Charter party clause contradictions driving demurrage claims
Demurrage claims start at fixture stage. See how a restricted-hours NOR clause under SHINC cargo terms cost one owner two days, and how to catch it before signing.
By Janani Yagnamurthy
SVP, Product, Strategic Growth
"For decades, shipping has treated experience as something that walks out the door every evening and retires after 40 years. CP Optimiser gives us the opportunity to turn experience into scalable AI-driven infrastructure, that lets juniors apply the knowledge of a senior from day one."
Thomas Stjernholm
Managing Director – Commercial, Tomini Chartering
Demurrage disputes can start at fixture stage, long before a vessel reaches the port. When a Notice of Readiness (NOR) clause contradicts the cargo operation terms, laytime starts later than the vessel's arrival, and the owner carries the gap as unpaid time.
Marcura's laytime and demurrage team reviewed a sample of recent fixtures and found this contradiction in 15% of them, about one in seven, with nothing visible until a claim was on the table.
Marcura's CP Optimiser flags that contradiction before the fixture is signed. Marcura Claims captures it after the claim closes, and PortLog puts the pattern in front of your chartering desk for the next fixture.
How a Saturday arrival at Paranagua left two days unpaid
A bulk carrier arrives at Paranagua on a Saturday morning at 08:00 local time. The cargo is sugar, the fixture is clean, and the terms were agreed weeks earlier in what looked like a routine email exchange. The master tenders Notice of Readiness on arrival.
The vessel waits. Laytime does not start counting until Monday at 08:00, which leaves two full days of unpaid time at the port on the owner's side of the ledger.
Three weeks later, the Statement of Facts (SOF) lands on the demurrage analyst's desk, and the claim is already mature. The charterer points to one clause and the owner to another. Both clauses are in the fixture, and they contradict each other.
This kind of demurrage dispute settles slowly and expensively, and nobody learns much from it. The contradiction sits at fixture stage and the cost surfaces at claim stage, so the two ends of the workflow rarely meet.
How common are NOR and cargo terms contradictions in charter parties?
More common than the industry tends to admit. Marcura's laytime and demurrage software team reviewed a sample of recent fixtures to see how often the same pattern recurred. The answer was 15%.
About one in seven fixtures carried a contradiction between the Notice of Readiness (NOR) terms and the cargo operation terms, and it would not surface until a claim was already on the table.
How can SHINC cargo terms conflict with a restricted-hours NOR clause?
The cargo terms on the Paranagua fixture were SHINC (Sundays and Holidays Included). On paper, SHINC is the more permissive arrangement: laytime counts continuously, weekends and holidays alike.
The NOR acceptance clause restricted tender to working hours: 08:00 to 17:00 Monday to Friday, and 08:00 to 12:00 Saturday. Outside those windows, NOR could not be validly tendered.
The vessel arrived at 08:00 on a Saturday. On some operators' reading of the clause, that was already past the Saturday cut-off, and it was certainly outside the Monday-to-Friday window.
The NOR was accepted, but the clock did not start until the next valid acceptance window. Two days disappeared into the gap between two clauses that each looked entirely reasonable when read separately.
Clause | Wording on the Paranagua fixture | Effect on laytime |
|---|---|---|
Cargo operation terms | SHINC (Sundays and Holidays Included) | Laytime counts continuously, weekends and holidays alike |
NOR acceptance clause | Tender restricted to 08:00 to 17:00 Monday to Friday and 08:00 to 12:00 Saturday | NOR cannot be validly tendered outside those windows, so laytime did not start until Monday at 08:00 |
Alternative NOR acceptance clause | ATDNSHINC (Any Time Day or Night, Sundays and Holidays Included) | The Saturday arrival carries no penalty, the cargo and acceptance terms align, and the two days count |
Under an ATDNSHINC acceptance clause, the Saturday arrival would have carried no penalty. A single wording difference created two days of unpaid time, and the claim took weeks to resolve because the contradiction was real.
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Why does “as per last” carry clause contradictions into new fixtures?
“As per last” is the shorthand for carrying terms forward from a recent fixture into a new one. A charterer or broker does it, sometimes without revisiting every clause. The Paranagua fixture inherited its NOR clause this way.
The intent is speed. The effect is that clauses written for a different trade, port, or season land in a fixture they were never tested against. In the sample reviewed, “as per last” was the single most common origin of an inherited contradiction.
The fixture template moves, the cargo type changes, the port rotation changes, and the NOR clause moves with the template even when the cargo terms underneath it have shifted. That is how SHINC cargo terms end up under a restricted-hours NOR clause. It is also how a daylight restriction designed for one terminal ends up applied to another where it was never needed.
How can chartering and claims teams close the loop on clause contradictions?
The deeper issue in the Paranagua case is that nothing in the way most operators manage claims and chartering ensures the next fixture is written with that lesson already learned.
Demurrage and laytime claims generate, by far, the richest dataset a maritime company holds on its own operational behaviour. Every closed claim records which clause was contested, which port it played out in, which counterparty disputed it, and which interpretation prevailed. In aggregate, that data does something a single analyst's memory cannot.
It reveals patterns: the clause-port combinations that recur, the counterparties that test the same wording fixture after fixture, and the inherited “as per last” templates that travel from one trade into another while quietly carrying unpaid time with them.
The Paranagua contradiction needs to be caught in two places: once before the fixture is signed, so it never reaches the vessel, and once after the claim closes, so the pattern is captured for the next fixture. Connecting those two stages creates a practical feedback loop between chartering and claims handling.
Marcura works at both ends, with CP Optimiser before signing and Marcura Claims with PortLog after the claim closes, and the integration between them turns the process into an operational discipline.
Before the fixture is signed: CP Optimiser
Marcura's CP Optimiser, part of Marcura Contract Intelligence, reads the full charter party in around six minutes, scores clause risk and flags clause-level contradictions. The flags include the mismatch between cargo terms and NOR window that cost the Paranagua fixture its two days.
Each CP Optimiser flag comes with the reasoning behind it. Your chartering desk sees why a clause has been surfaced and decides whether to accept the risk, renegotiate the wording, or review the inherited clause.
After the claim closes: Marcura Claims and PortLog
Marcura Claims captures the contradiction as structured data: clause type, port, counterparty, arrival-day pattern, and settlement outcome. Over time, that record becomes the operator's own pattern library, drawn from more than 20,000 claims processed annually across dry bulk, tankers, chemicals, and project cargo.
When the next fixture is being drafted, PortLog, Marcura's voyage estimation and port time intelligence tool, surfaces patterns from previous claims directly in the chartering view through the Marcura platform.
What charterers should take from the Paranagua case
Demurrage and laytime claims are usually treated as a downstream problem. The Paranagua case shows that the decision-making window sits much earlier. By the time the SOF arrives, the contradiction is already locked into the fixture.
The fix is a discipline that systems can support:
Read the NOR clause and the cargo clause as a single instrument.
Treat “as per last” as a question rather than an answer.
Close the loop between the claims data that already exists and the fixture decisions that have yet to be made.
Price freight with evidence of real port costs and time
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