Neptune Atlas
Charterparty forms
Nobody drafts a charterparty from a blank page. A fixture is done on a named printed form, chosen because both sides already know roughly what it says, and then amended by typed clauses that on a working fixture run several times longer than the form itself. Which form is named tells you a lot about the negotiation ahead. How the printed part and the typed part interact is where a surprising share of disputes actually live, and the answer is not the one most people assume.
Why forms exist
A charter allocates a long list of risks: who pays for what, who bears delay, what happens when the cargo is late, when the ship is off hire, which law governs and where a dispute is heard. Doing that from first principles for every fixture is impossible at the speed the market works. Chartering is conducted by e-mail over hours between parties who often have no relationship beyond this one cargo.
A standard form makes almost all of it a default. The negotiation is then only about the terms that differ, which are the ones on the recap: ship, cargo, quantity, ports, laycan, rate, laytime, demurrage, commissions and a short list of specials. That is why a ship can be fixed in an afternoon.
The main forms
| Form | What it is for | Editions and what to know |
|---|---|---|
| GENCON | General purpose dry cargo voyage charter, published by BIMCO as the Uniform General Charter | First issued 1922, put into the box layout in 1974, revised 1976, 1994 and 2022. The 1994 edition’s Part II has nineteen clauses; the 2022 edition is roughly twice the length |
| NYPE | New York Produce Exchange time charter, the dominant dry cargo time charter | First published 1913, amended 1921, 1931 and 1946, revised 1981, 1993 and 2015. The copyright sits with the American shipbrokers’ association; the 2015 edition was written jointly with BIMCO and the Singapore Maritime Foundation |
| BALTIME | BIMCO’s own dry cargo time charter | Issued 1909 and still code named BALTIME 1939, as revised 2001. There is no later edition, whatever a form catalogue tells you |
| ASBATANKVOY | Tanker voyage charter | October 1977, and overhauled in 2025 after forty-eight years. It is the only dedicated tanker voyage form not tied to an oil major, which is the whole reason it survives |
| SHELLVOY, SHELLTIME, BPVOY | Tanker voyage and time charters published by individual oil majors | Company forms rather than industry forms. SHELLTIME 4 dates from 1984 and was amended in 2003; SHELLVOY 6 from 2005 |
| BARECON | Bareboat charter | A different animal. The charterer takes the ship without crew and becomes, for most practical purposes, the owner for the period |
| SUPPLYTIME, TOWCON, TOWHIRE, HEAVYCON | Offshore support, towage and heavy lift | Separate families with their own conventions, several of them running a knock for knock liability regime in which each side carries its own losses regardless of fault |
Beneath those sit the commodity forms, written around one trade’s loading customs: North American grain, Continent grain, Americanised Welsh coal for the United States coal trade, coal and ore, fertiliser, sugar and others. Where one exists the trade expects it, because the laytime and loading customs in it are the ones the terminal actually works to. A warning about them: form catalogues describe these badly and confidently. One widely copied list glosses the North American grain charter as Norwegian. Take the trade from the publisher, not from a directory.
Old editions are not dead editions
This catches newcomers every time. Naming a form without a year is ambiguous, and the ambiguity is not academic, because the market goes on fixing on editions that are decades old. When the 2015 edition of NYPE was published, its own explanatory notes said the 1946 edition was arguably still the most commonly used version of the charter. A form with twenty-eight printed clauses, buried under sixty typed ones, is a perfectly ordinary thing to meet.
There is a real reason for it and it is not laziness. An old form has decades of decided cases attached to it, so both sides know what its words have been held to mean. A new edition is better drafted and less predictable. Which of those a party prefers depends on whether they expect to be arguing.
It is worth knowing what the revisions changed, because the difference is not cosmetic. GENCON had no law and arbitration clause at all until 1994, which is why one was the commonest rider addition before then. The 2022 edition rebuilt the owner’s liability clause and changed how weather is treated in laytime, from something that interrupts the running of time to an exception that applies only when weather actually stops the ship working. Two editions of one form, and the demurrage calculation comes out differently.
The bias is real and it is priced
Forms are not neutral. The clearest example is the pair of dry cargo time charters. BALTIME’s responsibility clause, the one the trade nicknames the owners’ irresponsibility clause, cuts the owner out of liability for almost everything other than a personal failure of their own, so that even the negligence of their own servants falls outside it. NYPE is the more balanced document, and it is the form wired into the industry agreement that apportions cargo claims between owner and charterer. Charterers’ brokers resist BALTIME for exactly that reason. Courts have historically read the BALTIME exclusion narrowly, so it protects less absolutely than it reads, but the starting position is unmistakable.
The same split runs through the tanker trades in a different form. An industry form was drafted by a committee containing owners, charterers, brokers and clubs, so the base text is already a compromise and both sides negotiate from a shared midpoint. An oil major’s own form is that charterer’s position, issued unilaterally. An owner amending it starts from a worse baseline, and the desk on the other side often has limited authority to move. The length tells the story on its own: the neutral tanker voyage form is a handful of pages of printed clauses, and a major’s current form is an order of magnitude longer.
How the document is put together
- Part I is a grid of numbered boxes: parties, ship, cargo, ports, laycan, rate, laytime, demurrage, commissions, law and arbitration, and a final box listing the additional clauses. Each box is annotated with the printed clause it feeds. This is the fixture in tabular form.
- Part II is the printed clauses, which almost nobody reads during the negotiation because both sides believe they know what they say.
- Rider clauses are typed on, numbered continuing from where the printed clauses stop, and are where the real negotiation lives.
- Addenda are amendments agreed after the fixture.
Not every form uses that layout. NYPE has no box grid: it is a preamble, a continuous body of clauses and an annex describing the ship, and that annex is part of the contract. Recognising which shape you are in matters before you start quoting clause numbers at anybody.
Precedence, and why the typed clause does not always win
The received wisdom is that typed beats printed. It is a decent rule of thumb and it is not the rule.
Forms address this with an order of precedence clause, typically saying that Part I prevails over Part II to the extent of the conflict, and the better drafted ones add “but no further”. Three things then go wrong in practice.
- The clause only operates on a genuine inconsistency, and tribunals work hard not to find one. The test is whether effect can fairly be given to both provisions. If the printed clause can be read as qualifying the typed one rather than contradicting it, both survive and the negotiated term does not sweep the printed one away. Fixtures have turned on exactly this, where a recap set a laytime term and a pro forma clause carved an exception out of it, and the exception stood.
- Typed does not win merely by being typed. A typed addendum does not override every printed exception by virtue of its medium. The typed words have to be specific enough to show the party actually took on the obligation.
- The precedence clause may not reach the riders at all. It was drafted to rank Part I against Part II. Some forms expressly extend it to the additional clauses and some do not, and where it does not, an appended rider set has no stated ranking and falls back on general principles.
The practical consequence is a drafting discipline rather than a legal one. Do not rely on precedence. Strike through the printed clause you are displacing, or open the rider with express words naming the clause it overrides. A rider that merely adds without deleting will usually be read as qualifying the printed clause, not replacing it.
A related habit worth understanding: deleted printed words are conventionally left visible with a line through them rather than removed. The document is then a record of what was struck out as well as of what was agreed, which is why a clean retyped version that silently drops the deletions is worth less than the marked up one. Whether a tribunal may then look at what was deleted in order to read what survived is a question for the governing law, and it is argued about.
The pro forma, and the phrase that causes trouble
A great many fixtures are not done on a blank form at all. They are done on a previous charterparty between the same parties, described in the negotiation as a pro forma, and the recap says something like “otherwise as per the charterparty dated such and such with logical amendments”.
Everybody uses the phrase and it settles less than it appears to. The amendments that are logical are the mechanical ones: the ship’s name, the dates, the ports, the rate. What it does not settle is whether a clause written for a different cargo, a different trade or a different ship still applies, or whether a change agreed in the recap carries knock-on consequences in clauses nobody re-read. A tribunal then reconstructs intent from a document neither party drafted for this fixture. If a pro forma is being used, name it exactly, by date and by the fixture it came from, and say which clauses are deleted rather than trusting the word logical to do it.
Standard clauses as a separate layer
Beyond whole forms, the industry bodies publish individual clauses to be bolted onto any charter: war risks, sanctions, security, bunker sulphur content, emissions schemes, hull fouling, laytime definitions, law and arbitration. They exist because a new problem arrives faster than a form can be revised, and a clause the whole market has seen before is easier to agree than one side’s drafting. Every one of them carries a year, they are superseded, and a current version frequently covers things an older one does not. Pasting one into a fixture that has already dealt with the same subject in a rider produces two regimes for one problem, and the precedence clause then decides something nobody intended.
What actually binds, and when
The charterparty document is usually drawn days or weeks after the fixture is concluded, and sometimes it is never signed. The contract came into existence when the last subject was lifted, on the terms in the recap, and courts treat formation across an e-mail chain as entirely ordinary. The form named in that recap is incorporated at that moment, edition and all.
Which means the recap has to name it properly. “As per GENCON” with no year, or “as per owners’ pro forma” with no pro forma identified, is an incomplete term in a live contract. It costs nothing to fix at the time and is very hard to fix afterwards.
A standard form is a shared default, not a safe harbour. It saves the negotiation from inventing a contract, which is enormously valuable, and it quietly imports a risk allocation that somebody chose. The two disciplines that follow are unglamorous: name the form and the edition precisely, and read the printed clauses your riders are about to contradict. Almost every argument about what a charterparty said is an argument that one of those two was skipped.
References
- BIMCO, GENCON 2022, 2022. bimco.org
- BIMCO, NYPE 2015, 2015. bimco.org
- BIMCO, BALTIME 1939 (as revised 2001). bimco.org
- BIMCO, BIMCO and ASBA publish updated oil tanker charter party (ASBATANKVOY 2025), 2025. bimco.org
- Steamship Mutual, SHELLVOY 6: the new provisions and their substantive impact on shipowners. steamshipmutual.com
- Steamship Mutual, Pro forma charterparty, printed terms v negotiated terms, 2010. steamshipmutual.com
Related
Neptune Atlas
Neptune Atlas holds the deal as a fixture: the parties, the rate and its basis, the laycan and the demurrage figure, with the laytime worked against a statement of facts recorded on the same record. It does not carry the charterparty itself. There is no clause library in this version, no drafting, and no copy of the printed forms, which are published by the bodies that maintain them and are theirs to license. Every paid plan starts with 7 free days. A card is needed to start them, and cancelling before they end costs nothing.
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