Neptune Atlas
Charterparty forms
A charterparty is the contract for hiring a ship. Nobody writes one on a blank page. A fixture (an agreed deal) uses a named printed form, chosen because both sides already know roughly what it says. Then typed clauses change it. On a real fixture, the typed clauses are often several times longer than the form. The form chosen tells you a lot about the negotiation ahead. Many disputes come from how the printed part and the typed part fit together. And the answer is not the one most people expect.
Why forms exist
A charter shares out a long list of risks. Who pays for what? Who carries the cost of delay? What happens when the cargo is late, or when the ship is off hire (out of service)? Which law applies, and where is a dispute heard? Nobody can work all that out from the start for every fixture at the speed the market moves. Chartering happens by e-mail over a few hours. Often the two parties have no relationship beyond this one cargo.
A standard form turns almost all of it into a default. The negotiation then covers only the terms that differ. These are the terms in the recap (the written summary of the deal): ship, cargo, quantity, ports, laycan, rate, laytime, demurrage, commissions and a short list of special terms. That is why a ship can be fixed in one afternoon.
The main forms
| Form | What it is for | Editions and what to know |
|---|---|---|
| GENCON | A general dry cargo voyage charter. BIMCO publishes it as the Uniform General Charter | First issued 1922. Moved to the box layout in 1974. Revised 1976, 1994 and 2022. The 1994 edition's Part II has nineteen clauses. The 2022 edition is about twice as long |
| NYPE | The New York Produce Exchange time charter, the main dry cargo time charter | First published 1913. Amended 1921, 1931 and 1946. Revised 1981, 1993 and 2015. The American shipbrokers' association holds the copyright. The 2015 edition was written together with BIMCO and the Singapore Maritime Foundation |
| BALTIME | BIMCO's own dry cargo time charter | Issued 1909. It is still called BALTIME 1939, as revised 2001. There is no later edition, whatever a form catalogue says |
| ASBATANKVOY | A tanker voyage charter | October 1977, and fully revised in 2025 after forty-eight years. It is the only tanker voyage form not linked to an oil major. That is the main reason it is still used |
| SHELLVOY, SHELLTIME, BPVOY | Tanker voyage and time charters published by individual oil majors | Company forms, not industry forms. SHELLTIME 4 dates from 1984 and was amended in 2003. SHELLVOY 6 dates from 2005 |
| BARECON | Bareboat charter | A different kind of contract. The charterer takes the ship without a crew. For most practical purposes, the charterer becomes the owner for the period |
| SUPPLYTIME, TOWCON, TOWHIRE, HEAVYCON | Offshore support, towage and heavy lift | Separate families with their own customs. Several use a "knock for knock" system, where each side carries its own losses, whoever is at fault |
Below these are the commodity forms. Each is 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 a commodity form exists, the trade expects you to use it. Its laytime and loading customs are the ones the terminal really follows. Be careful: form catalogues often describe these forms wrongly. One widely copied list calls the North American grain charter Norwegian. Check the trade with the publisher, not with a directory.
Old editions are not dead editions
Newcomers often get this wrong. If you name a form without a year, nobody knows which edition you mean. That matters in practice, because the market still fixes on editions that are decades old. When the 2015 edition of NYPE came out, its own notes said the 1946 edition was probably still the most used version. It is quite normal to meet a form with twenty-eight printed clauses under sixty typed ones.
There is a real reason for this, and it is not laziness. An old form has decades of court cases behind it. So both sides know what its words have been held to mean. A new edition is better written, but less predictable. Which one a party prefers depends on whether it expects a dispute.
It helps to know what the revisions changed, because the changes are real. GENCON had no law and arbitration clause at all until 1994. Before then, that was the most common clause added by rider. The 2022 edition rewrote the owner's liability clause. It also changed how weather counts in laytime. Before, bad weather stopped the laytime clock. Now it is an exception that applies only when weather actually stops the ship working. Two editions of one form give two different demurrage results.
The bias is real and it is priced
Forms are not neutral, and the two dry cargo time charters are the clearest example. The trade calls BALTIME's responsibility clause the "owners' irresponsibility clause", because it frees the owner from liability for almost everything except the owner's own personal failure, even negligence by the owner's own employees. NYPE is more balanced. It is also the form built into the industry agreement that splits cargo claims between owner and charterer. That is exactly why charterers' brokers resist BALTIME. Courts have usually read the BALTIME exclusion narrowly, so it protects the owner less than its words suggest. But it clearly starts from the owner's side.
The tanker trades show the same split in another way. An industry form is written by a committee of owners, charterers, brokers and P&I clubs. So its basic text is already a compromise, and both sides start from a shared middle point. An oil major's own form is that charterer's position, issued by one side. An owner who wants to change it starts from a worse position. And the desk on the other side often has little authority to agree changes. The length shows the difference. The neutral tanker voyage form has a few pages of printed clauses. An oil major's current form is about ten times 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. A final box lists the extra clauses. Each box shows which printed clause it feeds. This is the fixture in table form.
- Part II is the printed clauses. Almost nobody reads them during the negotiation, because both sides think they know what they say.
- Rider clauses are typed and added. Their numbers continue from where the printed clauses stop. The real negotiation happens in them.
- Addenda are changes agreed after the fixture.
Not every form uses this layout. NYPE has no grid of boxes: it has an opening section, one continuous set of clauses, and an annex describing the ship, and that annex is part of the contract. Know which layout you have before you quote clause numbers to anyone.
Precedence, and why the typed clause does not always win
Most people believe typed clauses beat printed ones. That is often true in practice, but it is not the legal rule.
Forms deal with this in an order of precedence clause. It usually says that Part I wins over Part II where they conflict. The better forms add "but no further". In practice, three things go wrong.
- The clause only works where there is a real conflict, and tribunals try hard not to find one. The test is whether both clauses can fairly have effect. If the printed clause can be read as limiting the typed one, not contradicting it, both survive. Then the negotiated term does not cancel the printed one. Fixtures have been decided on exactly this point. In one case, a recap set a laytime term, a pro forma clause made an exception to it, and the exception stood.
- A typed clause does not win just because it is typed. A typed addendum does not override every printed exception simply because of how it was written. The typed words must be clear enough to show the party really accepted the duty.
- The precedence clause may not cover the riders at all. It was written to rank Part I against Part II. Some forms say clearly that it also covers the extra clauses, and some do not. Where it does not, the riders have no stated rank, and general legal principles decide.
So the answer is careful drafting, not law. Do not rely on precedence. Strike out the printed clause you are replacing. Or start the rider with clear words that name the clause it overrides. A rider that only adds, and deletes nothing, will usually be read as limiting the printed clause, not replacing it.
A related custom: deleted printed words usually stay visible with a line through them. They are not removed. So the document records what was struck out as well as what was agreed. That is why a clean, retyped copy that quietly drops the deletions is worth less than the marked-up one. Whether a tribunal may then look at deleted words to understand the words that remain depends on the law of the contract, and people argue about it.
The pro forma, and the phrase that causes trouble
Many fixtures are not done on a blank form at all. They use an earlier charterparty between the same parties, called a pro forma in the negotiation. The recap then says something like "otherwise as per the charterparty dated such and such with logical amendments".
Everyone uses this phrase, and it settles less than it seems to. The logical changes are the mechanical ones: the ship's name, the dates, the ports, the rate. The phrase does not settle whether a clause written for another cargo, trade or ship still applies. Nor does it settle whether a change agreed in the recap affects other clauses that nobody read again. A tribunal must then work out what the parties meant from a document that neither of them wrote for this fixture. If you use a pro forma, name it exactly, by date and by the fixture it came from. And say which clauses are deleted. Do not trust the word "logical" to do it.
Standard clauses as a separate layer
As well as whole forms, the industry bodies publish single clauses that can be added to any charter. They cover war risks, sanctions, security, sulphur in fuel, emissions schemes, hull fouling, laytime definitions, and law and arbitration. They exist because new problems arrive faster than a form can be revised. And a clause the whole market has seen before is easier to agree than one side's own wording. Every one of them has a year. Newer versions replace older ones, and a current version often covers things an older one does not. Sometimes a rider in a fixture already deals with a subject, and someone pastes in a standard clause on the same subject. Then there are two sets of rules for one problem, and the precedence clause decides something nobody intended.
What actually binds, and when
The charterparty document is usually written days or weeks after the fixture is agreed. Sometimes it is never signed. The contract began when the last subject (condition) was lifted, on the terms in the recap. Courts treat a contract made through a chain of e-mails as completely normal. The form named in that recap became part of the contract at that moment, including its edition.
So the recap must name the form properly. "As per GENCON" with no year, or "as per owners' pro forma" with no pro forma named, leaves a term incomplete in a live contract. Fixing it at the time costs nothing. Fixing it later is very hard.
A standard form is a shared default, not a guarantee of safety. It saves the parties from inventing a contract, which is very valuable. But it also quietly brings in a split of risk that someone else chose. Two plain habits follow. Name the form and the edition exactly. And read the printed clauses that your riders are about to contradict. Almost every argument about what a charterparty said comes from skipping one of these two.
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 keeps the deal as a fixture: the parties, the rate and its basis, the laycan and the demurrage figure. The laytime is worked out against a statement of facts on the same record. It does not hold the charterparty itself. This version has no clause library, no drafting, and no copy of the printed forms. The bodies that maintain those forms publish them, and the right to license them is theirs. 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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