US shippers pay highest demurrage fees globally

> US ports occupy top five spots on the list of “60 ports ranked by highest to lowest D&D charges across shipping lines”

> New York charges the highest demurrage & detention (D&D) fees on the planet. Long Beach, Los Angeles, Oakland and Savannah take up the 2nd to 5th spots

> All five ports are 2-3 times more expensive than Hong Kong, which is in 7th spot

US retailers, manufacturers, agricultural shippers, and other exporters and importers are laboring under some of the highest shipping levies in the world, according to Container xChange, a leading global online platform for container trading and leasing.

Container xChange’s new “Demurrage & Detention Benchmark 2022” report, published July 5, compares D&D rates imposed on customers by the world’s 10 largest shipping lines across 60 of the world’s biggest container ports.

It found that US shippers face the highest D&D charges imposed by container lines worldwide. Indeed, US ports occupy the top five spots in Container xChange’s ranking of global ports from the highest to the lowest D&D fees.

Demurrage and detention tariffs have two main purposes: to compensate the shipping line for using its container and to encourage the merchant to return the box as soon as possible for the shipping line to reuse it and have a fast turnaround.

Demurrage is what a shipper pays for using a container in the terminal beyond the free period. Detention is what he pays for using the box outside the terminal beyond the free period. For imports, demurrage time begins when a box is unloaded from a ship until its gate-out. For exports, it starts from gate-in of the full container until it is loaded.

New York leads the way in D&D fees, followed by Long Beach, Los Angeles, Oakland and Savannah. All five ports are 2-3 times more expensive than Hong Kong, in 7th spot, and 20 times costlier than leading Asian hubs such as Dalian in China and Busan in Korea.

Under heavy pressure from shipper lobbyists hit by soaring shipping rates, schedule disruptions and higher fees, which have been adding to supply chain cost inflation, President Joe Biden signed the Ocean Shipping Reform Act (OSRA) into law on June 16.

Shenzhen Xunlaitong specializes in shipping export from Shenzhen to Australia & New Zealand, Germany, Netherlands and more business

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