The voyage
The estimate
Still needs a cargo quantity, and a freight rate, and the voyage days.
Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to Neptune Atlas or stored anywhere.
What the time charter equivalent is
An owner offered a cargo wants one number: what does this voyage earn per day, and is that better than what the ship could get on time charter instead. Freight per tonne cannot answer that, because it says nothing about how long the voyage takes. The time charter equivalent does the division.
freight quantity x rate less commission address + brokerage = net revenue less voyage costs bunkers + port charges + canal dues = voyage result / total voyage days ballast + laden + port + waiting = TCE per day
Why waiting has its own row
A ship waiting off a congested berth is burning fuel, earning nothing and ageing the voyage, but she is not working cargo and she is not making way. Folding those days into port time hides the figure a broker most wants to move. Folding them into sea time burns them at sea consumption, which is roughly seven times the truth. On a ship taken at 8,150 a day, three days on an anchorage is 24,450 before a tonne of fuel is burned.
The arithmetic is never what is wrong
What makes an estimate wrong is a distance somebody guessed, a ballast leg nobody counted, or a consumption figure taken at sea speed for days the ship spends in port. That is why every day and every burn rate above is a figure you state rather than one this page infers.
Where this is simpler than a real estimate
One bunker price, where a real estimate prices the grades separately: a ship burns VLSFO at sea and usually gas oil inside an emission control area, and they are not priced alike. One combined port charges figure rather than a disbursement account per call. And no allowance for weather in port, which the charterparty usually treats differently from waiting even though both cost the owner fuel.
Questions
- How do you calculate TCE?
- Take gross freight, subtract commission to get net revenue, subtract the voyage costs (bunkers, port charges, canal dues) to get the voyage result, then divide by the total voyage days including ballast, laden, port and waiting time. The answer is a figure per day that can be compared directly against a time charter rate.
- What counts as a voyage day?
- Every day the ship is committed to the voyage: the ballast run to the load port, the laden passage, the days alongside loading and discharging, and any time spent waiting for a berth. Leaving the ballast leg out is the commonest way an estimate flatters a voyage.
- Should commission come off before or after voyage costs?
- Before. Address commission and brokerage are percentages of gross freight, so they come off first, and the voyage costs are deducted from what is left. Unless the fixture says otherwise they also come off demurrage.
- What freight rate do I need to earn a given TCE?
- Enter the target in the box above and the page solves for it. It is the same arithmetic run backwards: the rate that makes the voyage result divided by the days equal the number you want.
- Is this calculator free?
- Yes, with no account and no limit. It runs in your browser, so nothing you type is sent to Neptune Atlas or stored anywhere.
- How accurate is it?
- It uses the same arithmetic as the Neptune Atlas voyage estimator, and an automated check asserts on every build that it reproduces the worked estimate published in our TCE guide, to the cent. It is simpler in three ways, which are listed above rather than hidden.
The full guide, with the worked estimate this page reproduces
Also worth reading: bunkers and fuel grades on why one price is a simplification, and what a ship can actually lift on where the cargo quantity comes from. There is also a free laytime and demurrage calculator.
Neptune Atlas runs this estimate against real distances and a ship’s own consumption grid, and prices one cargo across several ships at once. See what it costs.