Landed cost: what it costs to land a container

The number that decides whether importing was worth it

The price the factory quotes you is not what the goods cost. Landed cost is the price of the goods on your floor, ready to sell, with everything paid — and on a first import it routinely lands 20% to 40% above the number the buyer had in their head.

None of the additions are hidden. They are just spread across six or seven different invoices from five different companies, arriving over about eight weeks, and nobody sends you a total.

Everything in the stack

Grouped by who bills you, because that is the order they arrive in.

The two federal fees, in force today

These are the ones we can state precisely, because they are set by regulation rather than negotiated. The table below shows whichever schedule is currently in force — CBP adjusts the Merchandise Processing Fee limits for inflation every year, effective 1 October.

Demurrage, detention and “per diem”

This is the most confused vocabulary in importing, and getting it wrong costs real money because the two charges have different clocks and different owners.

The Federal Maritime Commission defines them together, and the distinction it endorses is by asset, not by location:

• Demurrage is about land — the container is still sitting in the marine terminal after your free time expired.
• Detention is about the box — you have the carrier’s container out and have not returned it empty.
• “Per diem” is not a third charge. It is legacy shorthand for the daily equipment charge, and the FMC has explicitly discouraged using it as a synonym. If a quote presents per diem as a separate line beside detention, ask what it actually is.

A rule that is worth money to you

Since May 2024, a demurrage or detention invoice must be issued within 30 calendar days of the date the charge was last incurred, and it must contain a specific list of information. The consequence of getting that wrong is not a warning:

Failing to include any of the required information in a detention or demurrage invoice eliminates any obligation of the billed party to pay the applicable charge.Federal Maritime Commission, 46 CFR Part 541

You also get at least 30 days to request mitigation, refund or waiver. Small importers routinely pay these invoices without reading them. Read them.

One currency note: the provision governing who may be invoiced (§ 541.4) was set aside by the D.C. Circuit and removed from the regulations at the end of December 2025. The 30-day deadline and the invoice-content requirements are unaffected.

Two traps that are pure arithmetic

You cannot legally truck a container loaded to its plate

A 20ft container is typically rated to carry around 28,000 kg of cargo. The federal gross vehicle weight limit on the Interstate system is 80,000 lb for the whole rig — tractor, chassis, container and cargo together. Once you subtract the truck and the empty box, carriers publish practical payloads of roughly 17,200 kg for a 20ft and 20,000 kg for a 40ft.

So the container’s rating is about 60% higher than what you can actually put in it and still move it on a standard chassis without a permit. Load to the plate and you have a box that legally cannot leave the terminal — while demurrage runs. Overweight permits exist in some states and are not automatic.

Confirm the ceiling with whoever is doing your drayage, in the destination state, before you fix the packing list. Not after.

The carrier’s liability for your goods is almost nothing

People skip marine cargo insurance because they assume the shipping line is responsible. Under the Carriage of Goods by Sea Act, a carrier’s liability is limited to $500 per package unless a higher value was declared on the bill of lading — which essentially nobody does, because declaring value costs a percentage.

A pallet worth $5,000, destroyed: $500. And on consolidated cargo, “package” is most likely to be read as a carton, which makes the arithmetic worse in exactly the shipments where handling is heaviest. Marine cargo insurance typically costs a fraction of one per cent of the insured value. The maths is not close.

The landed cost formula, and how to run it yourself

Every landed-cost calculator online is this one sum with a nicer font:

Landed cost = goods + origin charges + ocean freight and surcharges + insurance + duty + any additional duties + MPF + HMF + broker, ISF and bond fees + destination handling + drayage + the time-based charges nobody planned for.

Three of those lines are calculated on value, not weight, so they scale with the price of the goods: duty is the rate for your classification multiplied by the customs value; the Merchandise Processing Fee is a percentage of value between a floor and a cap; the Harbor Maintenance Fee is a percentage of value on ocean cargo. The figures currently in force are in the table above. Divide the total by the number of sellable units — after subtracting anything that arrived short or damaged — and that is the number that decides whether the import was worth it.

A worked example with round numbers, and a duty rate chosen only for the arithmetic: 10,000 units at $4.00 are $40,000 of goods. Origin charges $900, ocean freight and surcharges $3,800, insurance $150. Duty at an assumed 5% of $40,000 is $2,000; MPF and HMF together add under $200 on that value at the current schedule; broker, ISF and bond about $600; destination handling, chassis and drayage $1,400. That is roughly $49,000 before a single day of demurrage — $4.90 a unit against the $4.00 the buyer had in their head, or about 23% more. Put in the rate your classification actually carries and the number moves; add a week on the terminal and it moves again.

Two things the sum cannot tell you: whether the classification is right, which decides the largest variable, and what the time-based lines will come to, which depends on how well the arrival is managed. An “FOB” price is none of this — Incoterms without the jargon explains why a landed cost and an FOB price are different numbers.

Why we will not put a duty rate on this page

Because your duty rate depends on the ten-digit classification of your specific product, and classification is precisely the thing that non-specialists get wrong. A page that guessed for you would be worse than a page that refuses.

The additional-duty layer on top has also changed several times during 2026 under different legal authorities, some of it litigated. Anything we printed as a number would be stale within weeks and you would have no way to tell.

What is stable is the shape: classification determines the duty rate; additional duties sit on top where they apply; MPF and HMF are calculated on value; everything else on this page is commercial and negotiable. Settle the classification, and the rest is arithmetic.

Who actually pays that duty — the importer, the exporter or the buyer — has its own short guide: who pays the tariff on an import.

Questions people ask

Checked CBP fee schedules (19 CFR 24.23 and 24.24), FMC 46 CFR Part 541, and 23 CFR 658.17 verified on September 22, 2026. Due for review by November 21, 2026.