Information date: 29 October 2026 — Demurrage accrues inside the terminal once the carrier’s filed free-time window ends; detention starts at gate-out of the full box and runs until the empty returns. Chinese ports do not fix these windows — the liner publishes them in a tariff filed with the Ministry of Transport, and the filed version, not the booking note, sets the clock. If the delay traces to customs inspection, a port closure or a terminal system outage, dispute in writing inside the tariff’s stated window. If your own documentation or payment lag caused it, seek a commercial waiver early rather than litigating after payment.
Verified facts and scope
Demurrage accrues inside the terminal once the carrier’s filed free-time window ends; detention starts at gate-out of the full box and runs until the empty returns. Chinese ports do not fix these windows — the liner publishes them in a tariff filed with the Ministry of Transport, and the filed version, not the booking note, sets the clock.
Scope has to be fixed before the numbers mean anything: Applies to FCL imports where your company controls pick-up and returns the equipment. Before disputing, confirm the free days in the filed tariff, the terminal’s own storage rules, the customs release timestamp, and who physically held the container at each step. Anything outside that set is a separate question with its own evidence requirement, and mixing the two is the most common way a workable plan turns into an unusable one.
For a decision on “FAQ: Demurrage and Detention at Chinese Ports — Free-Time Clauses, Carrier Tariff Filing and the Evidence to Recover Charges”, keep three layers apart: the published rule or statistic, the company’s own orders and process records, and the assumptions nobody has tested yet. The first layer defines the external conditions, the second proves what is true for this business, and the third is where the risk actually sits. Public material cannot substitute for a contract, a system log, a sample or a live test.
A practical way to test the scope is to ask which parts of “FAQ: Demurrage and Detention at Chinese Ports — Free-Time Clauses, Carrier Tariff Filing and the Evidence to Recover Charges” would still be true if the company changed supplier, entity or product line tomorrow. Items that survive that change belong to the rule layer and can be taken from official publications; items that do not survive belong to the operating layer and have to be rebuilt from invoices, warehouse records, customs entries or platform statements. Where Applies to FCL imports where your company controls pick-up and returns the equipment. Before disputing, confirm the free days in the filed tariff, the terminal’s own storage rules, the customs release timestamp, and who physically held the container at each step, the two layers are frequently mistaken for each other, and an action plan built on the wrong one either over-complies or misses a deadline it never saw coming.
How the effect reaches operations
Carriers must file freight and surcharge tariffs before they can collect them, which is why the filed schedule outranks commercial documents. Terminal storage and carrier detention are separate bills with separate clocks, so a delay caused at the gate can trigger both at once.
The usual misjudgement is quoting the booking note’s free time, or paying the invoice before checking the filing. Detention frequently keeps running during customs inspection, and consignees often lose the gate-out timestamp that would shift the cost to the party at fault.
Translated into an operating sequence, Carriers must file freight and surcharge tariffs before they can collect them, which is why the filed schedule outranks commercial documents. Terminal storage and carrier detention are separate bills with separate clocks, so a delay caused at the gate can trigger both at once. That ordering matters: check applicability first, then the transmission step, and only then the size of the gap in cost or timing. When an intermediate step cannot be confirmed, the honest response is to narrow the scope of the conclusion rather than to substitute an industry average for the company’s own figures.
The cost of getting the order wrong is asymmetric. A team that checks applicability too late usually discovers it at the point where the shipment, the filing or the invoice can no longer be changed without penalty, and by then the only remaining lever is price. A team that checks early spends a few hours on questions that turn out to be irrelevant, which is cheap by comparison. On “FAQ: Demurrage and Detention at Chinese Ports — Free-Time Clauses, Carrier Tariff Filing and the Evidence to Recover Charges” the practical rule is therefore to spend the first hour on scope and the second on the numbers, never the other way round.
Decision
If the delay traces to customs inspection, a port closure or a terminal system outage, dispute in writing inside the tariff’s stated window. If your own documentation or payment lag caused it, seek a commercial waiver early rather than litigating after payment.
The conditions should be written down so the decision can be re-run by someone else: Applies to FCL imports where your company controls pick-up and returns the equipment. Before disputing, confirm the free days in the filed tariff, the terminal’s own storage rules, the customs release timestamp, and who physically held the container at each step. When those hold, proceed as described; when one is missing, close the gap first and decide afterwards. General information on how port charges are structured and evidenced; not legal advice on a specific bill of lading, and no promise that any charge can be recovered.
Two workstreams usually have to move in parallel. The compliance workstream closes the document side of “FAQ: Demurrage and Detention at Chinese Ports — Free-Time Clauses, Carrier Tariff Filing and the Evidence to Recover Charges” — registrations, confirmations, filings — while the commercial workstream protects the delivery date, the pricing already quoted and the customer commitments that were made on the earlier reading of the rules. Running them as one queue is how small documentation gaps become missed shipment dates: the commercial side waits for a certificate that could have been requested a week earlier. If the delay traces to customs inspection, a port closure or a terminal system outage, dispute in writing inside the tariff’s stated window. If your own documentation or payment lag caused it, seek a commercial waiver early rather than litigating after payment. Set one owner per workstream and one shared status sheet, and treat a red item on either side as a reason to freeze only the affected order.
Implementation checklist
- Pull the filed tariff and free-time clause first.
- Log gate-out, inspection and release timestamps daily.
- Send a written waiver request before settling.
- Name one decision owner, one execution owner and one review date.
- Keep the source page, access date, entity and internal evidence.
- On any change, reopen only the affected judgement.
Evidence and review
Start with the smallest test that can change the answer: Pull the filed tariff and free-time clause first. Pick one real entity or one representative case, write down the continue, watch and stop conditions in advance, and record the input version, the owner, the start time and the actual result. The first pass should only look at facts that move the decision; formatting preferences are not risk.
The second pass is completed by “Log gate-out, inspection and release timestamps daily”, and someone who did not prepare the file should spot-check one piece of critical evidence. The usual misjudgement is quoting the booking note’s free time, or paying the invoice before checking the filing. Detention frequently keeps running during customs inspection, and consignees often lose the gate-out timestamp that would shift the cost to the party at fault. A single small deviation can be corrected in place; a repeated deviation, or one that touches a statutory duty or changes the economics, is what justifies pausing the affected part.
After “Send a written waiver request before settling”, compare the actual result with the baseline rather than with the impression of the team. If the delay traces to customs inspection, a port closure or a terminal system outage, dispute in writing inside the tariff’s stated window. If your own documentation or payment lag caused it, seek a commercial waiver early rather than litigating after payment. When the arrangement is extended to more products, customers or processes, keep the same success test and one complete record per batch. If later information changes, update only the affected fields.
One last discipline keeps the file usable next quarter: write the closing note as if a colleague who has never spoken to the supplier has to act on it. That note states what was verified, on which date, against which source, and what remains open — on “FAQ: Demurrage and Detention at Chinese Ports — Free-Time Clauses, Carrier Tariff Filing and the Evidence to Recover Charges” it also states which of the three actions was actually finished and which was only scheduled. Teams that skip the closing note re-litigate the same question every month, and each round costs more than the documentation would have. General information on how port charges are structured and evidenced; not legal advice on a specific bill of lading, and no promise that any charge can be recovered.
Limits of the conclusion
General information on how port charges are structured and evidenced; not legal advice on a specific bill of lading, and no promise that any charge can be recovered.
The limits are structural rather than cautious wording. Public sources describe rules and market conditions; they do not observe “FAQ: Demurrage and Detention at Chinese Ports — Free-Time Clauses, Carrier Tariff Filing and the Evidence to Recover Charges” inside a specific company. Where the analysis quotes a second-hand interpretation, the original release has to remain reachable, and a figure that cannot be traced back does not enter the decision table. Where the point depends on Applies to FCL imports where your company controls pick-up and returns the equipment. Before disputing, confirm the free days in the filed tariff, the terminal’s own storage rules, the customs release timestamp, and who physically held the container at each step, the conclusion is only as current as the last check of those conditions.
