Broking

What a ship broker does

Published 21 August 2026 · updated 22 September 2026

A ship broker stands between somebody who has cargo to move and somebody who has a ship to fill, and is paid only when the two are joined. Nearly everything else about the job follows from that one sentence: what a broker collects, what a broker is worth to each side, and why the working day starts before the market does.

Two lists, and the join between them

On one side there is cargo. A charterer 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 what that costs. On the other side there is tonnage: ships that come free somewhere, on some date, and earn nothing at all until they are employed again.

Neither list is published. There is no exchange, no screen carrying live prices, and no register of who is open where. Both are assembled out of e-mail, telephone calls and a desk’s own record of what it has done before. That is worth saying plainly to anyone coming in from another industry, because it is the thing that surprises them: the market a broker works in is not visible anywhere. It exists in the mailboxes of the people trading in it.

So a desk’s real asset is not software and not contacts in the abstract. It is two years of those two lists, kept honestly, so that when a cargo lands the ships that could actually do it can be named in ten minutes rather than in a day. Ten minutes against a day is the whole competitive difference, because the enquiry has usually gone to several brokers at once.

For brokers managing that workflow every day, shipbroking software can help keep cargo enquiries, vessel positions, contacts and fixture work connected in one place.

What a broker actually sells

Not the ship, and not the cargo. Three things, and they are worth separating because a newcomer tends to believe the first one is all of it.

• Coverage. Knowing what is open and what is moving, across more owners and more charterers than either side can watch alone. An owner sees his own fleet. A broker sees three hundred ships and knows which of them are lying idle this week.
• Judgement. Which of those ships the charterer will actually accept, what the cargo is worth today rather than last month, whether the counterparty pays, and whether a berth that looks fine on paper can take her draught. This is the part that takes years and the part that cannot be bought.
• The work of holding a negotiation together. Carrying offers and counters accurately and fast, keeping both principals informed enough to stay in the conversation, writing down what was agreed, and chasing the details after everyone else has moved on. Deals fail on this far more often than they fail on price.

A morning

On a dry cargo desk the shape of the day is fairly consistent, and it is driven by the fact that a position is worth money for about forty-eight hours.

• Early. Read the circulars. Twenty to forty e-mails from owners and competing brokers listing ships that come free, each holding anywhere from one hull to fifty. Anything relevant goes onto the position list.
• Then the cargo side. 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 with the wording changed at every hop.
• The middle of the day. Match, quote, and follow up. Put ships forward against cargoes, put cargoes in front of owners, run the numbers on anything that looks close, and chase the half dozen negotiations already running.
• Late. Recap what fixed, report what failed, and circulate the desk’s own list so the market knows what you are working.

The pattern to notice is that a broker is reading and writing almost continuously. The output of the job is text: a circular, an offer, a counter, a recap. Everything else is preparation for producing one of those four accurately.

Whose broker are you

Every negotiation has at least two brokers and often more. Which side you sit on decides what you are being 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 everybody in the chain knows which side each person is on before a number is passed.

The kinds of broking

Chartering is what most people mean by ship broking, but it is one of several distinct trades that share a name and share very little else.

Operations, sometimes confused with broking, is the job that starts where broking stops: nominating 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 the operations half tends to agree terms that are painful to perform.

How a broker is paid

On a commission taken out of the freight or the hire, paid by the owner, and earned only when the deal is actually concluded. A negotiation that runs for three days and fails pays nothing at all, which is the single most important commercial fact about the job.

The conventional dry cargo figure is 1.25 per cent of freight, and it is split among the brokers in the chain. Where two brokers are involved each may take 1.25, so an owner can be paying 2.5 in total. On a time charter it is a percentage of hire, taken as hire is paid, over the whole period. Demurrage normally carries commission too, unless the fixture says otherwise, which is a line worth reading rather than assuming. How ship broker commission works takes the whole subject apart: the stack, who pays whom, and when it is earned.

Address commission is a different thing and is not the broker’s money. It is a deduction the charterer takes for its own account, conventionally 2.5 or 3.75 per cent, and it is effectively a discount on the freight written in percentage form. A newcomer who reads a recap showing five per cent and assumes the brokers are taking all of it has misread the line. Both come off the gross freight, which is why a voyage estimate that works on gross overstates the answer by the whole percentage.

Why it is harder than the description sounds

Four things make this difficult in ways that a description of the workflow does not convey.

Nothing is exclusive. An enquiry usually goes to several brokers at once and sometimes to the whole market. No exclusivity is given and none is implied, so the same cargo can land on your desk three times through three chains before lunch. Offering one ship into two of those chains puts the owner in front of the charterer twice at two different numbers, which usually loses the fixture and turns the commission into an argument.

The information decays fast. A position is good for about two days. A freight idea is good for less. Most of what a broker knows in the morning is worthless by the end of the week, which is why the collecting never stops.

There is no reference price. Indices exist and they are useful context, but the number for this cargo on this ship on this day is discovered by asking, not by looking up. Two brokers can hold honest and 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 somebody who sent a worse answer at nine.

Where to start

If you are learning this from outside the industry, the order below is the one that makes the rest readable. Each of these is a separate guide and they are linked underneath.

1. The three records that get confused. Where a ship is, when she is free next, and what the port expects at the berth are three different things. Getting this wrong is the classic error in the whole domain and it will make everything else confusing.
2. Who is who on a fixture. Several parties are called the owner and two different companies are called the agent. Sort the cast out before you try to follow a negotiation.
3. The shorthand. A circular is fifty words of abbreviations and most of them name an obligation. You do not have to memorise them, but you do have to stop skipping them.
4. The two e-mails that arrive every morning. A tonnage circular and a cargo enquiry, read line by line. Between them they are most of the raw material of the job.
5. The join. How a cargo is actually matched to a ship, and which of the constraints 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 fairly narrow set of habits. Answering quickly and being accurate under time pressure, because both principals are deciding whether to keep you in the chain. Writing down every number as it changes, because the recap is what everyone will read months later and nobody remembers the call. Being straight about what you do not know, since a broker who guesses an intake or a draught is found out once and then routed around permanently. And staying interested in the ships themselves: the desks that fix well know the hulls, not just the numbers attached to them.

None of that is glamorous and none of it needs a screen full 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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