On September 10, CMA CGM began applying a Panama Canal Adjustment Factor of $500 per TEU to Far East cargo moving to the US East and Gulf coasts, as reported by ICIS. Two days later, MSC lifted its own canal surcharge from $100 to $149 per TEU. Neither number existed in the freight budget most importers built in June, and both landed on lanes already carrying an emergency fuel surcharge.
Why the stack got taller this quarter
The Panama Canal Authority announced in late August that it would cut daily transit slots from September 3 after another season of thin rainfall in the Gatún watershed, with Panamax capacity dropping again from September 15. Fewer slots and tighter drafts mean lighter loads, longer queues, and carriers recovering the difference through the tariff. Meanwhile a run of typhoons pushed vessel waits at Shanghai to several days, and bunker prices have kept emergency fuel surcharges live on long-haul trades since the spring.
Surcharges themselves are not new. What changed is the density. A single container can now carry four or five separate accessorial charges, each announced on its own schedule, each with its own effective date, and each arriving on an invoice six to eight weeks after the booking decision that triggered it. That gap between decision and invoice is where freight budgets quietly break. If your concern right now is running the re-booking wave rather than reading the bill, we covered that separately in the Panama draft cuts exception playbook.
The surcharge stack, line by line
Most ocean accessorials fall into five families. Knowing which family a charge belongs to tells you who controls it and whether it is negotiable.
Fuel. The Bunker Adjustment Factor is the standing, formula-based recovery of fuel cost, usually reset quarterly and published per trade lane. An Emergency Fuel Surcharge is the off-cycle version, introduced when bunker prices move faster than the BAF formula can absorb. BAF is predictable enough to budget. EFS is not, and it is often reviewed weekly.
Route and chokepoint adjustment. Canal transit fees, low-water surcharges, and Red Sea rerouting charges all recover the cost of a constrained or lengthened passage. The Panama charges landing this month are the clearest example. These track a physical constraint, so they move with rainfall, drafts, and security conditions rather than with your volume.
Demand and season. Peak Season Surcharges and General Rate Increases are commercial rather than cost-recovery. They apply when space is scarce and carriers can hold them. Of the five families, this is the one where contract terms and booking timing actually change what you pay.
Congestion. Port congestion surcharges recover the cost of vessels waiting for a berth. They tend to appear after the congestion is already visible in the schedule, which means the operational disruption reaches your customers before the charge reaches your finance team.
Equipment and terminal time. Demurrage and detention sit slightly apart from the list above, because they are driven by your own container dwell rather than by the carrier's cost base. That makes them the most controllable charges on the invoice and the most worth attacking first. We wrote a plain-language breakdown of demurrage vs. detention if the distinction is fuzzy.
The practical problem is not understanding these categories. It is that each carrier names them differently, publishes them in a different place, and returns them on the invoice in a different format. A team running six carriers is reconciling six vocabularies against one set of shipments. This is the point where a command center earns its keep: Orkestra normalizes charge and shipment data across carriers into a single record, so a canal adjustment on one carrier and a canal adjustment on another are the same field, comparable on the same lane, without anyone rebuilding a spreadsheet each month.
Check it before you pay it
A surcharge being real does not mean it was applied correctly. Four checks catch most of what goes wrong:
- Effective date against booking date. Most tariffs bind to the date of loading or the date of booking, not the date of invoicing. A charge effective September 12 on a container loaded September 4 is a question worth asking.
- Scope against the actual routing. A Panama Canal Adjustment Factor belongs on cargo that transited the canal. If the vessel was re-routed via Suez or discharged on the West Coast for inland rail, the charge does not follow automatically.
- Unit of measure. Per TEU, per container, and per bill of lading produce very different totals on the same shipment. Mismatches here are common and rarely deliberate.
- Contract carve-outs. Fixed-rate agreements often exclude specific accessorials or cap them. The exclusion only helps if someone checks the invoice against the contract.
None of this is exotic. It is simply hard to do at volume when the shipment record lives in a TMS, the contract lives in procurement's drive, and the invoice arrives as a PDF. Our freight audit and claims guide covers the discrepancy types and the deadlines that go with them. What makes the check routine rather than heroic is having the charge, the booking, and the routing on one record at the moment the invoice arrives. Bridgestone found $11.6K in weekly savings across 22 shipments once its data was normalized and alerts were tuned to catch the exceptions worth acting on.
Forecasting what you do not control
You cannot stop a canal surcharge. You can stop being surprised by one.
Start by mapping exposure rather than averages. For each lane, record which chokepoints it depends on, which carriers serve it, and what share of your annual volume moves on it. A lane that runs Far East to Savannah through Panama has a different risk profile than the same tonnage routed to Los Angeles, and the September charges hit one and not the other. Most teams discover they have concentrated more volume behind a single constraint than they realised.
Then price the scenario, not the point estimate. If your Panama-dependent lanes carry another $150 per TEU for the rest of the quarter, what does that do to landed cost on the affected SKUs, and at what point does re-routing or re-timing beat absorbing it? The same discipline applies to duty changes, which we walked through in the piece on what a tariff deadline does to landed costs, and to the detention that piles up behind a stopped entry, covered in how to reduce customs clearance delays. The teams that answer this in a week rather than a month are the ones already holding clean per-lane cost history, which is also the foundation for the sharper ocean freight rate procurement conversation at renewal.
Finally, close the loop between the operational decision and the cost it creates. When a planner accepts a re-booking after a blank sailing or a port omission, expedites a container, or lets a box sit an extra three days, that choice has a price attached. Recording it at the moment of decision turns the quarterly cost review into a report instead of an investigation. This is what supply chain analytics is for: exposing which lanes, carriers, and decisions are actually driving your freight spend, with a typical 15% cost reduction where the data is clean enough to act on.
What to do this week
Pull your last three months of ocean invoices and sort the accessorial lines by total value. You will almost certainly find that a small number of charge types account for most of the spend, and that at least one of them is a controllable dwell charge rather than a carrier cost pass-through. Check the top charges against their effective dates and your routings. Then allocate those accessorial lines down to the orders that caused them, which is the first step in calculating cost to serve rather than absorbing the charges at account level. Finally, map which of your lanes depend on the Panama Canal, and decide now what you will do if the restrictions extend into Q4.
The surcharges will keep coming. What separates the teams that absorb them from the teams that get absorbed is whether the charge, the shipment, and the decision behind it are visible in the same place. If your freight costs are still being reconstructed from PDFs weeks after the fact, book a 30-minute call and we will show you what the same quarter looks like on a single record.
