A laytime statement example, worked end to end

Laytimetech · Updated 22 October 2026

One voyage carried all the way through: four ports, two instruments reading the same hours, and a notice of readiness that was argued about. Every hour and every amount below was produced by the calculator from the papers listed here — none of it was typed in afterwards. A test runs this same fixture through the engine on every build and fails if one figure on this page stops matching.

The result, before the working

At the discharge end the charterer owes demurrage to the owners under the charter party and recovers demurrage from the receivers under the sale contract. The two do not meet, because the two contracts allow different time and except different days:

Add the load end and the whole voyage comes to USD 103,956.59 against the charterer if the Monday notice stands, or USD 116,996.52 if the Saturday one does. The argument about that one notice is worth USD 13,039.93.

The papers

Four documents, and four separate accounts — one for each relationship. The app settles each against the statements of facts for the ports that document governs.

The voyage

Total quantity 30,000 mt of wheat in bulk. The allowance on each account is worked off the whole 30,000 mt, not port by port.

The load end: two notices, one voyage

30,000 mt at 8,000 mt per day is 3.75 days, so the laytime allowed at the load end is 90 hours. The clause is reversible, which means Reni and Constanta are not two allowances of 45 hours — they are one account of 90 hours, and time saved at the first port is still there to be used at the second.

The notice of readiness at Reni was tendered on Saturday 7 March at 21:40. Under the clause laytime commences 12 hours after notice, which is Sunday 8 March at 09:40 — and Sundays are excepted, so nothing actually counts until Monday 00:00. The charterer said the Saturday notice was not valid and the master re-tendered on Monday 9 March at 08:00, which puts commencement at Monday 20:00.

Counting from the Saturday notice

Counting from the Monday re-tender

The same hours, the same exceptions, the same rain and the same Sunday — only the start moves. Laytime now commences at 20:00 on Monday 9 March, which takes 20 hours out of the count, and the account turns over:

Despatch is earned on the load end as a whole rather than at either port on its own, because the clause is reversible: there is one account, so there is one answer. Between demurrage of USD 10,663.19 and despatch of USD 2,376.74 the swing is USD 13,039.93.

The discharge end: the same hours, two accounts

This is the part a spreadsheet rarely survives. The charter party allows 4,000 mt per day and excepts nothing for Sundays; the sale contract allows 3,000 mt per day and excepts them. Both read the same statement of facts, hour for hour. The two columns below are the same voyage priced twice.

Notice of readiness at Damietta was tendered on Saturday 18 April at 05:50, so laytime commences at 17:50 on both accounts. At Alexandria the notice was tendered on Sunday 26 April at 07:15, commencing 19:15.

The five places the two accounts part

• Sunday 19 April. Excepted on the sale contract, counts in full on the charter party. The charter party is SHINC; Sundays were never taken out of it.
• Monday 20 April 08:10 to Tuesday 21 April 02:35 — the shore crane. 18h 25m. The charter party excepts shore and terminal breakdown in terms while laytime is running, so it comes out. The sale contract says nothing about breakdown, so on that account the receivers wear every minute of it. The same stoppage, the same page of the statement of facts, two answers.
• Sunday 26 April. 4h 45m, out on the sale contract, counting on the charter party.
• Friday 1 May. A declared public holiday at the discharge ports. It comes out of the sale contract account. On the charter party it counts twice over: it is SHINC, and by 1 May the ship had been on demurrage for two days — and once on demurrage, the exceptions have stopped.
• Sunday 3 May. Another 24 hours out of the sale contract account and in on the charter party.

The one thing both contracts agree on is the shift in from the roads: both exclude it, so the 8h 20m from Saturday 18 April 18:00 to Sunday 19 April 02:20 comes out of each account.

Where the two accounts finish

Both figures are priced on the exact minutes, which is why the hours on this page are printed as hours and minutes and not as decimals. Round 346h 15m to 346.25 and the money still comes out right; round it to 346.3 and it does not.

What the papers did not decide

Four things on this voyage were decided by a person reading the documents, not by the calculator. A laytime statement that hides them is the kind that falls over in correspondence, so the app keeps them separate and so does this page.

• Which notice of readiness stands. Both are priced above. Nothing in the app chooses between them.
• That 1 May was a holiday at the discharge ports. Declared from the statement of facts by whoever read it. The app does not look holidays up in a table and apply them behind your back — a holiday that is not on the papers is not in the count.
• That the crane was the terminal's and not the ship's. It decides which side of the breakdown clause the stoppage falls on, and the only evidence is the wording on the statement of facts.
• The quantity the allowance is worked on. 30,000 mt, taken from the bills of lading rather than from the charter party's option.

The same laytime statement as a file

These are produced by the app itself from this same voyage, at the moment you ask for them — the PDF by the builder behind every laytime statement in the product, the workbook by the one behind its Excel export. They are not screenshots and not a mock-up. Both are the discharge end on the charter party — the account this page leads with.

The laytime statement, as a PDF  ·  The working, as an Excel workbook

Read next

• How to calculate laytime: a worked example — one discharge, step by step, if the voyage above is more than you need.
• Laytime calculation in Excel: where the spreadsheet breaks — the four places a workbook stops being able to answer, three of which are on this page.
• What is laytime? — the terms in plain words.