What will this container actually cost, delivered to your door?

What landed cost is, and who collects each part of it

Landed cost is the whole amount an import costs by the time the goods stand in your warehouse: supplier price, international freight, carrier surcharges, terminal and port charges, the inland leg, customs duty, federal user fees, brokerage and insurance. The ocean freight rate is one line inside that total, and the only line most quotes lead with.

Landed cost divides into four collectors, and the split decides what you can argue about and what you cannot:

• The US government, through Customs and Border Protection — import duty, the merchandise processing fee and the harbor maintenance fee. Fixed by regulation, identical for every importer, negotiable by no one.
• The ocean carrier — the base rate plus bunker, peak season, currency and security surcharges. Filed in a tariff, negotiable in a contract, fixed once the container is moving.
• The terminal and the trucker — terminal handling, chassis, drayage, and the daily charges that start when a box sits too long. Set locally, and the source of most invoice surprises.
• The forwarder or broker — documentation, filings, customs entry and its own margin: the only lines where firms compete for your business.

Freight invoices in this market rarely make that division visible. By SeaRates' own count on 07/26/2026, of 299 pages ranking in US search or cited by AI Overviews across 89 queries about import costs, 53 use the term landed cost at all and 19 name both federal user fees. The rest fold government money and carrier money into one word, usually "logistics" — the point at which an importer stops being able to check anything.

How much of the bill is the ocean rate itself

Ocean freight is a minority of the delivered total on most shipments — 35% to 70% of it by the published figures — but the market does not agree on how large a minority. Across the 299 pages SeaRates measured on 07/26/2026, exactly five put a number on the ocean rate's share, and those numbers differ by a factor of two: 35–45% in one breakdown of a consolidated shipment, 50% and 70% in the LCL and FCL columns of one publisher's table, 60% in another's summary. A sixth prints a worked example for a 20ft container from Shanghai to Los Angeles — base freight $1,800 inside a $3,325 total — from which the base rate works out to 54%, a percentage SeaRates computed from their figures rather than one they state.

The spread in ocean freight's published share is not sloppiness on anyone's part. Ocean freight's share moves with the rate, and the rate is the only volatile element in the stack: the handling and paperwork floor of $398 to $1,060 per container barely moves month to month, while the base rate can double in a quarter. Hold the fixed stack at its measured median and the arithmetic falls out — at a $1,500 ocean freight rate the fixed lines alone are 21% to 41% of the two combined; at $5,000 they are 7% to 17%. Duty, drayage and daily charges push the ocean share down further.

A freight quote showing only the ocean rate has therefore shown you between a third and two thirds of the money, and which end is unknowable from the quote alone. Comparing two forwarders on the ocean line compares the volatile part while ignoring the part that is nearly identical for both — and the lines that break budgets are almost never ocean freight. The ocean component has published benchmarks of its own, and each has to be read with the week attached: which index measures what, and when each was taken sets out the four that matter. Per-lane pages are not published yet.

How the harbor maintenance fee and the merchandise processing fee are calculated

The merchandise processing fee is the federal charge most importers see first, and Customs and Border Protection sets it at 0.3464% of entered value by formula rather than negotiation. For a formal entry in fiscal year 2026 the fee is 0.3464% of the entered value, excluding duty, freight and insurance, with a floor of $33.58 and a ceiling of $651.50 per entry, plus $4.03 if the entry is filed manually. Informal entries pay a flat $2.69, $8.06 or $12.09. CBP published these figures at 90 FR 34665 on 07/23/2025 (CBP Dec. 25-10), effective for entries filed on or after 10/01/2025.

Merchandise processing fee arithmetic is worth doing by hand, because the floor and the ceiling bend the effective rate at both ends. Below $9,694 of entered value the floor binds, so a $5,000 entry pays $33.58 rather than the $17.32 the percentage gives — an effective 0.67%, double the nominal rate. Above $188,078 the ceiling binds, so a $500,000 entry pays $651.50 rather than $1,732, an effective 0.13%. The crossover is not a published statistic but a division you can repeat: $651.50 ÷ 0.003464 = $188,078.

The harbor maintenance fee behaves differently in the one way that decides a mode comparison. Harbor maintenance is charged at 0.125% of the cargo value declared on the commercial invoice, with no minimum and no maximum, under 19 CFR 24.24 — and CBP does not collect it on cargo imported or transported by air. A $2,000,000 ocean entry pays $651.50 in merchandise processing but $2,500 in harbor maintenance, so on high-value sea freight the uncapped fee outgrows the capped one.

Merchandise processing fee figures go stale faster than pages get updated. Of the 26 pages SeaRates measured on 07/26/2026 that mention the merchandise processing fee, six show the fiscal 2026 floor of $33.58 and nine still show superseded amounts — $31.67 and $614.35 from fiscal 2025, or older figures such as $29.66. Check any duty estimate against the CBP article before it enters a budget, because the floor and ceiling change every October — and check that the broker filing it holds a current licence, which our what the FMC registry says about this company explains.

What the broker charges for the work, as opposed to what it collects and remits on your behalf, is a different line again: what a customs broker actually costs separates the two on one invoice.

Destination charges: drayage, chassis, pre-pull and US port programs

Destination charges begin the moment the vessel discharges, and a foreign supplier's quote never contains them. Ocean carriers price port-to-port; everything after the terminal gate is arranged locally, billed locally, and quoted in whatever unit the local provider prefers. Drayage, the truck move from terminal to warehouse, is the largest of these and the least comparable: three units in circulation and no conversions published.

Chassis charges surprise importers more often than any other destination charge, because the equipment is rented separately from the truck at most US ports. Published figures in the corpus run a median $50 to $150 per container, with a p75 high end of $300, billed per day in some markets and per move in others. A chassis split — box and chassis in different places, so the trucker collects them separately — adds a further $150 to $200 per occurrence in the corpus.

Pre-pull is the one destination charge usually worth paying. A pre-pull moves the container out of the terminal to a nearby yard before free time expires, converting an open-ended daily exposure into one known fee, and the corpus puts a US pre-pull at $150 to $300 depending on coast. Whether it pays is arithmetic rather than judgement: weigh the pre-pull fee against the demurrage median of $75 to $300 per container per day for the number of days you expect to lose.

Port programs are local destination charges, statutory and easy to miss. PierPass, the off-peak traffic mitigation fee at the Los Angeles and Long Beach terminals, is named on 8 of the 299 pages SeaRates measured on 07/26/2026; the Clean Truck Fee at the same ports appears on 2. A destination quote for a Southern California delivery showing neither is not cheaper but incomplete. The programme in force depends on the terminal, and what each terminal bills once free time runs out is set out under the free-time clock and what day six costs.

Pre-pull is the one line usually worth buying: it converts an open-ended daily exposure into a single known fee. The test is arithmetic rather than judgement — weigh $150-300 once against $75-300 a day for the number of days you expect to lose.

Why the freight invoice comes in higher than the quote

Freight invoices exceed the quotes they came from for 4 repeatable reasons, none of which requires bad faith. Re-measurement is the most common: the quote was priced on your declared dimensions, the consolidator measured the actual cartons, and the chargeable volume or weight went up. Accessorials come second — a residential delivery, a liftgate, a waiting truck. Timing comes third, when a rate increase lands between booking and gate-in. Government charges come fourth, and were never in the quote to begin with.

An all-in quote is a narrower promise than it reads. All-in ordinarily covers the lines the forwarder controls end to end and excludes duty, federal user fees, customs examination, demurrage, detention and storage after free time. Door to door has the same structure: the phrase describes the route, not the completeness of the price. Both are worth converting into a written exclusion list before booking, because neither carries a fixed definition in US ocean freight.

Published figures for how far a freight invoice exceeds its quote are scarce and describe different things. Of the 299 pages SeaRates measured on 07/26/2026, seven discuss the gap at all, and their numbers are not interchangeable: one documents a single ocean import in full — a $2,800 ocean freight quote that finished at $5,075 after $425 of terminal handling, three days of demurrage at $450, a $925 customs inspection and $475 of documentation, an 81% overrun — while another puts a consolidated shipment's invoice at 50–80% above the quoted ocean rate. The remaining figures, 10–20% and 30%, describe domestic trucking. SeaRates publishes no typical overrun percentage, because no source we hold measures one across a sample.

The 81% case is one shipment rather than a market norm, and its structure matters more than its number: demurrage was a pickup problem, terminal handling and documentation were disclosure problems, and only the customs exam was luck. A quote checked against the line list earlier on this page would have surfaced the first three before the container sailed. On the China trade the DDP quote is where that gap usually opens, and who files the entry on a DDP shipment sets out who carries the liability across 31 measured pages.

None of the four freight invoice patterns requires bad faith. "All-in" and "door to door" describe the route and the lines the forwarder controls, not the completeness of the price, and neither phrase carries a fixed definition in US ocean freight. Convert both into a written exclusion list before booking. Of the 299 pages measured, 7 discuss this gap at all.

A demurrage invoice missing a required element carries no obligation to pay

Demurrage and detention invoices are subject to a federal billing rule in force since 05/28/2024 that almost nobody in this market writes about. Under the Federal Maritime Commission's final rule on detention and demurrage billing practices, in full effect since 05/28/2024, an invoice must be issued within 30 calendar days of the last day the charge was incurred, must go to the contracting party or the consignee but not to both at once, and must contain a specified set of identifying information. Failing to include any of the required information eliminates the billed party's obligation to pay that charge.

Recourse against a demurrage invoice is procedural rather than adversarial. A billed party has at least 30 calendar days to request mitigation, refund or waiver, and the billing party must then attempt to resolve the request within 30 calendar days unless both sides agree to longer. Parties holding a non-compliant invoice can raise it with the carrier, request informal assistance from the Commission's consumer affairs office, or file a charge complaint.

Awareness of the demurrage billing rule is close to zero in the pages an importer is likely to read. Of the 299 pages SeaRates measured on 07/26/2026, exactly one mentions the demurrage and detention billing rule — and that one is the Federal Maritime Commission's own site, while 74 explain how expensive demurrage is. Check the freight invoice against the rule before paying it, and check the free-time clock on our who consolidates less-than-container loads into the USA before the container lands.

Of the 299 pages SeaRates measured on 07/26/2026, exactly one mentions this rule — and that one is the Federal Maritime Commission’s own site, while 74 explain how expensive demurrage is.

What to do with the number you now have

A landed cost estimate becomes useful the moment you use it to interrogate a quote, and the 5 questions below force the excluded lines into view. Send them in writing, before booking, and keep the reply:

• Which freight quote lines are estimates and which are fixed? Terminal handling and documentation should be fixed; duty and any per-day charge cannot be.
• What is your unit for drayage — per move, per hour or per mile? Without the unit, two drayage quotes cannot be ranked.
• Which destination charges are excluded? Ask for the list by name. Chassis, pre-pull, port programs and storage are the usual omissions.
• Through what date is the ocean rate valid, and is it fixed at booking or at gate-in? The answer decides who carries the delay risk.
• Who issues the bill of lading, and who invoices me for demurrage or detention? The answer names the party the FMC billing rule applies to.

Two freight quotes become comparable only after both are normalised to the same basis. Put them side by side on the line list from the table earlier on this page, add the missing lines at the medians SeaRates measured on 07/26/2026 — $398 to $1,060 per container for the six fixed lines — and convert any per-CBM figure at 35.3 cu ft per cubic meter. A cheaper headline rate with three omitted lines routinely finishes above a dearer rate with none once the full landed cost is added up.

Budget demurrage exposure separately from the landed cost estimate. Demurrage, detention and examination are risks to size rather than costs to forecast, and the per-day medians on this page attach a dollar figure to each day of delay you think plausible. An importer who books with a delay budget and a written exclusion list has removed most of what turns a quote into a surprise.