Ocean Freight Cost and Surcharges

The number a shipper sees first, the ocean freight rate, is rarely the number that lands on the invoice. A carrier may quote $1,400 to move a forty-foot box from Shanghai to Los Angeles, and the bill that arrives carries a dozen further lines: a bunker surcharge, terminal handling at both ends, a security charge, a documentation fee, and, if the box overstays its free time, demurrage. By the time customs duty and inland trucking are added, the delivered cost can run to twice the quoted rate. This article takes apart that invoice line by line: the base rate, every standard surcharge and what each one recovers, and how a forwarder assembles them into a single all-in quote. It sits under the freight forwarding and Incoterms hub, which frames how the forwarder, the carrier, and the Incoterms rule on the sale contract divide these charges between buyer and seller. The ocean freight cost calculator runs the base-rate-plus-surcharges arithmetic on a specific booking, and the terminal handling charges calculator isolates the OTHC and DTHC lines that catch first-time importers out.

Surcharges aren’t a billing trick. Each one exists because a real cost moves independently of the base rate: fuel prices swing weekly, currencies float, terminals raise their tariffs, ports congest, and a container held too long ties up an asset the carrier could otherwise rent again. The base rate captures the steady-state cost of the sea leg; the surcharges capture the parts that change. Knowing which surcharge tracks which cost is what lets a buyer challenge an inflated line or budget the real landed figure, the subject of the sibling landed cost and import duty article.

The base rate: what you are actually quoting

The base ocean freight rate is the charge for the sea carriage itself, port to port, before any adjustment. How it’s expressed depends on how the cargo travels.

For a full container load (FCL), the rate is quoted per container and per container type. A standard twenty-foot (20’ DV) box, a forty-foot (40’ DV), a forty-foot high-cube (40’ HC), and a reefer each carry their own rate. The carrier prices the slot the box occupies on the ship, not the weight or value of what’s inside it, which is why an empty-looking container of pillows and a dense container of machine parts can pay the same base rate on the same lane. The unit is the box. The reefer container freight calculator handles the refrigerated case, where the rate carries a temperature-control premium and a power surcharge on top of the dry-box base.

For cargo that doesn’t fill a container, less-than-container-load (LCL), the rate is quoted per revenue tonne on the weight-or-measure rule. One cubic meter (CBM) is treated as one metric tonne, and the shipment pays on whichever is greater. A light, bulky consignment pays on its volume; a dense one pays on its weight. The same logic governs breakbulk and conventional general cargo, where the freight ton (W/M) has been the trade’s pricing unit for over a century. The mechanics of that conversion are the subject of the sibling CBM and chargeable weight article, and the CBM calculator does the volume arithmetic.

Most containerized liner cargo today moves on a Freight All Kinds (FAK) rate. FAK is a single base rate the carrier applies to a box regardless of the commodity class inside it. It replaced the old commodity-by-commodity tariff books because, once the cargo is in a sealed box, the ship handles the box the same way whatever it contains. A forwarder buying space in bulk from a carrier almost always buys at a FAK level and resells it. Cargo that genuinely changes the carrier’s cost or risk falls outside FAK: hazardous goods rated by IMDG class, refrigerated cargo, out-of-gauge or flat-rack loads, and high-value commodities still attract their own rated charges. The ocean freight cost calculator starts from the FAK or per-container base and layers the surcharges on top.

The base rate is also the figure the published freight indices benchmark. When a market commentator says the Shanghai to Rotterdam spot rate “hit $4,000 per FEU,” they mean the all-in or base-plus-surcharge spot level tracked by an index, not the long-term contract rate a large importer has locked. The link between the quoted rate and those benchmarks runs through the index family covered below and in Baltic Dry Index and freight indices.

Why surcharges exist at all

A liner carrier publishes a base rate it intends to hold for a contract period, often a quarter or a year for a large account. Several of its costs refuse to hold still over that period. Fuel is the largest. Bunker prices can swing by a tenth to a third within a single quarter in a volatile market, a nominal industry range rather than a fixed figure, and on a long-haul service fuel is a large share of voyage cost. If the carrier baked a fuel assumption into the base rate and fuel then jumped, it would carry the loss until the contract reopened. The surcharge mechanism solves this by splitting the bill: a stable base rate plus a set of floating adjustments that each track one volatile cost and reset on a published schedule.

This is the honest reading of surcharges, and it’s also where the friction lives. A surcharge that genuinely tracks an external cost (fuel, a terminal’s published tariff, a currency rate) is defensible and auditable. A surcharge that the market simply tolerates because capacity is tight (a peak-season charge during a demand spike, a general increase pushed through because every carrier moved together) shades from cost recovery into pricing power. The regulatory attention surcharges draw, from the US Federal Maritime Commission and from the European Commission’s decision to let the liner consortia antitrust exemption lapse, reflects exactly that ambiguity. The sections below name what each surcharge is supposed to recover, so the line can be read against the cost it claims to track.

Surcharge glossary at a glance

The common surcharges, what each one recovers, and which party normally carries it. The “who is billed” column is the default under typical liner practice; the Incoterms rule on the sale contract overrides it for the handling and destination charges.

Fuel surcharges: BAF, LSS, and the IMO 2020 driver

The Bunker Adjustment Factor (BAF) recovers swings in the cost of bunker fuel, the heavy fuel oil and distillates that power the ship. It is the floating fuel portion of the freight bill. When fuel rises, the BAF rises; when fuel falls, it should fall too. Carriers compute it from a formula that combines a fuel-price reference (often a basket of bunkering-port prices), the ship’s fuel consumption on the trade lane, and the lane’s transit time, then divide across the containers carried. The result is a per-container or per-tonne figure that resets monthly or quarterly. The companion Bunker Adjustment Factor article works through a representative BAF formula and the trade-lane factors that drive it.

BAF predates any environmental rule; it has floated fuel cost for decades. What changed in 2020 was the price of the fuel itself. The IMO’s 0.50% sulphur cap, set under MARPOL Annex VI Regulation 14 and in force from 1 January 2020, cut the permitted sulphur content of marine fuel used outside emission-control areas from 3.50% to 0.50% by mass. Ships without exhaust scrubbers had to switch from cheap high-sulphur fuel oil (HSFO) to very-low-sulphur fuel oil (VLSFO), which trades at a premium. Inside the stricter emission-control areas the limit is tighter still at 0.10%.

That premium is what the Low Sulphur Surcharge (LSS, also LSF) recovers. LSS is the variant of the bunker surcharge that prices the gap between compliant low-sulphur fuel and the old high-sulphur grade. Many carriers folded the low-sulphur premium straight into a revised BAF formula rather than billing a separate LSS line, so on a given invoice you may see one combined fuel adjustment or a base BAF plus an LSS. Either way the cost being recovered is the same: the price of burning legal fuel under the IMO 2020 regime. Where a vessel is scrubber-fitted and keeps burning HSFO the economics differ, but the published surcharge still tracks the compliant-fuel reference.

A practical caveat for the importer: because BAF and LSS float on a published schedule, the fuel line on a booking made today can differ from the line on an identical booking next month even with the base rate unchanged. Always read the fuel surcharge against the quote’s validity date.

Currency surcharge: CAF

The Currency Adjustment Factor (CAF) recovers losses from exchange-rate movement. A carrier may quote and collect freight in US dollars while paying a chunk of its costs (port calls, agency fees, crew, local services) in other currencies. When the dollar weakens against those currencies, the carrier’s dollar revenue buys less of what it must pay for. CAF is the percentage adjustment that offsets that drift, expressed as a percentage of the base freight and reset periodically against a reference basket of currencies.

CAF is less visible on dollar-denominated headhaul trades than it once was, because much liner pricing consolidated into all-in dollar rates that absorb currency risk into the base. It surfaces more on trades priced in a local currency, or on legacy tariff structures that itemize it. Where it appears, it’s a small percentage line, not a major cost driver, and unlike BAF it tracks foreign-exchange rates rather than fuel. The two are routinely confused; the distinction is simply that BAF follows the oil price and CAF follows the currency cross.

Terminal handling: OTHC and DTHC

Terminal Handling Charge (THC) recovers the cost the marine terminal charges to move the container across the quay: lifting it off the truck or rail car, stacking it in the yard, and loading it onto the ship at the load port, then the reverse at the discharge port. It is a real, separately tariffed cost the terminal operator levies on the carrier, which the carrier passes through to the cargo. The terminal handling charges calculator sizes the THC lines for a booking.

THC splits by end. Origin Terminal Handling Charge (OTHC) covers the load-port handling; Destination Terminal Handling Charge (DTHC) covers the discharge-port handling. The two are usually different amounts because terminal tariffs differ by port, and because the work differs. Which party pays which end is decided by the Incoterms rule on the sale contract, the subject of the sibling Incoterms explained article. Under FOB the seller generally covers origin handling and the buyer takes the ocean freight and destination handling. Under DDP the seller carries everything to the buyer’s door, DTHC included. A frequent dispute is the importer who negotiated an FOB price, budgeted the ocean freight, and then met a DTHC bill at the destination port they hadn’t priced in.

THC is also where surcharge transparency gets tested. Because the terminal’s tariff is published, an importer can in principle check the DTHC against the terminal’s own schedule. In practice carriers bundle handling, documentation, and local charges into composite “destination charges” that are harder to audit line by line. Asking for the THC to be itemized against the terminal tariff is a standard way to test whether a destination-charge bill is cost-based.

Security: ISPS

The ISPS surcharge recovers the cost of complying with the International Ship and Port Facility Security (ISPS) Code, the security regime the IMO adopted after 2001 and brought into force in July 2004 under SOLAS Chapter XI-2. The Code requires ships and port facilities to maintain security plans, controlled access, designated security officers, and monitoring. Ports and terminals incur cost meeting it; carriers incur cost on the ship side. The ISPS surcharge, sometimes split into a carrier security fee and a terminal security fee, passes that cost to the cargo.

ISPS is a small fixed line, typically a few dollars per container, not a major cost. It’s genuinely cost-based in origin (the Code is real and compliance is mandatory), and it’s one of the more stable surcharges because the underlying obligation doesn’t float the way fuel does. Importers sometimes query it as a nuisance line; it is a legitimate pass-through of a SOLAS security obligation.

Demand-driven surcharges: PSS, GRI, and congestion

Three surcharges track market conditions rather than a fixed external cost, and these are where pricing power shows most clearly.

Peak-season surcharge (PSS)

The Peak Season Surcharge (PSS) is a temporary uplift carriers apply when demand on a lane runs ahead of capacity, classically in the run-up to the Western retail peak when factories in Asia ship before the year-end holidays. It recovers nothing external; it prices scarcity. When ships are full and bookings are rolled, a PSS lets carriers raise the realized rate without reopening the base tariff. It’s announced for a defined window and lifted when demand eases, though in practice a PSS introduced in a tight market often persists. A PSS is a market signal as much as a charge: a fresh PSS announcement across multiple carriers tells the trade that space is tightening.

General rate increase (GRI)

The General Rate Increase (GRI) is an across-the-board rise in the base rate on a lane, announced by a carrier and applied from a set date. Unlike a PSS, which sits on top of the base as a separate line, a GRI lifts the base itself. GRIs are most visible on the major East-West container trades, where carriers announce them in dollars per container effective on a given day, and they frequently move together across carriers, which is part of why they draw competition-authority attention.

In the US trades the timing is regulated. An increase to a rate in a carrier’s filed tariff can’t take effect earlier than 30 calendar days after publication, under 46 CFR 520.8. A carrier can petition the Federal Maritime Commission for special permission to shorten that window, but it must show good cause. The FMC denied four such petitions on 23 March 2026, from CMA CGM, Hapag-Lloyd, Maersk, and Zim, where the carriers sought to impose war-risk and conflict surcharges on less than 30 days’ notice in connection with the Strait of Hormuz situation; the Commission found none had shown the good cause 46 CFR 520.8 requires. The 30-day rule is why a US-bound GRI is always announced well ahead of its effective date. The ocean freight cost calculator lets a shipper test how an announced GRI changes the all-in figure before it takes effect.

Congestion surcharge

A congestion surcharge recovers the cost of ships waiting for a berth when a port backs up. When a vessel sits at anchor for days because terminals are saturated, that idle ship time is real cost, the daily running cost of the ship earns nothing while it waits, and the congestion surcharge passes it to the cargo on the affected lane. It’s event-driven, introduced when a specific port or region congests and withdrawn when the queue clears. The pandemic-era West Coast and North Europe port backlogs produced some of the largest congestion surcharges the container trades have seen.

Risk and event surcharges: war risk, and the imbalance charge

A war-risk surcharge recovers the additional insurance and operational cost of routing a ship through, or insuring it for, a conflict-exposed area. When marine war-risk underwriters widen a listed risk area or raise the additional premium for transiting it, carriers face a real, dated cost increase, and a war-risk surcharge passes it to the cargo on the affected routing. The Strait of Hormuz and Red Sea disruptions of recent years are the live examples. As noted above, the FMC’s 30-day notice rule still governs how fast a US-trade war-risk surcharge can take effect, and the Commission has enforced that limit.

The container imbalance charge, sometimes billed as an equipment imbalance surcharge or equipment-repositioning charge, recovers the cost of moving empty containers from where they pile up to where they’re needed. Trade is directional: a lane that exports heavily in one direction leaves a surplus of empty boxes at the import end and a shortage at the export end. The carrier must reposition empties against the loaded flow, and that repositioning is a real cost the imbalance charge recovers. It surfaces most on structurally imbalanced lanes and at times when equipment is short.

Documentation and the bill of lading fee

The documentation fee, also billed as a bill of lading fee or B/L fee, recovers the cost of producing and processing the shipping documents: the bill of lading itself, the manifest, and the associated data filing. The bill of lading is the central document of the shipment, serving as the carrier’s receipt for the goods, the evidence of the carriage contract, and, when issued as a negotiable original, a document of title that can be traded or pledged. Producing it, transmitting the manifest data to customs, and handling amendments all carry administrative cost.

The fee is usually a flat charge per bill of lading, not per container, so consolidating cargo under fewer bills reduces it. Amendment fees apply when a shipper corrects a bill after issue, and a telex-release or express-release fee may apply where the parties dispense with paper originals. These are small lines individually, but on a high-volume account the per-document charges add up, and they’re a routine target when a forwarder negotiates an all-in rate.

Demurrage and detention: the charges that grow

Demurrage and detention (D&D) are the two charges that can turn a well-priced shipment into a loss, because unlike the fixed surcharges they accrue daily and without a ceiling until the container is returned. They recover the cost of a container or terminal slot being tied up beyond the free time the carrier allows.

The distinction is precise. Demurrage accrues when a container exceeds its free time inside the marine terminal, occupying yard space the terminal could otherwise use. Detention is charged for extended use of the carrier’s container, the equipment, outside the terminal, for example a box held at an importer’s warehouse beyond free time while it waits to be unpacked and returned. In the US Federal Maritime Commission’s framing, demurrage relates to use of marine-terminal space and detention to use of the shipping container itself.

Both run on free time: the carrier grants a number of free days (commonly a handful at each end), and the clock starts when free time expires. Daily rates often escalate in tiers, so a box held for two weeks costs far more per day in the second week than the first. The charges are designed as an incentive to move cargo and return equipment quickly, which is why they have no natural cap.

D&D billing is the most heavily regulated surcharge area in the US trades. The FMC’s demurrage and detention billing rule, issued under the Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 2022 and in force from 28 May 2024, sets out which parties may be billed (the contracting party or the consignee, defined as the ultimate recipient of the cargo), requires specific minimum information on every invoice, and requires invoices within 30 calendar days of the charge last being incurred for vessel-operating carriers. Failing to include the required information eliminates the billed party’s obligation to pay the charge. The rule grew directly out of the pandemic-era complaints that importers were billed demurrage on containers they couldn’t collect because terminals were closed or congested. The charter freight demurrage deposit calculator handles the related but distinct charter-party demurrage that arises in bulk and tanker chartering, where demurrage is the agreed daily rate for a ship held beyond its laytime, a different mechanism from container D&D.

Reading a full invoice line by line

The surcharge stack is easier to read on a worked invoice than on a list of definitions. Take an FCL booking of one forty-foot box from a Far East load port to a US West Coast discharge port, the kind of move an importer runs hundreds of times a year. The invoice will typically open with the ocean freight line, the per-container base rate the forwarder bought at a FAK level. Under it sits the fuel adjustment, shown either as a single BAF figure or as a base BAF plus a separate LSS line for the low-sulphur premium. Then the CAF, if the carrier itemizes it, as a percentage of the base.

Below the fuel and currency block come the handling lines. OTHC appears at the origin end, DTHC at the destination, each a flat per-container amount keyed to its terminal’s tariff. The ISPS security fee runs a few dollars per box. The documentation fee, charged per bill of lading rather than per container, sits with the local charges. If a PSS, GRI, or congestion surcharge is live on the lane, it appears as its own dated line. On a door move the inland trucking legs and the customs entry follow, and the import duty, assessed on the customs value rather than the freight, is usually billed separately by the broker.

The instructive part is the proportion. On a low-rate lane the base ocean freight can be a minority of the total once OTHC, DTHC, and the fuel adjustment are added, and on a door-to-door move the inland legs and duty can dwarf the sea freight. An importer who budgets only the quoted ocean rate has budgeted the smallest reliable line on the bill. Reading the invoice top to bottom, and matching each surcharge to the cost it claims to recover, is how a buyer spots a destination-charge bundle that has quietly absorbed a margin the terminal tariff doesn’t support.

How surcharges fall on FCL versus LCL

Which surcharges apply, and how they’re expressed, depends on whether the cargo moves FCL or LCL, and the difference catches shippers who switch between the two. On an FCL booking every surcharge is per container: BAF, THC, ISPS, and the imbalance charge are all flat per-box amounts, and demurrage and detention run against the single container. The shipper controls the box and bears the D&D risk directly, because the clock runs on a container they pack, collect, and return.

On an LCL booking the cargo shares a container with other shippers’ goods, consolidated and deconsolidated by a forwarder or a consolidator. The base rate is per revenue tonne on the weight-or-measure rule, and the surcharges are apportioned to the cargo’s share of the box rather than billed whole. BAF and the security charge come through as per-revenue-tonne amounts. Terminal handling at the consolidation and deconsolidation points appears as a CFS (container freight station) charge, the LCL analogue of THC, covering the cost of stripping and stuffing the shared box. A small LCL consignment can carry a surprisingly high per-CBM cost once the CFS and documentation charges are spread over a low volume, which is part of why a shipment large enough to fill most of a box is often cheaper sent FCL even when it doesn’t fill the container. The break-even freight calculator tests where an LCL consignment crosses into FCL-cheaper territory.

Demurrage and detention work differently on LCL too. Because the consolidator owns the shared container, the individual LCL shipper rarely faces container detention directly; the consolidator manages the box and the free time. What the LCL shipper can face is CFS storage charges if cargo isn’t collected promptly after deconsolidation, the LCL equivalent of demurrage on a personal box. The mechanics of the revenue-tonne unit that prices all of this sit in the sibling CBM and chargeable weight article.

How a forwarder builds the all-in quote

A freight forwarder assembles the all-in quote from the bottom up, and seeing the build-up explains why two quotes for the same lane can differ so much. The forwarder starts from the base ocean rate it has bought from the carrier, usually a FAK per-container level negotiated in bulk. It then adds the carrier surcharges that apply to the booking: BAF or the combined fuel adjustment, LSS where billed separately, CAF where it applies, the ISPS security line, and any PSS, GRI, or congestion charge live on the lane at the time.

Next come the terminal and local charges at each end. OTHC at the load port, DTHC at the discharge port, the documentation fee, and any equipment or imbalance charge feed in. The forwarder may add its own handling and service margins here, and on a door-to-door booking it adds the inland legs: trucking or rail to the origin port and from the destination port, plus customs clearance and the broker’s fee. What the customer sees as a single all-in number is this stack collapsed into one figure, and a forwarder that quotes only the ocean leg has quoted perhaps half the real cost.

The gap between the freight rate and the landed cost is where importers are caught. The freight rate is port-to-port carriage. The landed cost adds every surcharge above, plus marine insurance, plus customs duty and any anti-dumping or excise levy, plus clearance and inland haulage at both ends. A $1,400 ocean rate can become a$3,000-plus landed cost once destination handling, duty, and trucking are added, and the duty alone can exceed the freight on a high-tariff commodity. The full build-up from goods value through duty to delivered cost is the subject of the sibling landed cost and import duty article; the surcharge stack on this page is the freight half of that total.

Benchmarking the base rate: FBX, SCFI, and WCI

The base rate, and increasingly the base-plus-surcharge spot level, is benchmarked by a family of container freight indices that let a shipper test a quote against the market. Three dominate the container trades.

The Freightos Baltic Index (FBX), produced by Freightos in cooperation with the Baltic Exchange, prices spot rates for forty-foot containers (FEUs) across a set of global trade lanes. It aggregates anonymized rate data from live booking and pricing databases, publishes daily, and is built to a regulated, IOSCO-aligned methodology, which is part of why it has become a settlement reference for container freight derivatives. The Drewry World Container Index (WCI) is a weekly composite, published each Thursday, tracking spot rates per forty-foot container across eight major East-West routes plus a composite. The Shanghai Containerized Freight Index (SCFI), run by the Shanghai Shipping Exchange since 2005, reports weekly spot export rates from Shanghai to fifteen regions, collected by survey of carrier and shipper panelists.

The three don’t agree to the dollar, because they cover different routes, weight them differently, and define the rate (some all-in, some base) differently. A shipper using them reads the trend and the level, not a single authoritative price: a quote far above the index level on a given lane is worth challenging, and a quote far below may be omitting surcharges that will appear later. The mechanics of these container indices, alongside the dry-bulk Baltic indices and the tanker Worldscale system, are covered in Baltic Dry Index and freight indices. The ocean freight cost calculator lets a shipper enter an index level as the base and add the surcharge stack to reach a comparable all-in figure.

Disputing a surcharge line

Not every surcharge on a bill is correct, and the floating ones are where errors cluster. A fuel adjustment billed at last quarter’s level, a DTHC that exceeds the destination terminal’s published tariff, a demurrage invoice that double-counts a free day or omits the required information, all show up on real invoices. The practical defenses follow from how each charge is built. For a fuel surcharge, ask which reference period and which fuel-price index the figure is keyed to, and check it against the quote’s validity date. For terminal handling, ask for the THC to be stated against the terminal’s own published schedule. For demurrage and detention in the US trades, the FMC rule gives the billed party a concrete lever: an invoice that omits the required minimum information eliminates the obligation to pay, and a clear demurrage clock can be reconstructed from the free-time grant and the gate-in and gate-out timestamps.

The bargaining power a shipper has on surcharges scales with volume. A large importer negotiating an annual contract can fix the base rate and cap or fold several surcharges into an all-in figure, removing the floating risk entirely. A small or occasional shipper buys at spot and takes the surcharge stack as it comes. That asymmetry is itself a reason the regulators watch the area, because the shipper least able to audit a destination-charge bundle is also the one with the least bargaining power to challenge it.

Regulatory oversight of surcharges

Surcharges sit at the boundary between cost recovery and pricing power, which is why two regulators watch them closely. In the United States the Federal Maritime Commission regulates the trades under the Shipping Act as amended by the Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 2022. The 30-day tariff-notice rule (46 CFR 520.8), the demurrage and detention billing rule (in force 28 May 2024), and the OSRA prohibition on unreasonable refusals to deal all bear directly on how carriers may impose and bill surcharges. The FMC’s denial on 23 March 2026 of four special-permission requests, from CMA CGM, Hapag-Lloyd, Maersk, and Zim, for short-notice war-risk surcharges tied to the Strait of Hormuz shows the notice rule is enforced, not nominal.

In the European Union the picture shifted in 2024. The Consortia Block Exemption Regulation (CBER), which had exempted liner-shipping consortia from EU antitrust rules, expired on 25 April 2024 and was not renewed. The Commission concluded the exemption no longer promoted competition. Consortia aren’t banned; they now fall under the general EU antitrust rules that apply to every sector. The practical effect is that joint conduct on capacity and, by extension, the coordinated surcharge announcements that competition authorities had long eyed, now carries more legal exposure than under the old safe harbor. Both shifts point the same way: surcharges that track a documented external cost are defensible, and those that move in lockstep without a clear cost basis are under closer scrutiny than they were a decade ago. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), through its annual Review of Maritime Transport, has tracked the same concentration and surcharge-transparency concerns at the global level.

Limitations

This article describes the structure and purpose of the standard ocean freight surcharges, not their amounts. Surcharge levels vary by carrier, trade lane, container type, contract terms, and date, and they reset on published schedules. Any specific dollar figure quoted here would be stale within a quarter. Use the published carrier tariff, the booking confirmation, and a current freight index for live numbers, and read every floating surcharge against the quote’s validity date.

Surcharge names and bundling aren’t standardized across carriers. One carrier’s separate LSS line is another’s revised BAF; one carrier’s itemized OTHC, documentation, and security lines arrive as another’s single composite “origin charges.” The taxonomy here follows the most common usage, but always read the carrier’s own tariff definitions, which govern the contract.

The regulatory points are framed primarily through the US Federal Maritime Commission and the European Commission because those two bodies produce the most detailed public rules on liner surcharges. Other jurisdictions regulate differently, and a shipment may touch several regimes between origin and destination. The FMC rules cited apply to the US trades; they don’t govern a shipment that never touches a US port.

Container demurrage and detention covered here are distinct from charter-party demurrage in bulk and tanker chartering, which is an agreed daily rate for a ship held beyond its laytime under a voyage charter, a different contractual mechanism with its own laytime and demurrage clauses. This article addresses the liner-container case; the charter case is handled in the chartering material and the charter freight demurrage deposit calculator.

See also

• Freight forwarding and Incoterms: the parent hub, how the forwarder, the carrier, and the Incoterms rule divide these charges between buyer and seller.
• Baltic Dry Index and freight indices: the FBX, SCFI, WCI, and dry-bulk indices that benchmark the base rate.
• Bunker Adjustment Factor: the fuel-surcharge formula and the trade-lane factors that drive BAF and LSS.
• Landed cost and import duty: the full delivered cost, from goods value through duty to the door.
• CBM and chargeable weight: the weight-or-measure rule and revenue-tonne unit that price LCL freight.
• Incoterms explained: which party bears origin handling, ocean freight, and destination charges under each rule.
• Ocean freight cost calculator: runs the base-rate-plus-surcharges arithmetic on a specific booking.
• Terminal handling charges calculator: isolates the OTHC and DTHC lines for a booking.
• Reefer container freight calculator: the refrigerated case with its temperature-control and power premiums.