Neptune Atlas
War risk areas
A war risk area is not a report that something happened. It is an area of sea that underwriters (marine insurers) have drawn a line around. The business terms of a voyage through it depend on whether the ship is inside the line or outside it: the extra premium, the notice, the crew bonus and the owner’s right to refuse. That is a different question from whether there was an attack there last week. The two are less connected than most people expect.
What the Joint War Committee publishes
The Joint War Committee is a joint committee of the Lloyd’s Market Association and the International Underwriting Association. Its members represent underwriters from Lloyd’s and from insurance companies who write marine hull war cover in London. It publishes a list of areas as numbered circulars, and it revises the list when it decides to, not on a fixed calendar.
People often overstate three things about that list.
- It tells you when to notify. It does not ban anything, and it does not set a price. Every circular says that “the application of this list on individual contracts will be a matter for specific negotiation”. The market association says clearly that underwriters and brokers negotiate the rate, and the committee has no part in it. The list decides who must contact the underwriter. The underwriter decides the price.
- It mixes different kinds of entry. Some entries are just country names, some are sea areas defined by coordinates, some are regions inside a country, and some are conditional, covering, for example, only offshore installations in one economic zone. A named country includes its ports and its coastal waters out to twelve nautical miles, unless the entry says otherwise. A tool that shows all of these as one list of rectangles loses the difference between four kinds of entry.
- It is a circular, not a live feed. Revisions follow events and come at irregular times, so each boundary is a fact with a circular number and a date. A tool that shows the area but not the revision it came from hides the most important thing to check.
Why the contract is written against a zone
The obvious tool to build is a map of red dots, one per attack, updated every night. That is the wrong design, and the reason is how the contracts work, not how the map looks.
A hull war policy usually has a navigation clause. It says the ship shall not enter, sail for or turn towards the waters on the current list. This works as a contract term because the answer is yes or no and can be known in advance: the master can tell before sailing whether the voyage breaks it. An incident feed cannot do this job, because it only records what has already happened to someone else.
The policy wording shows the same point in another way. When the committee revises the list, the change does not apply automatically to a policy already written. It applies only after the underwriter gives notice, usually seven days. If a contract changed its own price all the time based on live intelligence, neither side could say what was covered at any moment.
The charterparty (charter contract) follows the same logic. The standard war risk clauses define an Area as a port, place, area, zone, waterway or canal, which is a place, not an event. The owner’s right to refuse, the charterer’s duty to repay costs and the change to freight all depend on whether the ship was ordered into an Area.
The Singapore Strait has the highest count of armed robbery anywhere in the world. Yet it has no listing at all, because the crime there is theft from moving ships, and that does not change the cover. The Gulf of Guinea records a small part of that count, but it has its own defined area, because there criminals take crew for ransom, and almost all of the world’s crew kidnappings come from a very few incidents in that water. An incident feed measures how often something happened. A listed area shows how bad it could be and who pays.
How the cover is put together
A normal hull and machinery policy excludes war, so the owner buys cover for war, strikes, terrorism and related risks separately. Four features of that separate cover matter to a fixture (an agreed charter).
- Piracy is not in it. This surprises almost everyone. The standard war and strikes wording excludes piracy. Piracy is covered by the normal hull policy instead, because that policy keeps barratry (wrongful acts by the master or crew) and piracy out of its own war exclusion. So “war risk cover” and “piracy cover” are different purchases, and a broker who assumes the war policy covers a hijacking is wrong.
- The premium is charged for the exposure. Entering a listed area costs an additional premium, usually quoted as a percentage of the insured value of the hull, and charged for each transit or each port call. On an expensive ship a fraction of a per cent is a large sum, and when an area gets worse these quotes change within days.
- Cancellation on notice is the tool underwriters actually use. Either side may cancel the war cover with seven days’ notice, and the underwriters agree to restore it if a new rate or new conditions are agreed before the notice ends. This is how underwriters change the price for a region. There is also a separate and much rarer rule, automatic termination, which ends cover at once, without notice, on events such as war breaking out between certain named great powers, or the state requisitioning (taking over) the ship.
- Detention has its own clock. If the ship is seized and the owner loses free use and control of it, the wording treats twelve months in a row as a constructive total loss. The ship is then treated as lost even though it still exists, so a seizure is not just a problem of delay.
Next to the hull cover sit other purchases. Excess war risks cover protects the protection and indemnity (P&I) side, because the clubs exclude war from normal cover. Kidnap and ransom cover applies where the risk is to people, not the ship. There is also loss of hire cover. Each is a separate contract with its own limits, and in the worst regions the war side has lower sub-limits than elsewhere.
Who pays, under the charter
The standard war risk clauses for time and voyage charters were both revised in 2025. The revision matters because it tightened the definitions that decide who pays. Both clauses give the owner the right to refuse to send the ship to an Area, or to leave one, where the master or owners reasonably judge it may be exposed to war risks. This applies whether or not the risk existed when the charter was made.
In the normal case, the owner pays the basic yearly war risk premium on the hull and the charterer repays the additional premium for the area. Under the current time charter clause, the charterer must pay this within a short stated period after the owner’s invoice, and also repays crew bonuses and extra wages on proof of payment. The ship stays on hire (the charterer keeps paying) while the clause is being followed. On the voyage side, freight is adjusted for the time and cost of a longer alternative route rather than by a fixed mileage threshold, which is a change from the older wording.
The crew bonus is a real cost, not a small one. Under the seafarers’ union terms, a designated warlike operations area gives the crew a bonus equal to their daily basic wage for the whole stay, with a minimum number of days. It also doubles death and disability compensation. Note that the union keeps its own list of warlike areas, which is not the underwriters’ list and does not match it.
One phrase, several different risks
| Water | What the exposure actually is | What it does to a fixture |
|---|---|---|
| Southern Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb | Attacks on the ship from the coast at a distance: missiles, drones, uncrewed boats | A premium for each transit as a percentage of hull value, a crew bonus, and many owners refusing the passage completely |
| Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, Gulf of Oman | Interference and seizure by a state, and widespread jamming of satellite navigation | Premium and notification on any call or transit. There is no way to route round it: every berth in the Gulf is inside the area |
| Black Sea and Sea of Azov | An active war. Drones, missiles and mines, with ships hit in port as well as at sea | Cover quoted voyage by voyage. The price can multiply within weeks, and cover can be withdrawn |
| Gulf of Guinea | Kidnap of the crew for ransom, including far offshore | Hardening (making the ship harder to board), a citadel (a secure room for the crew), sometimes an escort. The risk is to people, so a different cover applies |
| Somali basin and western Indian Ocean | Hijack of the whole ship for ransom, far offshore | Reporting and protective measures in the voluntary reporting area, as well as the listing |
| Singapore Strait | Theft from moving ships at night | Rarely affects the cover or the rate. A matter for the crew on watch |
Missiles from a coast, seizure at a strait, kidnap offshore and petty theft at three in the morning are not one risk, and each needs a different conversation with the owner. A tool that shows all of them as the same red rectangle has removed the information the broker needed most.
One common mistake is worth correcting here, because it is repeated everywhere. The industry high risk area in the Indian Ocean was withdrawn at the start of 2023. The voluntary reporting area did not replace it: the reporting area already existed, was run separately, and simply continued after it. And withdrawing the industry area did not remove anything from the underwriters’ list, which is a different document from a different body. Two bodies moved in opposite directions at the same time, which a single red overlay cannot show.
The reroute is the decision
When an area gets bad enough, the question is no longer the premium but the route. Going round the Cape of Good Hope instead of through Suez adds thousands of miles and well over a week to a voyage from Asia or the Gulf to Europe. It saves the canal toll, but it uses a lot of fuel and many days. The sea distance calculator measures both routes, with the canal used or avoided.
Neither answer is clearly right and the costs do not balance simply, so price both. The direct route also has two operating costs that should be counted in days, not dollars: reporting and protective measures take time, and where escorted or grouped transits run, a ship has to wait for one. An estimate that prices the premium but not the delay has priced only half the cost.
Instructions that contradict themselves
Here is a practical warning for anyone who uses or builds a routing tool. “Avoid the Gulf of Guinea” cannot be followed on a voyage loading at Lagos, because Lagos is inside it. The same is true of “avoid the Black Sea” for a cargo to Constanta, and “avoid the Gulf” for any cargo loading at Basrah. Read literally, these instructions mean the ship can never leave the berth.
The right behaviour is neither to refuse nor to route through the area silently. It is to drop the impossible instruction for that leg and say which one was dropped, so that the reader sees that they are loading inside the area, instead of seeing no route at all. If the tool says nothing, a broker can believe that a voyage avoided an area when it did not.
What none of this is
Approximate boundaries drawn over published areas are a planning aid. They are not the underwriter’s definition and they do not state what is covered. A ship can be inside a listed area but outside every drawn rectangle, or the other way round. The market has also started to assess individual voyages as well as zones, looking at the flag, the ownership and the other party as well as the position, none of which a map can show.
The zone decides which contract terms apply. Intelligence about the current risk sets the price. Neither replaces the other. The answer to every question on this page is the same, and no screen gives it: before quoting, confirm the listed area, the additional premium, the notice requirement and the crew position with the underwriters and the club. What a desk needs from software is a warning that the question exists on this voyage, early enough to ask it.
References
- Lloyd’s Market Association, Joint War Committee. Rating is a matter for individual negotiation between underwriters and brokers and the committee plays no role in it. lmalloyds.com
- International Underwriting Association, Joint War Committee Risk List, Listed Areas. iua.co.uk
- BIMCO, War Risks Clause for Time Chartering 2025 (CONWARTIME 2025), 2025. bimco.org
- BIMCO, War Risks Clause for Voyage Charter Parties 2025 (VOYWAR 2025), 2025. bimco.org
- ICC International Maritime Bureau, Global maritime piracy and armed robbery increased in 2025, 2026. icc-ccs.org
- International Transport Workers’ Federation, IBF Warlike and High Risk Areas. itfseafarers.org
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Neptune Atlas
Neptune Atlas draws war risk and piracy areas on the chart, tells you which ones a computed route actually passes through, and will route a leg round one so both answers can be priced side by side. The boxes are planning approximations of published areas and every answer says so. There is no incident feed behind them and there is deliberately not going to be one. 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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