The invisible fee: why cargo owners overpay for container detention every year

When an importer or exporter in the Baltic Sea region opens a shipping line's Detention & Demurrage (D&D) invoice, most simply pay it. Not because they agree with the amount, but because they don't have the time, the expertise, or the appetite to dispute it. That's a rational response to a system built so that disputing costs more than paying.

The real cost

Global D&D charges run to roughly $22 billion a year — money cargo owners pay carriers for holding containers beyond the contractual free time. Some of that is legitimate: the container really did sit longer than the contract allows. But a meaningful share is error that nobody checks.

The errors are systemic, not random:

• Start/end point of the calculation. Does free time start at vessel discharge, or at notification to the client? A one- or two-day gap turns into hundreds of euros per container.
• Weekends and holidays. Some contracts count calendar days, others working days.
• Port congestion. When a port physically can't accept an empty return due to its own backlog, the invoice is still usually issued to the client.
• Outdated or misapplied rate. Free time terms change over the life of a contract; the invoicing system isn't always updated in sync.

Why nobody disputes it

A typical D&D invoice is worth a few hundred euros. Disputing it means reading the contract, comparing dates, writing a substantiated claim to the carrier. Most mid-size forwarders' finance teams don't have anyone for that — or they do, but that person's time costs more than the potential return on one invoice.

Large carriers with well-resourced legal teams negotiate against a single person juggling a dozen other tasks. The asymmetry isn't legal — it's operational.

What's changing

In the US, the Federal Maritime Commission adopted a 2024 rule requiring D&D invoices to carry specific mandatory data fields. Europe has no equivalent regulation — verification here has to rest on contract terms and actual data.

Technology that required a large team for manual invoice checking five years ago is now automatable. That doesn't remove the need to understand your contract — but it removes the barrier that stops most people from even trying.