Demurrage has more than one cause. Port congestion, customs exams, terminal closures, unavailable appointments, and cargo that is not actually available may be outside a forwarder's control.
Other exposure comes from operational gaps: a release email nobody saw, a free-time deadline that was not tracked, a delayed drayage handoff, or an approval request that arrived too late. The useful question is not whether every charge is preventable. It is which charges your own invoice and event history show could have been avoided.
The scale is real. The Federal Maritime Commission reports that nine ocean carriers collected roughly $15.4 billion in detention and demurrage charges from April 1, 2020 through March 31, 2025. That total does not establish what share was preventable.
Where the money actually leaks
These are the recurring operational gaps I look for in a forwarder's data:
Release visibility gaps: customs clears a container, but operations does not see the event until the next status review. Whether that costs a pickup day depends on terminal availability, appointments, and drayage readiness.
Free-time blind spots: nobody is systematically tracking which containers are closest to free-time expiry. Priority is determined by whoever calls to ask about their shipment, not by actual cost exposure.
Drayage booking lag: a container becomes available, but appointment booking and drayman assignment happen hours or days later because the steps aren't connected.
Client approval delays: the container is ready to move but needs a client payment or document approval, and nobody chased it until the charge already started.
Calculate it from your own book of business
Start with detention and demurrage invoices, then match each charge to release, availability, appointment, approval, and gate events. Separate situations the team could act on from cases where the container could not move. Rate exposure also has to come from the applicable carrier terms, terminal tariff, equipment, contract, and day rather than a generic per-container figure.
That baseline tells you what an improvement is worth. The operational fixes are usually straightforward: better visibility, earlier alerts, and faster handoffs. Not AI magic, just connecting information from carrier portals, the TMS, terminal systems, and customs feeds into something the team can act on.
In one engagement, a forwarder handling about 600 containers per month reduced demurrage 40% after automated free-time monitoring and release consolidation. That is a specific engagement result, not a market-wide benchmark.
If you want to map this in your own team, start with the freight forwarder automation use case and the full freight & logistics industry playbook.
