Laytime

Notice of readiness

Published 20 August 2026 · updated 22 September 2026

Notice of readiness is the document that starts the laytime clock. It is one page, it is usually sent in a hurry by a master with other things to do, and it is the most argued-about piece of paper in a voyage charter. A demurrage claim can turn entirely on whether it was valid.

Three assertions, three lines of attack

A NOR asserts three separate things at the same moment: that the ship has arrived, that she is ready in all respects to load or discharge, and that the notice is tendered in accordance with the charterparty.

Each one is attackable on its own. A charterer resisting a demurrage claim does not need all three to fail. Knock out any single one and the notice was invalid, laytime never commenced when the owner says it did, and every hour in the calculation moves.

Arrived: the answer depends on which charter was signed

Whether a ship waiting at anchor has arrived is not a question about the ship. It is a question about the contract.

Under a berth charter, the named berth is the contractual destination. She has not arrived until she is in it. Time spent waiting at the anchorage for congestion to clear is the owner’s risk, and no NOR tendered from the anchorage is good unless a clause says otherwise.

Under a port charter, the port is the destination. She arrives when she is within the port and at the immediate and effective disposition of the charterer. The usual English law test puts a ship waiting inside the port limits at a customary waiting place on the right side of that line, and a ship anchored well outside the limits on the wrong side.

That distinction decides who carries congestion risk, which in a congested load port is often worth more than the freight the parties spent a week negotiating. It is not signalled by the heading: a charter that names a berth but adds a clause moving waiting time to charterers is a berth charter with the risk shifted, not a port charter. Read the clause, not the label.

Ready: physical and legal

Physically ready means the ship can actually work the cargo now. Holds clean, dry and free of the last cargo’s residue, and passed by whoever the charterparty appoints to inspect them. Gear tested and working if she is geared. Hatches able to be opened, ballast able to be run. On a tanker, tanks stripped, lines clear and the cargo system set up for the grade.

Tendering before hold inspection is a routine source of invalidity. A ship whose holds have not yet passed is not ready, she expects to be ready, and the two are not the same assertion. If the holds fail at 0600 and pass at 1400, the notice given at 0500 was untrue when it was given.

Legally ready covers free pratique, customs clearance and the papers the port requires. Whether the absence of free pratique defeats a NOR is exactly the sort of question where practice differs by jurisdiction and by form. Where pratique is a formality granted on arrival, it is often treated as no bar to readiness. Where it is a real inspection that could refuse the ship, it is a genuine precondition. WIFPON exists because the question is live enough to need a clause.

Tender: to whom, in what form, in what hours

• To whom. To charterers, or to the party the charterparty names: their agents, the shippers, the receivers. Notice given to the ship’s own agent is not automatically notice to the charterer, and a chain of forwarding can put the effective time hours later than the master’s.
• In what form. Many clauses specify writing, and some specify the channel. Older forms still list letter, telex, cable and radio, which becomes a real question when the notice goes out as an e-mail attachment at 2347 to an address nobody reads until morning.
• In what hours. The common restriction is office hours on working days, something like 0800 to 1700 Monday to Friday and 0800 to 1200 Saturday. A notice tendered at 2200 on a Saturday under that clause does not take effect on Saturday. It waits.

The hours restriction is the trap that catches otherwise unimpeachable notices. The ship has genuinely arrived. She is genuinely ready. The notice still fails to start anything, because the contract said when it could be given and it was given at another time.

The WI family, and what each one actually waives

These abbreviations move one precondition each. They are drafting shorthand, not statute, and they do nothing beyond the precondition they name.

They are usually stacked into one line: NOR to be tendered WIPON WIBON WIFPON WICCON. Read that as four independent waivers rather than as a general blessing. WIBON does not make an unready ship ready. If the argument is about hold cleanliness, none of the four is any help at all, and an owner who tendered on the strength of the stack has simply tendered an invalid notice with more letters after it.

A valid NOR still does not start laytime

What a good notice starts is the notice period, called turn time or free time depending on the form. Six hours and twelve hours are both common. So is the older formula: laytime commences at 1300 if the notice is tendered before noon, and at 0800 on the next working day if it is tendered in the afternoon.

Turn time exists so that a ship arriving at 0300 does not eat the charterer’s allowance before anyone can respond to her. Whether cargo work actually done during turn time counts against laytime is a clause-level question, and both answers are in circulation.

Re-tendering

When the first notice was bad, the ordinary remedy is another one. Holds fail, they are cleaned, they pass, a fresh NOR goes out and the clock is argued from there. Some owners tender again every day as routine, so that if the first notice is later attacked there is a valid one on the file. That costs an e-mail and it has saved a great many claims.

Do not assume an invalid notice repairs itself. There is a line of reasoning under which a defective notice matures once the ship truly becomes ready, and there are tribunals that will not go near it. Relying on the notice curing itself is relying on the tribunal, which is a worse position than sending a second e-mail.

Nobody objected at the time. That is not agreement

This is the part with commercial consequences. The notice is tendered, the agent acknowledges receipt, the ship berths, cargo starts, the voyage carries on. Nobody says the notice was invalid, because at that moment nobody is looking for a reason to say it.

Months later the demurrage claim lands and somebody in a claims department reads the file properly for the first time. Now the Saturday-night tender matters. Now the hold inspection that failed in the morning and passed in the afternoon matters. Silence at the time is rarely a waiver: unless the charterparty carries a clause deeming a notice accepted if not challenged within a set period, and some do, an unchallenged notice is not a validated one.

Which is why the statement of facts carries the weight. The NOR is the assertion. The SOF is the evidence for it: tender time, inspection result and time, free pratique granted, customs cleared, pilot on board, first line ashore, all fast, commenced loading. Recorded as it happens by somebody present, in UTC with the local offset stated, because a notice argued over a year later is only as good as the timeline underneath it.

The charterparty decides all of it

Everything above is convention, and the conventions differ by form. Gencon, Asbatankvoy, Synacomex, Norgrain and a long tail of house forms and riders each answer these questions differently, and hardly any of the answers are on by default. Whether arrival means the berth or the port, whether free pratique is a precondition, and what hours a notice may be given in: all of that is drafting, not custom. A broker who knows the terminology has learned the vocabulary of the argument. The clause is what settles it.

References

• Steamship Mutual, Notice of readiness, FAQs. steamshipmutual.com
• Steamship Mutual, Berth or port charter?, 2010. steamshipmutual.com
• Skuld, A brief history of laytime, 2018. skuld.com
• BIMCO, CMI, FONASBA and the Baltic Exchange, Laytime Definitions for Charter Parties 2013, 2013. fonasba.com

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