Terminal storage fee or demurrage? How to tell two invoices apart

When a container sits at a terminal longer than planned, an invoice may come not only from the shipping line — the terminal itself often issues a separate invoice for the same period. These two invoices — carrier demurrage and terminal storage — are legally rooted in different contracts with different parties, but they can cover the exact same physical period, when the container is simply sitting in the same yard.

Why two invoices exist

Demurrage is a contractual charge between you and the shipping line — you agreed to a certain free time, and once it's exceeded, you pay the carrier. The terminal storage fee is an entirely separate contract between the shipping line (or directly you, depending on the terminal's practice) and the terminal itself, which physically holds the container on its premises. These two contracts have their own, often different, free-time windows and rates.

The problem arises when both free-time windows expire at the same time or overlap, and both parties — the shipping line and the terminal — charge you for the same extra-day period, without reconciling their timelines with each other. Neither party does this deliberately — each simply looks at its own contract, not the full picture.

How to spot the overlap

The practical method is to lay both invoices side by side and compare the periods they state, day by day. If the demurrage invoice's period and the storage invoice's period cover the same days, that's already a concrete, checkable basis for a question: should you actually owe both parties for these days, or is it the same amount, simply billed twice under a different name?

This check requires having both invoices — the carrier's and the terminal's — at the same time, which in practice happens rarely, since they arrive at different times, from different senders, often even in different formats. That's exactly why this overlap is rarely noticed — not because it's rare, but because noticing it takes a deliberate, extra step.

What to do once you find an overlap

Once overlapping days are found, the first step is to ask both parties in writing whether they're aware of the other party's invoice for the same period. It often turns out that one of the invoices was based on outdated data about when the container was actually returned or picked up. This isn't automatically fraud — more often it's simply two separate systems being out of sync, noticed only by someone who deliberately puts both invoices side by side.