Port Dues and Disbursements: What a Call Costs

A ship that arrives at a berth, works cargo, and sails again rarely pays a single bill. It pays a stack of them: the port authority’s tonnage and conservancy dues, the pilot’s fee, the tugs, the linesmen who take the ropes, the terminal’s berth occupancy charge, the light dues that fund the navigation aids on the approach, the ISPS security levy, the garbage and waste reception charge, and the agent’s fee for arranging all of it. A 50,000 GT bulk carrier on a routine load call runs a disbursement account into five figures before a single tonne of cargo is freight-earning, on illustrative tariff levels rather than any single port’s published rate, and almost none of those charges is negotiable at the quay; they are set by published tariffs the master sees only as line items on a statement after the ship has sailed. This article is the hub for what a port call actually costs and how the money flows. The port disbursement calculator builds the proforma account line by line, and the port dues calculator computes the single largest line, the tonnage due, from the ship’s GT and the port’s rate.

The structure of the answer is the same at every port even though the numbers differ. One party, the appointed ship agent, fronts the money to every authority and contractor and recovers it from the owner or charterer through a disbursement account. Most of the dues ride on the ship’s measured tonnage, gross or net, fixed under the International Convention on Tonnage Measurement of Ships, 1969, so the cost of a call is largely set the day the ship’s tonnage certificate is issued, not the day it berths. A handful of charges scale with time in port instead, which is why turnaround time is a cost lever and not just an operational metric. The rest of this hub takes the disbursement account, the agent, and each line item in turn, then routes down to the cluster calculators that do the arithmetic.

How the money flows: the disbursement account

The disbursement account is the itemized financial statement of a vessel’s port call. It lists every charge the call incurs, who levied it, and what it cost, and it is the document the owner or charterer uses to control port spend. The agent issues it in two versions. The proforma disbursement account (the PDA) goes out before the ship arrives: it is the agent’s best estimate of the call’s cost, built from the port tariff and the agent’s experience of the berth, and it is the basis on which the principal remits funds so the agent can pay the authorities on the ship’s behalf. The final disbursement account (the FDA) goes out after the ship sails, backed by the actual invoice from each authority and contractor, and it is the true cost of the call. The port disbursement calculator assembles a PDA from the line items the tariff gives you and returns the total and the cost per gross ton.

The reconciliation between the PDA and the FDA is the owner’s standard control on port cost. A well-run owner or operator checks the FDA line by line against the proforma: a pilotage charge that came in 40% over the estimate, a tug standby the agent did not flag, a quay due that ran longer than the planned stay because the berth ran slow. The gap is where port-cost leakage hides, and on a fleet of ships calling dozens of ports a month the cumulative difference between disciplined and loose disbursement control is real money. This is why the disbursement account is treated as a financial instrument and not a receipt: it is the audit trail of the call. The deeper structure of the PDA and FDA, the funding mechanics, and the dispute points sit in that article.

The cash side matters too. The agent pays the port, the pilots, and the tugs in local currency on local terms, often before the ship arrives for the tonnage dues and pilotage that must be prepaid, and the principal funds the agent in advance against the PDA. An owner who underfunds an agent can find the ship held or services withheld; an agent who overcharges or pads the account loses the appointment. The discipline runs both ways, which is the reason the proforma is scrutinized before remittance and the final is scrutinized after.

The ship agent

No master pays a port directly. A ship that calls a foreign port appoints a local ship agent (the port agent) to act for it: the agent arranges the berth, books the pilot and the tugs, clears the ship through customs and immigration, orders the linesmen, handles the garbage and the slops, arranges bunkers and stores and crew changes if needed, and pays every authority and contractor on the ship’s behalf, recovering the lot through the disbursement account. The agent is the ship’s representative ashore for the duration of the call, and the agency fee is the line on the disbursement account that pays for that representation.

There are two appointment patterns, and they decide who the agent answers to. Under an owner’s agent appointment the owner nominates the agent, common on a voyage charter where the owner is paying the disbursements. Under a charterer’s nominated agent the charterer names the agent, common on a time charter where the charterer carries the port costs; the owner may then appoint a separate protecting agent (a husbandry agent) to look after the owner’s interests at the same call, particularly on crew, stores, and any owner’s matters the charterer’s agent has no mandate to handle. The BIMCO Agency Appointment Agreement 2017 is the standard contract that sets out the agent’s authority, the funding arrangement, and the disbursement-handling terms; using it gives both sides settled wording on what the agent may commit the ship to and how the account is rendered.

The agency fee itself is modest against the rest of the account, often a flat fee by ship type and call type rather than a percentage, but the agent’s influence on the total cost is large. A good agent berths the ship without waiting time, books the right number of tugs, avoids overtime and weekend surcharges where the schedule allows, and renders a clean account that needs no dispute. A poor one runs up standby charges, misses tide windows, and pads the proforma. The fee buys the agent’s local knowledge of the tariff, the harbor master’s office, and the terminal, which is exactly the knowledge a master arriving for the first time does not have.

The tonnage basis: GT, NT, and DWT

Before the line items, the basis. Almost every port charge is levied on a measure of the ship’s size, and the measure is usually a tonnage, gross or net, not a weight. The distinction is the single most common source of confusion on a disbursement account, so it is worth stating precisely.

Gross tonnage (GT) and net tonnage (NT) are not weights at all. They are dimensionless figures derived from volume under the International Convention on Tonnage Measurement of Ships, 1969 (ITC 1969), which the IMO adopted on 23 June 1969 and which entered into force on 18 July 1982. ITC 1969 replaced a patchwork of national systems, all descended from George Moorsom’s 1854 Board of Trade method, with one universal measurement so that a ship carries the same GT and NT in every port. Gross tonnage is a function of the moulded volume of all enclosed spaces of the ship; net tonnage is a function of the moulded volume of the cargo spaces. The article on tonnage measurement works through the convention in full.

The convention’s formula for gross tonnage is:

where $V$ is the total volume of all enclosed spaces in cubic meters and the coefficient $K_1$ is itself a function of that volume:

so a larger ship is measured with a slightly larger coefficient. Net tonnage is computed from the cargo-space volume with its own coefficients and adjustments for draft and passengers, with a hard floor: the convention provides that net tonnage shall not be taken as less than 30% of the gross tonnage. That floor stops a ship from declaring a near-zero cargo measure to dodge the NT-based dues.

Deadweight tonnage (DWT) is the other measure, and it is a weight: the total mass of cargo, fuel, fresh water, stores, crew, and effects a ship can carry at its load line, in tonnes. DWT answers a commercial question (how much can this ship lift) while GT and NT answer a measurement question (how big is this ship by enclosed and cargo volume). Port dues ride mostly on GT or NT because the authority is charging for the space and the navigational and infrastructure burden the ship imposes, not for the cargo it happens to carry on this call. The capacity DWT vs GT calculator handles the conversion and shows which metric a given regime uses.

The choice of basis has a real cost consequence for high-volume, low-density ships. A car carrier or a container ship is mostly enclosed air by volume, so its GT is large relative to its DWT; a tanker or an ore carrier is dense, so its DWT is large relative to its GT. A GT-based tonnage due therefore charges the car carrier more than its cargo weight alone would suggest, and an owner comparing two ports’ tariffs has to compare them on the actual basis (per GT, per NT, per DWT, or per call) before the rates mean anything. A rate of “0.50 per GT” and a rate of “0.80 per NT” are not comparable until you know the ship’s GT and NT, because NT is always the smaller figure.

The line items

A disbursement account is a stack of separate charges, each levied by a different party on a different basis. The table below sets out the major line items and the basis each typically rides on; the sections that follow take them in turn. No two ports use the same tariff, so treat the bases as the common pattern, not a rule for a specific port.

Tonnage dues and port dues

The tonnage due, often called the port due, is the charge for using the port itself, and on most accounts it is the largest single line. The port authority levies it on the ship’s GT or NT, sometimes per call and sometimes per day in port, at a published rate. Some ports charge a flat rate per GT; others band it, so the first 10,000 GT pays one rate and the tonnage above pays a lower marginal rate, which gives larger ships a volume discount. Some cap the due after a set number of calls in a period, so a liner ship calling weekly pays less per call than a tramp calling once. The port dues calculator computes this line from the ship’s GT and the port’s stated rate and shows the sensitivity against vessel size.

The tonnage due is the charge most exposed to the GT-versus-NT question above. A port that charges on NT effectively gives a discount to ships with a high superstructure-to-cargo ratio, while a GT charge spreads the burden across the whole enclosed volume. An owner routing a high-GT ship should read the tariff basis before assuming one port is cheaper than another, because the headline rate per ton is meaningless without the ton it is per.

Conservancy

Conservancy dues pay for keeping the channel and the basin navigable: the dredging that holds the approach to its design depth, the maintenance of the breakwater and the basin, and the survey work that keeps the charted depths current. Some ports fold conservancy into the tonnage due; others state it as a separate line, levied per GT or per NT. The charge exists because a port is a maintained asset, not a natural feature: a channel that is not dredged shoals, and a ship that grounds on a shoaled channel is a casualty the port owns. Conservancy is the recovery of that maintenance cost from the ships that benefit from the depth.

Light dues

Light dues fund the navigation aids on the approach and along the coast: the lighthouses, the lightvessels, the buoys, and the electronic aids a ship relies on to make the port safely. In many jurisdictions a national lighthouse authority levies the light due separately from the port, often per NT and often per voyage or per period rather than per call, so a ship that makes several calls in one country in a short window may pay the light due once rather than at each port. The basis and the period vary widely by country, which is why light dues are an easy line to estimate wrong on a proforma for an unfamiliar coast. The principle is constant: the ships that use the aids to navigation pay for the aids to navigation.

Pilotage

Pilotage is the charge for the pilot who conducts the ship through the approach channel and onto or off the berth. In almost every commercial port above a size threshold pilotage is compulsory, meaning the ship must take a pilot whether the master wants one or not; the master keeps command, but the pilot supplies the local knowledge of the channel depths, the tidal streams, the traffic scheme, and the berth that no visiting master carries. The charge reflects both the ship’s size and the work involved. The tonnage component is usually per GT or per NT in tariff bands, so a larger ship pays more for the same passage. On top of the tonnage component sit the act-of-pilotage charges: a boarding or attendance fee, a movement charge that distinguishes the inbound passage, the outbound passage, and any shift between berths, and surcharges for night, weekend, holiday, or adverse-weather work. Many ports add a pilot launch or boat fee for putting the pilot aboard and taking the pilot off.

Pilotage is one of the larger lines after the tonnage due, and it is one of the easier ones to run up. A ship that arrives off the pilot station and has to wait for a tide window, or that shifts berth mid-call, or that sails on a public holiday, picks up movement charges and surcharges that a clean single in-and-out call avoids. This is part of why turnaround discipline matters financially and not only operationally: a shift and a delayed sailing both touch the pilotage line.

Towage

Towage is the charge for the tugs that push and pull the ship onto and off the berth. The number of tugs and their power depend on the ship’s size, its windage, the berth, and the weather: a large car carrier in a beam wind needs more bollard pull than a small coaster in still air. Tug operators charge per tug per movement (berthing and unberthing are usually separate movements), priced by the tug’s bollard pull and the time engaged, with extra for standby, for a tug held against the ship’s late arrival, and for towage outside ordinary hours. On a large-ship call towage can rival or exceed pilotage as a line item, because a single high-power tug for a single movement is an expensive resource.

Towage is also a line that variance hits hard. A planned two-tug berthing that becomes a three-tug berthing in a freshening wind, a tug held on standby while the ship waits for the berth to clear, or an unberthing delayed past the tug’s window all push the actual above the proforma. The berthing operations and fender selection article covers the physics that decides how much tug power a berthing actually needs.

Mooring and linesmen

Once the tugs have the ship against the quay, the mooring gang (the linesmen or boatmen) take the ship’s lines and make them fast to the bollards ashore, and they let go and recover the lines when the ship sails. The mooring charge is usually levied per operation, so making fast on arrival and letting go on departure are two charges, scaled by the ship’s size and the number of lines. It is a smaller line than towage or pilotage, but it is a real cost and a real safety operation: a parted mooring line under tension is one of the more common port-side injury causes, which is why the work is done by a trained gang and charged for, not left to the crew alone.

Berth and quay dues

The berth or quay due is the terminal operator’s charge for the ship occupying the berth, and it is the line that scales most directly with time. It is levied per meter of length overall (LOA) per day, or per GT per day, so a longer ship that stays longer pays more. This is the cost lever that turnaround time pulls: every extra day alongside is another day of berth occupancy, and on a congested port the operator may also charge a premium or refuse an overstay because the berth is a scarce asset with the next ship waiting. The port turnaround time calculator benchmarks the arrival-to-departure time that this line is billed against, and a faster turnaround is money saved here and a berth freed for the next call.

The institutional split sits behind this line. In a landlord port the berth due and the cargo-handling charge belong to the terminal operator, not the port authority, while the tonnage and conservancy dues belong to the authority. So a single call generates invoices from at least two principals, the authority for the port-wide dues and the operator for the berth and the cargo work, which the agent consolidates onto one disbursement account. The ports and terminals overview covers that authority-versus-operator division in full.

ISPS and security

The ISPS charge recovers the cost of the port facility security required by SOLAS chapter XI-2 and the International Ship and Port Facility Security (ISPS) Code, which entered into force on 1 July 2004 in response to the post-2001 security agenda. Regulation XI-2/10 requires every port facility serving ships on international voyages to carry out a security assessment, hold an approved port facility security plan, and appoint a port facility security officer; the security charge on the disbursement account is how the facility recovers the cost of that regime from the ships that use it. It is levied per call, per GT, or per container, and it is a small line at security level 1 (the normal operating level) that rises at levels 2 and 3 when additional measures (extra access control, patrols, restricted areas) come into force. The charge is one of the newer fixtures on a disbursement account, postdating the ITC tonnage dues by decades, and it is now standard at every ISPS-compliant facility.

Garbage and MARPOL Annex V reception

A ship landing garbage or waste at a port reception facility pays for the service, and the line on the disbursement account reflects the MARPOL Annex V regime that governs garbage from ships. Annex V prohibits the discharge of most garbage into the sea and requires ships to land it ashore, which in turn requires ports to provide adequate reception facilities. The reception charge is levied per call or by the volume and category of waste landed (food waste, plastics, operational waste, cargo residues), and it sits alongside the separate handling of oily waste and sludge under MARPOL Annex I and sewage under Annex IV. Some ports fold a no-special-fee garbage charge into the tonnage due so that a ship pays for the reception capacity whether it lands waste or not, which removes the incentive to dump at sea to save the landing fee. The MARPOL Annex V article covers the garbage rules and the reception-facility obligation.

The agency fee

The agency fee, covered above, closes the account. It is the agent’s charge for the representation, the attendances, and the disbursement handling across the call, and it is usually a flat fee by ship type and call type rather than a proportion of the total. It is the smallest of the major lines on most accounts and the one with the most influence on the rest, because the agent’s competence touches every other line through the berthing, the bookings, and the timing.

A worked proforma disbursement account

The line items add up to a number, and the way they add up is worth seeing on a single account. The example below builds a proforma for one ship and one call. Every figure in it is illustrative: it is built on representative tariff levels to show the shape and the relative weight of the lines, not quoted from any one port’s published rate. A real proforma comes from the local agent on the actual port tariff for the actual call. Read this as the anatomy of the total, not as a price.

Take a handysize bulk carrier of 32,000 GT and 18,500 NT under ITC 1969, with a length overall of 180 meters, calling a single load port for a three-day stay: arrive, load grain, sail, with no berth shift and a daytime sailing. The agent books two tugs for berthing and two for unberthing, a compulsory pilot in and out, and the mooring gang at each end. The port disbursement calculator assembles exactly this kind of statement from the rates you supply, and the port dues calculator computes the tonnage line that leads it.

The total comes to 31,823 dollars, and the shape of it is the lesson. The tonnage and conservancy dues together (16,960) are more than half the account, because both ride on the ship’s 32,000 GT, which is why the GT-versus-NT question above is the largest single lever on the cost of a call. Pilotage and towage together (8,600) are the next block, and they are the lines a berth shift or an out-of-hours sailing would inflate. The cost per gross ton on this call is about 0.99 dollars per GT, a figure an owner can carry across ports to compare one tariff against another once each is reduced to the same per-GT basis. The time-driven berth due is small here (513) precisely because the stay is short and the ship is not on a chartered demurrage clock; on a delayed call that line and any demurrage would dominate the variance against this proforma.

Change the ship and the account changes with it. Put the same call on a 60,000 GT car carrier with a much higher GT-to-NT ratio, and the tonnage due roughly doubles while the cargo lifted does not, which is the cost penalty a high-volume, low-density hull carries on a GT-based tariff. Put it on a dense 30,000 GT product tanker and the tonnage line is similar to the bulker’s, but additional charges (a separate ISPS or pollution-response levy, a longer pilotage on a restricted tanker channel) push the total up. The arithmetic is always the same; only the bases and the rates move.

How the dues scale

Reading a disbursement account is partly a matter of knowing what each line scales with, because the scaling is what makes one call cheaper than another for the same ship.

A charge that scales per GT or per NT is fixed for a given ship: the ship’s tonnage does not change between calls, so the tonnage due, the conservancy, and the tonnage component of pilotage are knowable in advance from the ship’s certificate and the port’s rate. These are the predictable lines, and they are the bulk of the account. A charge that scales per call is also fixed and known: a flat ISPS levy or a flat agency fee does not move with the ship’s size or its time alongside. A charge that scales per day or per hour is the variable part: berth dues, demurrage on a chartered ship, tug standby, and the ship’s own running cost all run with the clock, and they are the lines a long or delayed call inflates. A charge that scales per movement, pilotage acts and towage, sits between the two: it is fixed per move but multiplies if the ship shifts berth or sails outside ordinary hours.

The table below sorts the major lines by what they scale with and whether the agent can quote them to the dollar on the proforma.

The split is why the per-GT and per-call lines anchor the proforma and the per-day and per-movement lines are where it drifts from the final account.

The practical consequence is that the proforma is reliable on the tonnage and per-call lines and exposed on the per-day and per-movement lines. An agent can quote the tonnage due to the dollar before the ship arrives; the agent cannot quote the berth due and the tug standby to the dollar because they depend on how the call actually runs. This is why the FDA differs from the PDA mostly in the time-driven and movement-driven lines, and why those are the lines an owner scrutinizes hardest on reconciliation.

Turnaround time as a cost lever

Turnaround time, the elapsed hours from a ship’s arrival at the port to its departure, is the operational metric that drives the time-based side of the cost stack. It is the sum of the waiting time off the port (anchorage time before a berth is free), the time alongside working cargo, and the time for the moves in and out. Every component of it touches the account.

The direct charges that scale with turnaround time are the berth or quay dues and, on a chartered ship, the demurrage when the time alongside exceeds the laytime the charter allows. A voyage-chartered ship that overstays its laytime goes on demurrage at a daily rate set in the charter party, and that rate can dwarf the fixed port dues: at an illustrative demurrage rate of 20,000 dollars a day on a panamax bulk carrier, a two-day berth delay becomes a 40,000 dollar line that no tonnage due approaches. The demurrage and laytime articles cover that accounting; it is the largest reason turnaround time is a financial number and not just a productivity one. The indirect cost is the ship’s own daily running cost, which the owner carries whether the ship is earning or waiting, so a day saved in port is a day the ship can be earning elsewhere.

Terminals measure their side of this in crane productivity, moves per hour for a container terminal or tonnes per hour for a bulk berth, because the productivity is what sets the time alongside for a given parcel. UNCTAD’s Review of Maritime Transport tracks median port times by ship type as a port-efficiency benchmark precisely because turnaround is the variable that ports and operators compete on and that owners cost. The port turnaround time calculator benchmarks the arrival-to-departure time as a function of cargo type and terminal productivity, which is the input to both the berth-due line and the demurrage exposure. The whole call also feeds the voyage estimation that an owner runs before fixing, because the port days and the disbursements at each end are line items in the voyage profit-and-loss.

Where the cost stack connects to the trade chain

The disbursement account is the ship’s view of the port cost, but the same money reappears in the goods’ view. The freight a shipper pays carries the owner’s port costs inside it on a voyage charter, and the surcharges a forwarder bills (terminal handling charges, port congestion surcharges) recover the terminal-side and time-driven charges from the cargo. The landed cost of an imported good therefore contains a share of the port disbursements at both the load and the discharge ports, buried in the freight and the destination terminal handling charge. The freight forwarding and incoterms article covers that goods-side view, where the same berth and terminal charges show up as line items in a landed-cost build rather than as a disbursement account, and where the Incoterms rule decides which party in the sale contract ultimately carries them.

The two views meet at the terminal. The ship pays the berth due and the cargo-handling charge through its agent; the cargo pays the terminal handling charge through its forwarder; both recover the terminal operator’s cost of moving the box across the quay, split by whichever contract, the charter party on the ship side and the Incoterms rule on the cargo side, allocates it. Reading a disbursement account and reading a landed-cost build are two ways of looking at the same port, which is why this hub and the freight-forwarding hub cross-reference each other rather than repeat.

Limitations

This article is a map of the port-call cost structure and the disbursement account, not a tariff for a specific port. Every port authority and terminal operator publishes its own tariff with its own bases, bands, caps, and surcharges, and the bases stated here (per GT, per NT, per call, per day, per movement) are the common pattern across ports, not a rule for any one of them. Before relying on a number, read the tariff for the actual port and the actual call, because two ports that both charge a tonnage due can compute it differently enough to reverse which is cheaper for a given ship.

The tonnage figures, GT and NT, are fixed for a ship under ITC 1969 and stated on its International Tonnage Certificate; this article gives the gross-tonnage formula and the 30% net-tonnage floor as the convention sets them, but the full net-tonnage computation involves draft and passenger terms not reproduced here, and a ship’s actual GT and NT come from its certificate, not from a back-of-envelope estimate. The ISPS, garbage, and conservancy treatments describe the general regime; the exact charge, its basis, and whether it is folded into the tonnage due or stated separately vary by jurisdiction and by facility. The split between owner and charterer for who pays the disbursements follows the charter party, summarized here by family, and a specific recap can move any of it.

None of the linked calculators replaces a real proforma from a local agent built on the actual tariff and the actual call. The port disbursement calculator and the port dues calculator estimate the account and its largest line from rates you supply; they are planning and reconciliation tools, not a substitute for the agent’s quotation or the authority’s invoice.

See also

• Disbursement account: the PDA and FDA, the funding mechanics, and the reconciliation that controls port-cost leakage.
• Ports and terminals overview: the harbor, the berth and terminal types, and the port authority versus terminal operator split.
• Tonnage measurement: the ITC 1969 gross and net tonnage measurement that the dues ride on.
• Berthing operations and fender selection: the berthing physics behind the towage and mooring lines.
• MARPOL Annex V: the garbage rules and the port reception-facility obligation behind the waste charge.
• Laytime and demurrage: the time-based charter accounting that turnaround time drives.
• Voyage estimation: where the port days and disbursements enter the voyage profit-and-loss.
• Freight forwarding and incoterms: the goods-side view, where the same terminal charges appear as landed-cost line items.
• Port dues calculator: computes the tonnage due from the ship’s GT and the port’s rate.
• Port disbursement calculator: builds the proforma disbursement account line by line.
• Port turnaround time calculator: benchmarks arrival-to-departure time as a function of cargo type and productivity.
• Capacity DWT vs GT calculator: converts between the capacity metrics and shows which a regime uses.