Durban Delays Hit 10 Days as Carriers Warn of 20

A local forwarding source quoted by The Loadstar said containers discharged at Durban Gateway Terminal on 11 August were still sitting inside the terminal on 25 August. The same report said free storage days were extended on 25 August as congestion continued to restrict container evacuation.

For some carrier tariffs serving Durban, demurrage or combined import detention is calculated from discharge, while terminal storage is charged separately under its own free-time rules. Collection, meanwhile, depends on an appointment slot the terminal is currently releasing under constraint. Everything expensive happens in the gap between those facts, which means the number worth tracking this month is not only the vessel queue. It is the elapsed time between the moment your container came off the ship and the moment it was genuinely collectable.

What broke at Durban Gateway Terminal

Durban Gateway Terminal is the former Durban Container Terminal Pier 2. ICTSI took formal management and operational control on 1 January 2026 through a special-purpose vehicle in which Transnet retains majority ownership, under a 25-year concession.

The immediate trigger was a systems cutover layered onto an already congested terminal. DGT scheduled the move onto its own N4 environment to begin at 18:00 on 15 August, with vessel and landside operations suspended during a migration expected to take roughly 12 hours. A forwarder advisory issued the day before had already warned clients that landside congestion was making port bookings difficult and that containers risked exhausting their free storage time inside the terminal.

The Southern African Association of Freight Forwarders declared a crisis on 21 August and escalated the matter to the Presidency, which sent a delegation to the port. SAAFF research head Jacob van Rensburg described the disruption as wider than an IT migration, naming booking availability, stack and yard fluidity, equipment reliability and landside evacuation. Stack occupancy was nearing 85%, which severely limits how freely containers can be shuffled inside the yard.

The terminal told SAAFF that operations resumed after the migration at roughly 70% of standard operating norms, with appointment slots released in a controlled manner while the system stabilised, alongside round-the-clock support and priority handling for reefers and urgent moves. That controlled release is one of the mechanisms determining how quickly containers can leave the terminal.

Date	What happened
1 Jan 2026	ICTSI assumes formal management and operational control of DGT; Transnet retains majority ownership
Jul 2026	Road hauliers file a Competition Commission complaint over storage and related charges
31 Jul 2026	28 vessels at anchor at Durban across all commodity types
15 Aug 2026	DGT begins its N4 cutover at 18:00, with operations suspended during the migration
21 Aug 2026	SAAFF declares a crisis and escalates to the Presidency
25 Aug 2026	DGT delays reported around 10 days, with some carriers warning customers to expect up to 20 days

Durban Gateway Terminal, January to August 2026. Sources listed under Further Reading.

Where the charges actually land

A container can be discharged on schedule and still be uncollectable for days. It can sit in a stack that cannot be worked, wait on a booking slot that has not been released, or be blocked behind unavailable equipment.

That distinction matters because carrier demurrage and terminal storage do not necessarily wait for operational availability. Current South Africa tariffs from major carriers use discharge-based charging clocks in Durban, while terminal storage is a separate charge with its own free-time rules. The commercial dispute is therefore not whether discharge occurred. It is whether charges should continue accruing during periods when terminal constraints prevent the container from being collected.

SAAFF has taken the position that storage, demurrage and delay costs arising from constraints outside the control of cargo owners, forwarders and transporters “should not simply be transferred downstream to those parties.” Its recovery proposals to Transnet include restoring booking capacity and container evacuation, improving stack fluidity, increasing equipment availability, strengthening rail integration, and addressing the demurrage exposure created by the disruption.

That argument is already in front of a regulator. Freight News reports that road hauliers lodged a formal complaint with the Competition Commission in July naming eight carriers, MSC, Maersk South Africa, CMA CGM, Hapag-Lloyd, ONE, COSCO, Pacific International Lines and Evergreen, alongside DGT and Transnet, over allegedly excessive storage charges and anti-competitive practices. The complaint is led by the Positive Freight Solutions Container Division, representing 140 transporters. Its core allegation is that terminal delays are generating demurrage, detention and storage charges while hauliers are unable to access containers. MSC has disputed the allegations, and no regulatory finding has been made.

A local forwarding source also told The Loadstar that free storage days were extended on 25 August, without a published indication of how long the extension would remain in force. An extension granted during the disruption, without a clear end date, is not something a planning team can build a delivery promise on.

If your team is reconstructing collection attempts from email threads after the storage invoice lands, it is worth walking through how ops teams capture discharge, availability and gate-out timestamps per container while the container is still sitting there.

The record that decides a Durban dispute

Do not assume the U.S. FMC’s D&D invoice-content rules govern the terminal-side charge at DGT. Those rules apply to covered common-carrier and U.S. marine-terminal invoices under the Shipping Act; DGT itself is a South African terminal. A Durban dispute therefore still depends heavily on the operational record, and that record needs to be built per container as events happen.

Discharge timestamp. Record when the container came off the ship. Many published carrier tariffs use discharge as a charging trigger, so this is the starting point of the sequence.
Availability posting. Record the date and time the box was first shown as collectable, plus every subsequent status change. This helps establish when operational availability diverged from the discharge-based charging clock.
Every booking attempt. Slot searched, slot offered, slot unavailable, with screenshots and the time of each attempt. Gaps in this log become gaps in the argument.
Gate-out. Record when the container actually left the terminal. Depending on the carrier tariff, this may end one charging period or mark a change in the applicable detention calculation.
Each storage extension. When it was announced, which containers it covered, and what it changed. Extensions communicated by circular or operational notice are easy to lose once the invoice arrives.
Identifiers. B/L and container numbers tying the sequence together, so the file survives being handed to a lawyer, carrier or industry association.

The mechanics of the discharge-to-availability gap, and why carriers and terminals hold different pieces of it, are covered in more depth in our guide to checking free time, gate-out and availability against a demurrage invoice.

Why the backlog will not clear quickly

One local forwarding source told The Loadstar that clearing the backlog could take at least a few weeks, assuming the number of ships and containers waiting does not continue to grow. Some carriers have already moved their customer guidance to delays of up to 20 days.

Rail evacuation is narrower than usual during exactly this window. A mainline maintenance shutdown was scheduled from 25 August to 2 September, which removes one of the levers SAAFF has asked Transnet to strengthen at the moment it is most needed.

There is very little spare tonnage in the system to absorb a recovery. Linerlytica attributes roughly 9% of global port congestion to South Africa, and puts global stranded capacity at 4.31m TEU, past the 4m TEU peak of 2022 in absolute terms while representing 12.6% of fleet capacity against 15.7% then. The idle fleet stands at 55 ships, about 164,000 TEU, or half a percent of the total. That leaves carriers with limited scope to add capacity quickly and makes omissions, slide-outs and schedule changes more likely during the recovery.

What to re-check on Durban-routed cargo this week: which containers pass their last free day before a slot is realistically available; whether the 25 August storage extension covers them and until when; whether any booking can still be diverted to another Durban facility or gateway before the box is committed; and whether your customer delivery windows still reflect DGT delays of around 10 days rather than the shorter delays quoted in July.

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