Thirty-three filings a year would be 11% of every charge complaint in America.

Start with the document, because the lever is a checklist rather than an argument. 46 CFR 541.6 sets out what a demurrage or detention invoice must contain, in five groups and 20 numbered items: bill of lading numbers, container numbers, the port of discharge, and “the basis for why the billed party is the proper party and liable”; then invoice date, due date, allowed free time in days, the start and end dates of free time, container availability date for imports, earliest return date for exports, and the specific dates charged; then the total due, the applicable rule — tariff name and rule number, terminal schedule, service contract number and section, or the negotiated arrangement — and the specific rate under it; then a contact for disputes, a URL, QR code or digital watermark pointing at the mitigation procedure, and the timeframes; and finally two certifications, that the charges comply with the Commission’s rules and that the billing party’s own performance “did not cause or contribute to the charges.”

Then the sentence that makes the checklist worth money. § 541.5 provides that omitting any required minimum information from an invoice eliminates the billed party’s obligation to pay the charge. Not reduces, not opens to argument: eliminates. § 541.7(a) adds a clock on top — the invoice must issue within 30 calendar days of the day the charge was last incurred, or again the billed party need not pay — and § 541.8 requires the billing party to allow at least 30 calendar days for a mitigation request and to attempt to resolve it within 30 of receiving one. A demurrage invoice is therefore not a price. It is a form, and a form can fail inspection.

Now the burden, which is the part that almost nobody prices. 46 U.S.C. § 41310, added by Pub. L. 117-146 § 10(a) on 16 June 2022, says “a person may submit to the Federal Maritime Commission, and the Commission shall accept” information about a charge; that the Commission shall promptly investigate; that the carrier “shall bear the burden” of showing a demurrage or detention charge is reasonable under 46 CFR 545.5; that on a finding of noncompliance the Commission “shall promptly order the refund of charges paid”; and that a civil penalty under § 41107 follows. In ordinary federal litigation the complainant proves the case. Here the defendant does, and the complainant, per the Commission’s own guidance, “is not expected to testify.”

The Commission closed the last gap on 1 September 2026. Its rule in docket FMC-2026-0331 confirms that a charge complaint may be brought three ways — the Interim Procedure by email, a formal complaint under § 502.62, or a small claim under § 502.304 — that the traditional routes cost $387 and $176 respectively while the Interim Procedure costs nothing, that the processes “may not run simultaneously,” and, the line worth reading twice, that the three-year limit on reparations claims does not apply, because § 41310 “does not contain a statute of limitations.” The only time bar is the start date: the charge must have been assessed after 16 June 2022. Every demurrage invoice an American importer has paid in the last four years and four months is still live.

A free remedy, no deadline, and the burden on the other side. In FY 2025 the entire United States used it 296 times. The same document records 372 informal disputes handled by the Commission’s dispute-resolution office, recovering about $1.7 million, and 39 mediations and preliminary conferences producing settlements of about $11.4 million — an average of $292,307.69 a mediation, against $4,569.89 an informal dispute. The Commission runs on $40,000,000 and 125 full-time staff and supervises “over 9,600 ocean transportation intermediaries.” Three hundred complaints a year is 0.0308 complaints per regulated intermediary.

The consensus reading of all this is that the rules were softened and the window is closing: on 23 September 2025 the D.C. Circuit, Chief Judge Srinivasan writing, set aside part of the billing rule in World Shipping Council v. FMC, and the Commission removed it from the Code on 29 December 2025. Read the opinion. What was severed was § 541.4 alone, the provision confining who may be billed to contracting shippers or consignees, and the court said the rest “do meaningful work” and left them in effect. The twenty-item contents rule, the elimination sentence, the thirty-day clocks and the burden shift all survived intact. The one part struck down was the part that protected motor carriers from being billed — which widens the pool of people holding a defective invoice rather than narrowing it.

So the non-consensus reading. This is not a legal argument business and it is not an advocacy business; it is a document-inspection business whose findings are enforced by somebody else at their own cost. The scarce input is not capital, not a licence and not expertise. It is invoices. Entry is $176 — one small-claims filing fee held in reserve, because the complaint itself is free — and the binding constraint is that an operator clearing $5,000 a month at a 25% contingency would be filing 11.16% of every charge complaint in the United States. That is either the clearest evidence that the remedy is underused, or the clearest evidence that importers do not want it used on their behalf. The edition says which one the documents support, and which one they do not.