Broking

What a ship broker does

Published 21 August 2026 · updated 17 October 2026

A ship broker works between someone who has cargo to move and someone who has a ship to fill, and is paid only when the two make a deal. Almost everything else about the job comes from this: what a broker collects, what a broker is worth to each side, and why the working day starts before the market opens.

Two lists, and the match between them

On one side is cargo. For example, a charterer (the party hiring a ship) needs thirty thousand tonnes of cement clinker moved from the Gulf of Kutch to East Coast India in the second week of October, and wants to know the cost. On the other side is tonnage: ships that become free somewhere, on some date, and earn nothing until they get new work.

Neither list is published. There is no exchange, no screen with live prices, and no register of which ships are free where. Both lists are built from e-mail, phone calls and the desk’s own records of past work. This often surprises people from other industries: the market a broker works in is not visible anywhere, and exists only in the mailboxes of the people who trade in it.

So a desk’s real asset is neither software nor a general set of contacts. It is two years of those two lists, kept accurately, so that when a cargo arrives the desk can name the ships that could really carry it in ten minutes instead of a day. Brokers compete mainly on that speed, because the charterer usually sends the enquiry to several brokers at once.

For brokers who manage that work every day, ship broker software can keep cargo enquiries, vessel positions, contacts and fixture work connected in one place.

What a broker actually sells

A broker sells neither the ship nor the cargo, but three other things. It helps to separate them, because newcomers often think the first one is the whole job.

• Coverage. Knowing which ships are free and which cargoes are moving, across more owners and charterers than either side can watch alone. An owner sees only their own fleet, while a broker sees three hundred ships and knows which of them are idle this week.
• Judgement. Knowing which of those ships the charterer will really accept, what the cargo is worth today rather than last month, whether the other party pays, and whether a berth that looks fine on paper is deep enough for the ship. This part takes years to learn, and nobody can buy it.
• Keeping a negotiation going. Passing offers and counter-offers on quickly and accurately, keeping both principals (the owner and the charterer) informed enough to stay in the talks, writing down what was agreed, and following up the details after everyone else has stopped paying attention. Deals fail on this much more often than on price.

A morning

On a dry cargo desk the day has a fairly steady shape. It is driven by one fact: a ship’s position is useful for about forty-eight hours.

• Early. Read the circulars. These are twenty to forty e-mails from owners and competing brokers, each listing anywhere from one to fifty ships that are becoming free. Anything useful goes onto the position list.
• Then the cargo side. Read the enquiries from charterers and from other brokers. Work out whose cargo each one really is, because the same cargo often arrives three times through three chains of brokers, with the wording changed at each step.
• The middle of the day. Match, quote and follow up. Offer ships for cargoes, show cargoes to owners, do the sums on anything that looks close, and follow up the half dozen negotiations already running.
• Late. Confirm what was fixed (agreed), report what failed, and send out the desk’s own list so the market knows what you are working on.

Notice that a broker reads and writes almost all day, because the output of the job is text: a circular, an offer, a counter-offer, a recap (the summary of the agreed deal). Everything else is preparation for writing one of those four accurately.

Whose broker are you

Every negotiation has at least two brokers, and often more. The side you are on decides what you are paid to do.

A broker can be on either side on different days, and on both sides of the same trade in different weeks. What matters is that everyone in the chain knows which side each person is on before any number is passed.

The kinds of broking

Most people mean chartering when they say ship broking. But chartering is one of several separate trades that share a name but have little else in common.

Operations is sometimes confused with broking. It is the job that starts where broking stops: appointing agents, following the ship through the ports, handling the documents and settling the accounts. Many small desks do both, and a broker who has never done operations often agrees terms that are hard to carry out.

How a broker is paid

A broker is paid a commission taken from the freight or the hire. The owner pays it, and it is earned only when the deal is actually completed, so a negotiation that runs for three days and fails pays nothing. This is the most important business fact about the job.

The usual dry cargo figure is 1.25 per cent of freight, and it is shared among the brokers in the chain. If two brokers are involved, each may take 1.25, so the owner may pay 2.5 in total. On a time charter it is a percentage of hire, taken as the hire is paid, over the whole period. Demurrage (money for delay in port) normally carries commission too, unless the fixture says otherwise. Read that line in the fixture rather than assuming. How ship broker commission works covers the whole subject: how the commissions add up, who pays whom, and when it is earned.

Address commission is something different, and it is not the broker’s money. The charterer deducts it for itself, usually 2.5 or 3.75 per cent, and in effect it is a discount on the freight written as a percentage. A newcomer who sees five per cent on a recap and thinks the brokers take all of it has misread the line. Both come off the gross freight, so a voyage estimate based on gross freight overstates the result by the whole percentage.

Why it is harder than the description sounds

Four things make this job hard in ways that a description of the steps does not show.

Nothing is exclusive. An enquiry usually goes to several brokers at once, and sometimes to the whole market. Nobody promises exclusivity, so the same cargo can reach your desk three times through three chains before lunch. If you offer one ship into two of those chains, the charterer sees the owner twice at two different prices, which usually loses the deal and causes a dispute over the commission.

The information goes out of date fast. A position is good for about two days and a freight idea for less, so most of what a broker knows in the morning is useless by the end of the week. That is why the collecting never stops.

There is no reference price. Indices exist and give useful background, but the price for this cargo on this ship on this day is found by asking, not by looking it up. Two brokers can hold honest but different views of the same market.

Being right is not enough. The best ship for the cargo loses to the ship that was offered first, offered clearly and followed up. A newcomer who spends the morning perfecting an analysis and the afternoon sending it has usually lost to someone who sent a worse answer at nine in the morning.

Where to start

If you are learning this from outside the industry, follow the order below, which makes the rest easier to read. Each item is a separate guide, linked underneath.

1. The three records that get confused. Where a ship is, when it is next free, and what the port expects at the berth are three different things. Mixing them up is the most common mistake in this field, and it makes everything else confusing.
2. Who is who on a fixture. Several parties are called the owner and two different companies are called the agent, so learn who is who before you try to follow a negotiation.
3. The shorthand. A circular is fifty words of abbreviations, and most of them name a duty. You do not need to learn them by heart, but you must stop skipping them.
4. The two e-mails that arrive every morning. A tonnage circular and a cargo enquiry, read line by line. Together they are most of the raw material of the job.
5. The match. How a cargo is actually matched to a ship, and which checks are arithmetic and which are judgement.
6. The deal, and the clock against it. What a recap contains and why, and how laytime and demurrage are counted once the ship is in port.

What a good broker is good at

The trade rewards a small set of habits. Answer quickly and stay accurate under time pressure, because both principals are deciding whether to keep you in the chain. Write down every number as it changes, because months later everyone reads the recap and nobody remembers the call. Be honest about what you do not know, because a broker who guesses a cargo intake or a draught is found out once, and after that people stop working with them. And stay interested in the ships themselves: the desks that fix the most deals know the ships, not just the numbers attached to them.

None of this is glamorous, and none of it needs a screen of live prices. It needs two lists kept properly, and the discipline to work them every morning.

References

• Institute of Chartered Shipbrokers, Welcome to the Institute of Chartered Shipbrokers. ics.org.uk
• Institute of Chartered Shipbrokers Ireland, What are Shipbrokers. icsireland.ie
• FONASBA (Federation of National Associations of Ship Brokers and Agents), Documentation. fonasba.com

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