Dwell time is how long something sits still in the supply chain: a container’s days in the terminal between discharge and gate-out, an export box waiting to load, a transshipment box between vessels, or a vessel’s hours at berth. Rising dwell is the classic congestion symptom.
Import dwell (discharge to gate-out) is the most watched flavour because it burns free time and predicts demurrage; its drivers are customs, documentation, appointments, and yard congestion. Export dwell measures gate-in to load, and berth dwell measures how long ships occupy the quay.
Terminals manage dwell aggressively since yard density degrades every operation; ports and authorities publish dwell statistics as performance indicators, and persistent high dwell pushes carriers to adjust services.
Dwell is pure event arithmetic, which makes it directly computable from tracking: discharge to gate-out per container, aggregated per port. TrackingMCP’s port pages carry that activity context, and per-container dwell in tracking flags boxes idling toward their last free day at gateways like New York or Rotterdam.
Dwell time is how long something sits still in the supply chain: a container’s days in the terminal between discharge and gate-out, an export box waiting to load, a transshipment box between vessels, or a vessel’s hours at berth. Rising dwell is the classic congestion symptom.
A few days at a fluid gateway is common, but normal is port-specific and regime-specific: transshipment hubs run different clocks than import gateways. Judge dwell against the port’s own baseline, not a universal number.
No. Dwell is the physical time in the terminal; demurrage is the charge after free time expires. Dwell inside free time costs nothing; every dwell day beyond it is billable.
Dwell context per port →
Track container dwell live →
More in Ports & terminals: Port congestion · Anchorage (anchorage wait) · Terminal operating system (TOS) · Terminal appointment · Gate-in & gate-out · Empty return · Earliest return date (ERD) · Container yard (CY) · Container freight station (CFS) · Port of loading & discharge (POL/POD) · Browse all 106 terms →