How to Find Your Free Time and Last Free Day Before the Container Lands

Every demurrage and detention invoice starts the same way: a free-time clock expired on a date nobody on your team was watching. The charge is almost never a surprise in hindsight — the deadline was knowable. The problem is that the deadline is rarely printed where you’d look for it, and on most carriers you can’t see your import free time until the container has already discharged and the clock is already running.

This is a field guide to finding your free time and Last Free Day before the box lands — where each major carrier exposes it, how the days are actually counted, and why the number you find may not be the number that bills you. If you want the companion piece on which clock drives the invoice once charges hit, that’s covered separately in Carrier LFD vs Terminal LFD.

Two charges, one free-time window to find

Before you can find a deadline, you need to know which one you’re looking for. The two charges bill for different things and, depending on the carrier and market, may run on one combined clock or two separate ones.

Charge	What it bills for	Free-time clock starts	Free-time clock ends
Demurrage	Full container sitting at the terminal past free time	Container discharged from the vessel	Full container gates out of the terminal
Detention (per diem)	Carrier’s equipment held off-terminal past free time	Full container gates out of the terminal	Empty container gated back in at the approved return location

Import cargo, U.S. basis. Trigger events follow CMA CGM’s published tariff structure; other carriers use the same gate-event logic with their own tariff language.

One nuance to settle up front, because it changes where you look: in some markets carriers merge these into a single combined (merged) D&D window, where one free-time allowance covers discharge all the way through empty return. In the U.S., Canada, Japan, and a handful of other markets, they’re often calculated separately. Whether you’re hunting for one deadline or two depends on the lane.

Where each carrier shows your free time

The free time itself lives in the carrier’s tariff, but the operational number — your specific containers, your specific Last Free Day — is exposed through each line’s own lookup tool. They don’t work the same way, and they don’t all show you the same thing.

Maersk. Log into the Maersk Hub and open the Import Demurrage & Detention widget. Enter your B/L number and select View Details. You’ll see container-level free time, the Last Free Day, and the pickup and return locations. Two things worth knowing: you can buy additional free time online from 15 days before vessel arrival until one day after ETA, and if you’re not the consignee, you can see the Last Free Day but not the charge amounts. So a forwarder checking on a client’s behalf gets the date but not the dollars.

Hapag-Lloyd. Use the D&D Calculator and enter your booking number; the free-time and fee breakdown is emailed back, typically within about five minutes. The catch is coverage: the calculator runs separate import calculations for the United States, Canada, Japan, and Ireland, and combined (merged) calculations elsewhere. If your region isn’t supported, you’re back to reading the tariff directly.

CMA CGM. Free time is published in the tariff and, for U.S. shipments, port/terminal storage is generally rolled into demurrage rather than billed separately. The structural quirk to plan around: CMA CGM has stated that import demurrage free time becomes visible only after the container discharges and the clock has already started. If the free time isn’t showing correctly after discharge — common when you have negotiated contract free time that the terminal hasn’t picked up — that’s a call to their client team, not a number you can confirm in advance from the portal alone.

The pattern across all three: the tariff tells you the allowance ahead of time, but the tool that confirms your actual dates often won’t populate until the container is already on the ground. That gap — between knowing the rule and seeing your real deadline — is the window where exposure is built.

The trap inside the number: how the days are counted

Finding “five free days” isn’t the same as knowing when they expire. The same nominal allowance can land on different real-world dates depending on how the carrier counts.

Calendar days vs working days. Some carriers count free time in working days, skipping weekends and holidays, then switch to calendar days once charges start accruing. CMA CGM’s tariff materials, for example, express durations in either calendar or working days depending on the lane, with the first chargeable day being the first day after free time ends. The practical effect: your count to the deadline may skip non-working days while the meter after expiry does not. A Friday Last Free Day and a Monday Last Free Day are very different risk profiles over a long weekend.

The “LFD” label isn’t standardized. “Last Free Day” and “LFD” aren’t formal DCSA event terms. What DCSA standardizes is the underlying event — including AVPU, “Available for Pick-up.” In practice, carrier and terminal systems expose discharge, release, gate, and availability events more clearly than any single standardized milestone. So when you compare an “LFD” pulled from one source against one from another, you may be comparing two different underlying events that happen to share the same familiar three-letter label.

If your team is tracking free-time deadlines by logging into each carrier portal by hand — and re-checking because the number wasn’t there before discharge — walk through how ops teams set container-level free-time alerts across carriers in one view.

What you can actually control before the box lands

Clear customs early — but don’t assume it stops the clock. Clearing ahead of arrival removes the most common reason a container can’t be picked up in time. It does not automatically pause demurrage. Whether a hold pauses the clock depends on the tariff, the hold location, and appointment availability. Treat early clearance as exposure reduction, not a guarantee.

Book drayage against the earliest deadline you can identify. Not the most convenient one, and not only the one printed on the arrival notice. If demurrage and detention run on separate clocks, the terminal LFD tells you nothing about your empty-return deadline.

Know that returning the empty is what ends detention. Pulling the laden box out of the terminal stops the demurrage clock and starts the detention clock. The equipment meter only stops when the empty is gated back in at the approved return location — and the approved location matters, because returning to the wrong depot may not count.

Document appointment failures in real time. Most carrier dispute processes — CMA CGM’s included — will waive charges when you can show that no terminal appointments were available before your Last Free Day and no exemption was granted. That waiver depends on contemporaneous evidence: the screenshots and communications have to be captured as it happens, not reconstructed after the invoice lands.

If the deadline still slips: the one regulatory lever worth knowing

Prevention is the goal, but if a charge lands anyway, the FMC’s billing rules (46 CFR Part 541, in effect since 28 May 2024) give you a concrete check. A demurrage or detention invoice has to carry specific required information, and if any required element is missing, the billed party has no obligation to pay that charge. Carriers also have a 30-day window to issue the invoice and must allow at least 30 days to dispute it.

One caveat, because it’s easy to over-rely on: the provision that named exactly who could be billed (§541.4) was vacated by the D.C. Circuit, so the question of which party is properly invoiced is now being enforced case by case rather than by a bright-line rule. The fuller picture on who can legally be billed is in our breakdown of the Maersk FMC settlement. Don’t build a dispute argument on §541.4 — build it on the missing-invoice-information rule, which still stands.

The deadline you can’t see is the one that bills you

The recurring failure mode is structural, not careless: teams plan against the one deadline that happened to be printed in front of them, while the binding clock sits in a carrier tool that didn’t populate until the container discharged. Finding your real free time means knowing which charge you’re tracking, where that specific carrier exposes the number, and how it counts the days — then watching the container’s actual events against that rule, continuously, because the deadline is built from events, not from whichever date your team noticed first.

That reconciliation is exactly what continuous, container-level visibility does: pull discharge, release, gate, and availability events into one view across carriers, and flag the free-time deadline as it approaches — so the date you plan against is the date that actually drives the invoice, not just the one on the notice.

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