The Incoterms rules fix the floor the other way: under both CIF and CIP the seller must insure to at least 110% of the contract value of the goods, so 110% is the contractual minimum a seller owes a buyer, and a higher figure is a matter for negotiation. The error to avoid is the opposite one, under-insurance, where the sum insured is set below the true exposed value and the average clause cuts every claim, including partial losses, in the proportion the cargo was under-insured.

The premium sits inside the value it’s charged on, which produces a small circularity. The premium is a percentage of the insured value; the insured value includes the premium; so solving for the value takes the algebra in the formula above rather than a single multiplication. At a premium rate of a fraction of one percent the difference between the naive CIF times 1.1 and the exact figure is small, often a few tens of dollars on a six-figure cargo, but on a high-rate war or storage risk it grows. The calculator solves the circular form so the declared value is internally consistent and the premium is charged on the value actually insured, not on a value that leaves the premium out.

The Institute Cargo Clauses: A, B and C

The level of peril cover on a marine cargo policy is set by the Institute Cargo Clauses, the standard wordings maintained jointly by the Lloyd’s Market Association (LMA) and the International Underwriting Association of London (IUA). The current edition carries the date 1 January 2009, replacing the 1 January 1982 set that ran for a generation. The clauses come in three tiers of descending scope: Clauses (A), the broadest, all-risks; Clauses (B), an intermediate named-perils wording; and Clauses (C), the most restricted named-perils wording. The same three-tier idea recurs in war and strikes wordings as separate add-on clauses, because the standard ICC sets exclude war and strikes from all three tiers.

The choice between (A), (B) and (C) is the biggest decision a cargo buyer makes after the sum insured, and it’s the input the marine policy clause-type selector turns into a coverage profile. The cheaper a clause set, the narrower the protection, and the gap between (A) and (C) is the difference between a policy that pays for almost any loss and one that pays only when the ship itself has had a serious casualty.

The three tiers compare as follows, against the LMA/IUA Institute Cargo Clauses dated 1 January 2009:

All three sets carry the standard insurable value: the CIF value of the goods raised by 10%, the 110% convention that an Incoterms 2020 CIF or CIP seller owes as a minimum.

Clauses (A): all-risks

Institute Cargo Clauses (A) are all-risks cover. The risks-covered clause insures loss of or damage to the subject-matter insured from any cause whatsoever, except as excluded by the clauses that follow. This is the inverse logic of the named-perils tiers: under (A) the assured doesn’t have to show the loss fits a listed peril; the underwriter has to show it falls inside an exclusion to deny the claim. That shifts the burden, and it’s why (A) is the cover that pays for theft, pilferage, non-delivery, handling damage, and the long tail of ordinary transit losses that (B) and (C) never reach.

All-risks is not the same as all-losses. The (A) wording still carries a set of general exclusions. It doesn’t cover loss attributable to the willful misconduct of the assured; ordinary leakage, ordinary loss in weight or volume, and ordinary wear and tear; insufficiency or unsuitability of packing or preparation; inherent vice or the nature of the subject-matter; delay, even where the delay is caused by an insured peril; insolvency or financial default of the carrier; or loss from the use of any weapon employing nuclear fission or fusion. Two further exclusion clauses strip out unseaworthiness and unfitness of the vessel where the assured is privy to it, and the war and strikes events, which have to be bought back under the separate war and strikes clauses. So a buyer who reads “all-risks” as “everything” is wrong on the named exclusions, but right that (A) is the widest standard cover the market sells.

Clauses (B): the intermediate named-perils cover

Institute Cargo Clauses (B) are a named-perils wording: they pay only for loss or damage caused by the events the clause lists, and the assured carries the burden of bringing the loss inside one of them. The (B) list covers loss or damage reasonably attributable to fire or explosion; the vessel or craft being stranded, grounded, sunk or capsized; the overturning or derailment of a land conveyance; collision or contact of the vessel, craft or conveyance with any external object other than water; and the discharge of cargo at a port of distress. It then covers loss or damage caused by general average sacrifice, by jettison or washing overboard, and by the entry of sea, lake or river water into the vessel, hold, conveyance, container or place of storage. (B) adds, over (C), the cover for earthquake, volcanic eruption or lightning, and the water-entry and washing-overboard perils, plus total loss of any package lost overboard or dropped during loading or discharge.

What (B) leaves out is the point of it. (B) doesn’t cover theft, pilferage or non-delivery; it doesn’t cover ordinary handling damage that isn’t tied to a listed casualty; and it doesn’t respond to malicious damage unless that extension is added. A carton crushed by careless stacking, a container short on arrival, a pallet stolen from a yard: none of these fit the (B) list, and all of them would be paid under (A). (B) sits between the casualty-only floor of (C) and the all-risks ceiling of (A), and it’s the right choice mainly where the all-risks premium isn’t justified but the buyer still wants the water-damage and earthquake perils that (C) omits.

Clauses (C): the restricted named-perils cover

Institute Cargo Clauses (C) are the most limited standard cover. The (C) list is essentially the (B) list with the second group of perils stripped out. It covers loss or damage reasonably attributable to fire or explosion; the vessel being stranded, grounded, sunk or capsized; the overturning or derailment of a land conveyance; collision or contact with any external object other than water; and discharge of cargo at a port of distress. It covers loss caused by general average sacrifice and by jettison. That’s close to the whole of it.

What (C) drops relative to (B) is the entry of water (sea, lake or river), washing overboard, earthquake, volcanic eruption, lightning, and the loss-overboard-during-loading peril. The practical effect is that (C) pays only when the ship itself has suffered a major casualty: a fire, a collision, a grounding, a sinking. Wet damage from a wave over the deck, a container washed off, water flooding a hold without the ship grounding or colliding, none of these reach (C). It’s the cover the Incoterms CIF rule sets as the minimum a seller must provide, and it’s appropriate mainly for durable, low-value, bulk-type cargoes where the buyer is content to self-insure the everyday transit risks and wants protection only against a total casualty.

Incoterms 2020 and the insurance term

The Incoterms rules, published by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), allocate between seller and buyer the cost of carriage, the point at which the risk of loss passes, and the duties to clear customs and arrange insurance. The current edition is Incoterms 2020. Of the eleven rules, two carry an express insurance obligation on the seller: CIF (Cost, Insurance and Freight) and CIP (Carriage and Insurance Paid To). The other nine leave insurance to whichever party bears the risk in transit to arrange for its own account. The insurance term sits inside the wider machinery of moving a shipment, the forwarder, the carriage contract, and the trade term that fixes who insures; that machinery is the subject of freight forwarding and Incoterms, the hub this article hangs off. For the trade terms alone see Incoterms explained, and for the duty-and-charges side of an import see landed cost and import duty.

Under CIF the seller must obtain cargo insurance complying with at least Institute Cargo Clauses (C), the restricted casualty-only cover, for the buyer’s benefit, with a sum insured of at least 110% of the contract value of the goods in the contract currency. CIF is a sea-and-inland-waterway term, and the seller’s insurance duty is set deliberately at the (C) floor: the seller is buying cover the buyer pays for in the price, so the rule fixes a minimum rather than letting the seller decide. A buyer who wants more than casualty cover on a CIF purchase has to arrange the wider protection separately, because the seller’s obligation stops at (C).

Incoterms 2020 changed the CIP duty. Under CIP the seller must now insure to Institute Cargo Clauses (A), all-risks, again for at least 110% of the contract value. This was a deliberate revision: under Incoterms 2010 both CIF and CIP required only the (C) minimum. The drafters split the two terms because CIP is used for containerized and multimodal trade where higher-value manufactured goods move, and an all-risks floor matches that profile better than a casualty-only floor, while CIF, the traditional bulk-commodity sea term, kept the (C) minimum. So the same word “insurance” in the term name carries a different level of cover depending on which of the two rules the parties chose, and a buyer reading a contract has to look at the rule, not just the presence of an “I” in the acronym.

The legal frame: the Marine Insurance Act 1906

English marine insurance law was codified in the Marine Insurance Act 1906, the UK statute enacted by Parliament and drafted by Sir Mackenzie Chalmers, who’d earlier drafted the Sale of Goods Act 1893. The Act consolidated more than a century of case law into a single statute, and through wholesale adoption in other common-law jurisdictions it became the reference frame for marine cargo insurance well beyond the United Kingdom. The cargo policy, the Institute Cargo Clauses, and the CIF-plus-10% valued sum insured all sit inside its rules.

Section 1 defines a contract of marine insurance as a contract of indemnity. The point of indemnity is restoration, not enrichment: the insured is put back in the position before the loss and no further. The CIF-plus-10% convention lives inside that principle, because the 10% is the trade’s agreed measure of the buyer’s lost trading profit and incidental costs, the further loss beyond the bare goods that an indemnity is meant to make good.

Insurable interest is the foundation. Sections 4 to 6 make a policy without insurable interest void as a wager, define an insurable interest as a legal or equitable relation to the adventure such that the insured benefits by the safe arrival of the property or is prejudiced by its loss, and fix when the interest must attach. The cargo buyer’s insurable interest follows the risk: under CIF the risk, and so the interest, passes to the buyer when the goods are loaded on board at the port of shipment, so the buyer can claim under the policy the seller arranged for losses after that point even though the seller bought the cover. Without an interest at the time of loss there is no valid claim, however genuine the loss.

Utmost good faith and disclosure

Section 17 makes a contract of marine insurance one of the utmost good faith, uberrimae fidei, a higher duty than the caveat emptor of an ordinary commercial contract. Section 18, in its original form, required the assured to disclose to the underwriter, before the contract is concluded, every material circumstance known to the assured, a material circumstance being one that would influence a prudent underwriter in fixing the premium or deciding whether to take the risk. The duty is mutual but bears mainly on the assured, who knows the cargo, the route, the packing, and the loss history the underwriter can’t see. For consumer and then business insurance the harsh all-or-nothing remedy of the 1906 Act was reformed by the Consumer Insurance (Disclosure and Representations) Act 2012 and the Insurance Act 2015, which replaced the old duty with a duty of fair presentation and proportionate remedies; the 1906 framework still supplies the underlying principles and the marine-specific rules.

Warranties

Section 33 defines a warranty in the marine sense as a promissory warranty: an undertaking by the assured that some thing shall or shall not be done, that some condition shall be fulfilled, or affirming or denying a state of facts. A marine warranty is a strict promise, not merely a description of the risk. Under the 1906 Act a breach of warranty, whether or not material to the loss, discharged the insurer from liability from the date of breach. The Insurance Act 2015 softened this for the contracts it governs: a breach now suspends cover while the breach continues rather than voiding it for good, cover revives once the breach is remedied, and a breach of a term relevant only to a particular kind of loss can’t defeat a claim for an unrelated loss. A cargo warranty might require a particular packing standard, a class of vessel, or a maximum age of ship; breaking it is what costs the cover, so the warranty terms get read as carefully as the perils.

Indemnity, the valued policy, and subrogation

Section 27 defines a valued policy as one specifying the agreed value of the subject-matter insured, and provides that, in the absence of fraud, the value fixed by the policy is conclusive of the insurable value of the subject as between insurer and assured, whether the loss be total or partial. Section 28 defines the alternative, the unvalued policy, which leaves the insurable value to be settled later in the manner the Act lays down. Almost every cargo policy is a valued policy set at CIF plus 10%, because the agreed value removes the post-casualty argument over what the goods were really worth and fixes the total-loss payout in advance. The valued policy is the legal device that makes the CIF-plus-10% convention bite: the parties agree the number up front, and section 27 makes it stick.

Section 79 gives the insurer the right of subrogation. Where the insurer pays a total loss, it takes over the assured’s rights and remedies in the subject-matter from the time of the casualty; where it pays a partial loss it acquires no title to the goods but is subrogated to the assured’s rights and remedies up to the amount paid. In cargo practice this is what lets the cargo underwriter, having paid the assured for damage caused by the carrier, pursue the shipowner or the freight forwarder in the assured’s name to recover what it paid. The recovery action is run by the insurer, the proceeds reduce the insurer’s net loss, and the assured is required not to prejudice those rights, which is why a claimant has to hold the carrier responsible in writing and preserve the damaged goods for the recovery survey.

General average and the York-Antwerp Rules

General average is a doctrine older than insurance: when a sacrifice or extraordinary expenditure is made intentionally and reasonably for the common safety of a maritime adventure, all the interests that benefit, ship, cargo, and freight at risk, share the loss in proportion to their saved values. A master who jettisons part of the cargo to refloat a grounded ship, or hires salvors to save a vessel and its cargo from a casualty, creates a general average loss that the whole adventure pays for, not just the owner of the jettisoned cargo. The doctrine is treated in full in general average and the York-Antwerp Rules.

The mechanics are governed by the York-Antwerp Rules, the contractual code adopted by the Comite Maritime International (CMI), incorporated into bills of lading and charterparties by reference. The current set is the York-Antwerp Rules 2016, adopted by the CMI Assembly in New York in May 2016, which superseded the 2004 Rules that shipowners had largely refused to use in favor of the 1994 Rules. The 2016 Rules abolished the 2% commission on disbursements that the 1994 Rules allowed and made the interest rate on allowances variable rather than the fixed 7% of the 1994 Rules. A general average is calculated by an average adjuster, who values the saved interests and apportions the sacrifice and expenditure across them.

For a cargo owner the exposure is real and can arrive without warning. After a casualty the shipowner declares general average and refuses to release the cargo until each cargo interest provides general average security, typically a cash deposit or an average bond backed by an insurer’s general average guarantee. The contribution can run to a meaningful percentage of the cargo’s value, set provisionally before the adjustment is complete and refunded if it overshoots. All three sets of Institute Cargo Clauses cover the assured’s liability for general average and salvage charges, adjusted according to the contract of carriage and the governing law, so the cargo insurer supplies the guarantee and pays the contribution rather than leaving the cargo owner to fund a deposit out of pocket. The deeper treatment of the apportionment and the adjuster’s role is in the general average article.

The policy, the certificate, open cover, and the claim

A marine cargo risk can be placed as a one-off voyage policy, but a trader who ships regularly places an open cover: a standing agreement under which the underwriter agrees to insure all shipments of a defined description, within agreed limits per bottom and per location, at agreed rates, for a period. Under an open cover the assured declares each shipment as it moves, and the underwriter is bound to accept declarations that fall within the cover. The open cover gives certainty (cargo is insured the moment it attaches, before the paperwork catches up) and administrative ease, and it’s the normal arrangement for any importer or exporter with a continuous flow of goods.

The document that travels with the goods is usually a certificate of insurance, not the policy itself. The certificate is issued against an open cover and evidences that a particular shipment is insured under it, with the sum insured, the conditions (the relevant Institute Cargo Clauses), and the voyage stated. The certificate is the document tendered under a letter of credit and assigned to a buyer or a bank, so it carries the cover down the sale chain. Cover attaches under the transit clause, the Institute Cargo Clauses 1/1/09 wording, from the time the goods first move in the warehouse at the named place for the start of transit and continues during the ordinary course of carriage, ending on delivery at the final warehouse or on the expiry of a fixed period after discharge, whichever happens first. The “warehouse to warehouse” reach of the transit clause is why the cover runs door to door rather than ship’s rail to ship’s rail.

When a loss happens the claim process turns on speed and evidence. The assured has to give the insurer or its agent prompt notice; has to take reasonable measures to avert or minimize the loss, the sue-and-labor duty, which the policy reimburses; and has to preserve the assured’s recovery rights by holding the carrier and any bailee responsible in writing and lodging a claim against them within their time limits. The damaged cargo must be left available for survey, because the survey is what converts the claim into a payment. A surveyor, instructed by the insurer or appointed jointly, inspects the goods, records the nature and extent of the damage, forms a view on the cause, and quantifies the loss, separating insured-peril damage from excluded causes such as inherent vice or insufficient packing. The survey report, the commercial invoice, the bill of lading, the packing list, and the certificate of insurance together make up the claim file, and the valued sum insured fixes the ceiling on a total loss while the survey fixes the amount on a partial one.

Partial loss, the average clause, and deductibles

Most cargo claims are partial, not total, so the sum insured is the ceiling and the survey fixes what’s actually paid. The Marine Insurance Act 1906 distinguishes a total loss, where the whole subject-matter is lost or so damaged it ceases to be the thing insured, from a partial loss, where some of the value survives. On a partial loss under a valued policy the indemnity is the same proportion of the agreed value as the depreciation in the goods bears to their sound value, so a consignment surveyed as 30% depreciated recovers 30% of the insured value, not 30% of the bare invoice cost. That is why the valued sum insured matters on a partial loss as much as on a total one: the agreed value, not the goods’ market price on the day, scales the payout.

The average clause is the mechanism that punishes under-insurance. Where the sum insured is less than the insurable value, the assured is treated as self-insuring the shortfall, and every claim, including a small partial loss, is cut in the ratio of the sum insured to the true value. Declare $80,000 on goods worth$100,000 and a $10,000 partial loss pays$8,000, the missing $2,000 falling on the assured as if it were its own underwriter for that slice. The CIF-plus-10% convention exists partly to keep the declared value above the exposed value so the average clause never bites; an under-declared cargo saves a little premium and loses far more on the first claim.

Modern cargo policies carry an excess or deductible rather than the older franchise. A deductible is a flat amount, say $500 or$1,000, subtracted from every claim, so small nuisance losses fall below it and never reach the insurer; the assured carries the first slice on each loss. The older franchise worked differently: it was a threshold, often a percentage of value, below which nothing was paid but above which the whole loss was paid in full, including the franchise amount. The Institute Cargo Clauses 1/1/09 wordings dropped the memorandum-style franchise that earlier marine policies used and operate on a deductible basis where one is agreed; the specific figure is a placement decision, not a clause constant, and it changes the premium because a higher deductible means the insurer pays fewer small claims.

Premium rating and the duration of cover

The premium rate the insured value calculator takes as an input is set by the underwriter, not by any formula, and it reflects the loss expectancy of the specific risk. The commodity drives it first: glass, ceramics, and project cargo rate higher than steel billets or coal because they’re fragile or hard to handle; perishables and temperature-sensitive goods add the reefer-failure exposure. The route adds the next layer, with war-risk and piracy zones, transhipment ports, and long inland legs each raising the rate, and the packing and the carrying conditions (containerized versus break-bulk, on-deck versus under-deck) shift it again. A trader’s own loss record over the open cover is the last input, because an account that claims often pays more than one that doesn’t, the same experience-rating logic that runs through every line of insurance.

The duration of cover is bounded by the transit clause, and stretching it costs extra. The standard Institute Cargo Clauses transit cover runs warehouse to warehouse but terminates a fixed number of days after discharge over the ship’s rail at the final port, whether or not the goods have reached the final warehouse, so a cargo that sits in a port stack past that window falls out of cover unless a storage extension is bought. Cargo held in a customs warehouse, a free-trade zone, or the buyer’s holding store before onward distribution needs a separate storage or stock-throughput cover, because the transit policy was never meant to insure static inventory. The link between the insured value and the duty-and-charge build-up at the destination is the subject of landed cost and import duty; the insurance ends where the transit ends, and the goods then sit on a different cover.

Worked example

Take a containerized consignment of machinery sold CIP from a supplier in Germany to a buyer in the United States. The invoice (cost) value is $200,000. Ocean and inland freight to the buyer's door is$9,500. The underwriter quotes a premium rate of 0.18% on the insured value for Institute Cargo Clauses (A), which CIP 2020 requires.

The cost-plus-carriage base before premium is $209,500. The insured value on the 110$209,500 times 1.10 divided by (1 minus 0.0018 times 1.10), which is about $230,450 divided by 0.99802, near$230,907. The premium is 0.18% of that, about $416. The sum insured of roughly$230,900 is what the policy pays on a total loss: the $200,000 of goods, the$9,500 of carriage, the premium, and the 10% uplift covering the buyer’s margin and the incidental costs of a destroyed shipment. The insured value calculator runs this directly, and because the seller chose CIP the cover is all-risks (A), so a stolen container or handling damage in transit is paid, not only a casualty to the ship.

Contrast a bulk parcel of steel coil sold CIF, where the seller need only insure to Institute Cargo Clauses (C). The same total-loss sum insured arithmetic applies on the 110% base, but the cover responds only to fire, collision, grounding, sinking, general average sacrifice, and jettison. Rust from condensation in the hold, water that entered without the ship grounding, or coils crushed in handling wouldn’t be paid under (C). The buyer who wants those perils covered on a CIF purchase has to buy up to (B) or (A) for its own account, because the seller’s Incoterms duty was discharged at the (C) floor. The clause choice, not the sum insured, is what separates the two outcomes, which is the disambiguation the clause-type selector is built to make explicit.

Limitations

The CIF-plus-10% convention and the figures here are the customary commercial practice, not a regulatory mandate. The 10% uplift is a trade norm; an individual policy can be written at a different markup, and the Incoterms minimum of 110% binds only the CIF and CIP seller, not every cargo contract. Treat 110% as the floor, not a universal rule.

The Institute Cargo Clauses summarized here are the 1 January 2009 LMA/IUA wordings, and the descriptions of what each tier covers and excludes are a reading of the standard clauses, not the operative text of any one policy. A real cover may be endorsed, may carry institute war and strikes clauses, trade-specific clauses, deductibles, or warranties that change the picture; the governing document is always the policy or certificate as issued, read in full. Don’t rely on a tier label alone.

The legal statements rest on the Marine Insurance Act 1906 as the codifying statute, but English marine insurance law has moved since. The Consumer Insurance (Disclosure and Representations) Act 2012 and the Insurance Act 2015 reformed the duty of disclosure, the remedies for misrepresentation, and the effect of a breach of warranty for the contracts they govern. The 1906 Act supplies the foundational principles, but the current remedy for a given breach depends on which later statute and which choice-of-law clause apply, and a cargo dispute in another jurisdiction may turn on a different code adopted from or alongside the 1906 Act.

The calculators paired with this article compute the sum insured and frame the clause choice. They don’t quote a premium rate, underwrite a risk, value a specific cargo for a claim, or substitute for a broker’s placement or a surveyor’s assessment of a loss. The premium rate is an input the user supplies from an actual quotation, not a figure the tool predicts, because real rates depend on the commodity, the route, the loss record, and the market, none of which a calculator can know.

See also

• Freight forwarding and Incoterms: the hub on moving a shipment, the forwarder, the carriage contract, and the trade term that fixes who insures and to what level.
• Cargo insurance and the Institute Cargo Clauses: the full clause-by-clause treatment of the ICC (A), (B) and (C) wordings, war and strikes clauses, and the policy structure.
• General average and the York-Antwerp Rules: the doctrine of general average, the adjustment, security, and the 1994, 2004 and 2016 rule sets.
• Incoterms explained: the eleven Incoterms 2020 rules, the risk-transfer points, and where each one sets the insurance duty.
• Landed cost and import duty: the duty, freight, and charge side of an import, the other half of CIF-plus-duty unit economics.
• Insured value calculator: solves the CIF-plus-markup sum insured with the premium correctly included.
• Marine policy clause-type selector: sets the level of peril cover against Institute Cargo Clauses (A), (B) and (C).