There is a kind of logistics cost that appears on no quote, adds zero value to your product, and can exceed the entire freight bill if the operation gets away from you: time charges. Demurrage, detention and storage are the supply chain’s silent fine — and the good news is that they are, for the most part, avoidable.
First, the names of things
- Demurrage: the carrier’s charge for keeping its container inside the terminal beyond the agreed free days.
- Detention: the charge for holding the container outside the terminal (at your warehouse, for example) beyond the deadline to return it empty.
- Storage: what the terminal or bonded facility charges for the space your cargo occupies while it isn’t released.
All three run in parallel and accrue by the day. A container stuck for a week over a documentation problem can generate hundreds of dollars per day across the three concepts — money that comes straight out of your margin and that no insurance covers.
Demurrage is not a transportation cost: it is the price of the days your operation wasn’t ready.
Why do they really happen?
Almost never by bad luck. In our experience, the vast majority of time charges are born of foreseeable causes: incomplete or inconsistent documents at arrival, tax payments released late, inspections that get complicated by a misdeclared tariff code, trucking that wasn’t coordinated with the actual release date, or simply nobody watching the free days tick away.
Six tactics to stop paying them
- Negotiate enough free days from the quote. The standard isn’t the same across carriers or lanes, and extending them costs far less than paying them expired.
- Have the complete document file BEFORE arrival: invoice, packing list, transport document, permits and proof of origin if applicable.
- Run a pre-shipment inspection at origin when the goods or the supplier are new — catching a discrepancy at the factory costs a fraction of catching it at destination customs.
- Leave tax payment and clearance instructions ready before the cargo touches port.
- Coordinate trucking against the actual release date, with a backup operator.
- Watch the clocks: free days, terminal cutoffs and the empty-return deadline. If nobody watches them, nobody respects them.
Visibility is half the solution
When the importer sees the same thing as their agent — clearance status, free days running, pending documents — time charges collapse. It’s one of the reasons we built our platform: every shipment shows its critical dates and what’s missing for release, before the clock becomes a fine.
More terms you want to master? Our logistics glossary at freightspot.com/recursos/glosario explains demurrage, detention, free days and the rest of your operation’s vocabulary in plain words. And if you’re paying these charges on a recurring basis today, write to us — auditing where your time goes is one of the highest-return exercises in logistics.
