Where Demurrage Actually Gets Lost: Four Patterns Inside the Claims Process

Most demurrage conversations focus on the wrong end of the problem.

Port congestion, weather delays, terminal inefficiency. These are real, and plenty of exposure flows from conditions no claims team can control.

But a significant share of demurrage losses happen after the vessel sails, not during the port call itself. They happen in spreadsheets, disconnected systems, and analysts' heads.

According to estimates, dry bulk alone accounts for $8–10 billion in demurrage fees annually, roughly 6–8% of total freight spend. At rates of $15,000–$30,000 per day, every unrecovered hour has a real dollar value.

And because most demurrage claims teams are still running manual workflows that were never designed for today's volume, a meaningful portion of that entitlement simply doesn't get recovered.

How much time do demurrage analysts spend on administrative work?

Analysis across more than 20,000 claims processed annually shows approximately 75% of demurrage analyst time is absorbed by process tasks; document collection, chasing agents, entering SOF data, formatting calculations, filing correspondence. Only 25% goes to the work analysts were hired for: dispute handling, clause interpretation, and negotiation.

A single demurrage claim involves roughly 45 discrete steps.

The issue isn't capability. Most claims teams are experienced and have deep domain expertise. The issue is structural. 99% of statements of facts (SOFs) are still processed manually across the industry, consuming an estimated 12 million hours per year.

Under that kind of load, corners get cut, not deliberately, but inevitably.

What causes demurrage claims to lose money?

Demurrage leakage follows four consistent patterns across organisations of every size and commodity type, according to Marcura's experience processing claims across dry bulk, tankers, chemicals and project cargo.

Incomplete calculations. When volume is high and analysts are stretched, selective transcription becomes common. At $15,000–$30,000 per day, each unrecovered detail compounds across a portfolio.

Missed time bars. Miss a time bar and the claim is gone. When time bars live in analysts' heads or beside a spreadsheet, one absence or busy period can erase recoverable entitlement. One real portfolio documented $450,000 in time bar failures in a single year.

Data that can't be queried. SOFs exist, but not in a form that makes them useful for reporting. Leadership questions that should be simple queries become multi-week projects because the data wasn't captured in a way that makes them answerable.

Expertise that walks out the door. When a senior analyst leaves, the loss isn't just headcount. It's the knowledge of how a specific counterparty negotiates, the history of a disputed clause, the context behind decisions never written down. In a manual workflow, that institutional memory leaves with the person.

How do charter party clauses cause demurrage losses?

Charter party ambiguities account for 5–10% of total demurrage write-downs across the industry and can delay claim submission by 20–30 days. This is a source of leakage that receives less attention than the administrative burden, but compounds in the same way.

The practical consequences are significant. An early loading clause with ambiguous laycan language can cost approximately $70,000 per port call if laytime only commences from the agreed laycan regardless of when loading actually begins.

A vessel-on-demurrage clause that fails to exclude daylight restrictions can cost around $20,000 per call. An STS clause missing laytime start and end details creates the same exposure.

One organisation had a holiday clause in their standard terms, but it specifically referenced BIMCO holidays. When a vessel called at a port observing a local public holiday not on the BIMCO list, the charterer was liable for a day and a half of demurrage the clause should have covered.

The fix at renewal was a single word: removing 'BIMCO', so any recognised holiday is excluded from laytime. But identifying the problem required cross-referencing operational data against clause language, something a manual process rarely produces.

Structured claims data makes that connection available before the next fixture is signed.