If your company has ever received a detention invoice for a container you don’t recall agreeing to be responsible for, a settlement the Federal Maritime Commission just reached with Maersk is worth your attention. The carrier agreed to pay a $1.9 million civil penalty and — more consequentially for the rest of the market — to rewrite the clause in its bills of lading that decided who could be billed in the first place.
The dollar figure isn’t the story. The mechanism is. This is the second time in a year the FMC has forced a major carrier to narrow how it defines “merchant,” and that single word governs who is on the hook for detention and demurrage charges across most container shipments moving through U.S. ports.
What Maersk actually settled
According to the FMC, the compromise agreement recovered $1,900,000 in civil penalties from Maersk A/S and resolved allegations that the carrier violated the Shipping Act by assessing detention charges — under its service contract and tariffs — against third parties who had never consented to be bound by the terms of Maersk’s bills of lading, service contracts, or tariffs. Maersk agreed to the settlement without admitting any violation of the Shipping Act or Commission regulations.
Two commitments came with the penalty. Maersk agreed to stop the practice and to amend its U.S. tariff rules so that the definition of “merchant” in its bills of lading is limited to shippers, consignees, and persons with a beneficial interest in the cargo. It also agreed to issue refunds and waivers to the third parties that were affected. The penalty itself goes to the U.S. Treasury’s General Fund — the FMC receives none of it.
Why one word in the bill of lading matters this much
Most carrier bills of lading contain a “merchant” clause, and historically it has been written broadly — broadly enough to sweep in shippers, consignees, holders of the bill, and often anyone named on the document, including notify parties. When a container sits past free time and detention accrues, the charge can be pointed at any party the “merchant” definition reaches. That is how detention invoices end up on the desks of forwarders, truckers, and consignees-of-convenience who never signed a contract agreeing to carry that cost.
The FMC’s position is that a charge can only land on a party that actually agreed to be bound — a shipper, a consignee, or someone with a genuine beneficial interest in the cargo. Narrowing the “merchant” definition is the structural fix: it removes the contractual hook that let the charge attach to a non-consenting third party in the first place.
This is not an isolated action. Earlier this year the Commission imposed a $22.67 million penalty on MSC over detention and refrigerated-container tariff billing violations — a case that turned on the same issue, where MSC was found to have invoiced third parties listed as “notify parties” on its standard bill of lading regardless of whether they had any contractual or beneficial cargo interest. In April, a federal appeals court upheld an FMC ruling against Evergreen tied to detention charges assessed during a closure at the Port of Savannah. The “merchant” clause is the common thread the FMC keeps pulling.
The part most coverage gets wrong: the rule was partly struck down, but enforcement didn’t stop
Here’s the nuance that matters if you’re deciding whether a charge is contestable. In February 2024 the FMC issued its Final Rule on detention and demurrage billing practices under the Ocean Shipping Reform Act, effective May 28, 2024. One section of that rule — 46 C.F.R. 541.4, which specified exactly who a D&D invoice may be sent to — was challenged by the World Shipping Council, and on September 23, 2025 the D.C. Circuit set that section aside.
So the bright-line regulation naming who can be invoiced is not currently in force. What that means in practice: the FMC is enforcing the principle case by case, through investigations and consent settlements like this one, rather than through the vacated rule. The Maersk agreement shows the approach working — the carrier didn’t just pay; it agreed to change the underlying tariff language. For a shipper or forwarder, the practical takeaway is that “who can legally be billed” is being decided through enforcement and tariff revisions, not a single statute you can point to, which makes the documentation behind any contested charge more important, not less.
What this changes for the party receiving the invoice
Check the “merchant” clause before you pay. If you received a detention charge and you are not the shipper, the consignee, or a party with a beneficial interest in the cargo, the basis for billing you is now exactly what the FMC has been challenging. The first question is whether you ever consented to be bound by that carrier’s bill of lading at all.
The charge has to tie to a real container event. Detention accrues for the time a container is held beyond free time. Contesting a charge — or confirming it’s legitimate — comes down to the timeline: when the container gated out, when it was available for return, when it actually came back, and which of those days fall inside or outside free time. A charge you can’t trace to specific, dated container events is a charge you can’t verify, and the burden of reconstructing that timeline usually falls on the party trying to dispute it.
When a detention dispute comes down to which days a container was actually in your control, the side that can show the dated event trail — gate-out, availability, return — is the side that can hold its position. Walk through how ops teams pull the container-level event timeline behind a contested charge.
Watch for refunds if you were billed by Maersk as a third party. The settlement requires Maersk to issue refunds and waivers to affected third parties. If your company was billed detention under Maersk’s old “merchant” definition without being a shipper, consignee, or beneficial cargo interest, you may be in scope.
What to watch next
The FMC collects quarterly D&D data from nine carriers — CMA CGM, COSCO, Evergreen, Hapag-Lloyd, HMM, Maersk, MSC, ONE, and Yang Ming. With Maersk and MSC both now having narrowed or been penalized over billing practices, the open question is whether the remaining carriers revise their “merchant” definitions proactively or wait for their own investigations. If you contract across multiple carriers, the inconsistency in how each defines “merchant” right now is itself worth mapping — the same shipment structure can produce a contestable charge with one carrier and a binding one with another.
Sources: U.S. Federal Maritime Commission settlement notice and detention & demurrage program materials; D.C. Circuit decision on the FMC Final Rule (46 C.F.R. 541.4), September 23, 2025. Maersk agreed to the settlement without admitting any violation of the Shipping Act or Commission regulations. Details current as of June 2, 2026.
Further Reading
- FMC — FMC Collects Civil Penalty Payment of $1,900,000 from Shipping Line
- FMC — U.S. Court of Appeals Issues Decision in Case on Demurrage and Detention Billing Practices
- FMC — Detention and Demurrage program overview
- gCaptain — FMC Hits Maersk With $1.9 Million Penalty Over Detention Billing
- FreightWaves — U.S. Fines Maersk $1.9 Million Over Detention Charges
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