Why Maritime Payment Delays Reached 42 Days. Business Impact & What Operators Can Do

Summary

In recent maritime logistics literature, payment delays across freight, shipping, and related supply chain services have been found to average roughly 42 days from invoice issuance to settlement.    This lag is no longer a minor accounting annoyance — for mid-size ship operators, chartering firms, and logistics providers, such delays can significantly jeopardise working capital, increase borrowing or financing costs, strain supplier relationships, and hinder smooth voyage planning.

As the global shipping environment becomes more volatile — with route disruptions, rising freight rates, and port inefficiencies — payment delays can compound other operational bottlenecks. In this post, we explore what drives these delays, why they matter now more than ever, and what operators can do to compress the shipping payment cycle and insulate their business.

Data & Drivers Behind Prolonged Payment Delays

The 42-Day Benchmark & What It Means

A recent review of maritime logistics literature - a 2024 survey of blockchain use in maritime logistics explicitly notes that “every day, hundreds of billions of dollars are left unpaid as payments take an average of 42 days to reach the invoicing organisation.”    This suggests that, across a broad swath of freight, carrier, and service providers, it takes roughly six weeks for funds to flow post-invoice.

Given the capital intensity and tight margins in shipping/chartering/freight operations, a 42-day delay significantly ties up cash needed for bunkers, port fees, wages, maintenance, or upcoming fixtures.

Macro Trends: Market Volatility, Route Disruptions & Port Pressure

Recent analyses from UNCTAD (the UN Trade and Development body) highlight that maritime trade is facing rising uncertainty, longer routes, and port pressures.  For instance:

• Geopolitical tensions and disruptions (e.g., in the Red Sea) have forced many vessels to reroute around longer routes, such as the Cape of Good Hope. 

• Rerouting has increased ton-miles (cargo-distance) significantly in 2024 alone; ton-miles grew rapidly, even while overall trade-volume growth slowed. 

• Port congestion and chokepoints, especially in developing countries, remain serious. Even though container-ship turnaround in some regions returned to near pre-pandemic levels by 2023, dry bulk turnaround still lags. 

These macro conditions ripple into downstream finance flows: longer voyages, unpredictable discharge windows, and port delays all contribute to delays in invoicing, invoice verification, freight release, and ultimately, payment settlement.

Furthermore, rising freight rates and spot-market volatility increase disputes over surcharges, demurrage, port costs, bunker adjustments, and other charges. Each dispute or renegotiation can add days or weeks before final invoice settlement.

Structural & Operational Friction: Documentation, Invoice Discrepancies, Manual Workflows

• Many shipping transactions still rely on paper-based documentation. As noted in a 2024 report, global container trade generates enormous amounts of paperwork; if laid end to end, the reams would stretch for kilometres. 

• The complexity increases when multiple parties (carrier, forwarder, port agent, customs broker, consignee) are involved, each requiring reconciliations, approvals, and validations, especially when bills of lading (B/L), discharge receipts, port charges, demurrage/detention, etc., are involved. Mistakes or delays at any stage stall the entire payment chain. 

• Manual invoice processing, lack of standardised invoice formats, and unclear provenance or audit trails make verification time-consuming and are a common cause of payment lag. Several industry write-ups describe this as “hidden costs of delayed payments.” 

In sum: a 42-day delay often reflects not just payment terms but also systemic inefficiencies in documentation, reconciliation, and verification workflows, aggravated by external volatility.

Real Business Impacts

When payments are delayed by 4–6 weeks on average, the business implications are more than cosmetic. For operators — especially mid-size/lean organisations — the impacts are material:

• Working capital stress: Funds tied up in unpaid invoices deprive the operator of liquidity needed for bunkers, port dues, crew wages, maintenance, and supplier payments. For smaller or mid-size firms without deep cash reserves, this can strain operations or delay new fixtures.

• Higher financing costs/borrowings: To bridge the liquidity gap, operators may resort to short-term lending, invoice discounting, or factoring — often at high cost. The longer the DSO (days sales outstanding), the more interest or discount fees accumulate, eroding margins. This is widely documented in freight-finance literature. 

• Supplier & partner liquidity issues: When carriers, port agents, bunkers suppliers, or service providers themselves get paid late, it creates a cascading impact downstream — possibly causing delayed disbursements, demurrage, container detention, or even service refusal. As one industry commentary puts it, delayed payments “impact trust & relationships” along the supply chain. 

• Operational slowdowns and risk exposure: Pending invoice payments often tie up port releases (e.g., bill of lading release), leading to demurrage/detention, cargo holdups, and missed delivery or loading windows. 

• Reduced flexibility for voyage planning or expansion: With cash locked up and liquidity uncertain, companies may scale back new fixtures, avoid long-haul voyages, or decline new contracts — limiting growth potential.

In volatile freight-rate environments, such delays can erode profitability or even lead to losses, especially when operators incur financing costs or penalties.

Process Gaps That Cause Payment Delays

Based on industry reporting and academic literature, the following are common process gaps creating or prolonging payment delays:

1. Scattered, paper-heavy documentation flows bills of lading, delivery receipts, port invoices, bunker invoices, often flow through multiple parties (carrier → forwarder → shipper → consignee → finance dept), leading to delays, lost documents, and mismatches. 

2. Manual invoicing and reconciliation , a lack of standardisation results in inconsistent invoice formats, missing data, and ambiguous line items, leading to queries, clarifications, denied or delayed payments.

3. Unclear invoice provenance/foot-printing when multiple services (voyage, bunkers, port charges, demurrage, agency fees) are bundled without clarity, finance teams hesitate or delay approval pending breakdowns and validation.

4. No or weak KPIs/tracking for payment cycles, the absence of monitoring for DSO (Days Sales Outstanding), query rate, and invoice turnaround time means delays remain invisible, nested in the admin backlog.

5. Lack of automation or digital workflow for approvals, with approval waits internally (chartering → operations → finance → accounts payable), often relies on manual emails, spreadsheets, or paper, increasing cycle time.

As long as these gaps persist, external pressures (port congestion, route disruption, nav events, volatile freight rates) will only amplify the delay.

Practical Fixes: What Operators Can Do to Shorten the Cycle

Here are actionable steps for operators, chartering managers, and finance heads to reduce payment delays, many of which are doable internally and can be piloted in 90 days.

• Centralise documentation and invoicing workflows: Maintain a central “freight-billing / invoice-hub” per fixture/voyage where carrier invoices, port charges, bunker receipts, agency charges, demurrage bills, etc., are collected as soon as available. This reduces scattered paperwork and ensures all stakeholders have access to the same data.

• Use standardised invoice templates: Define and adopt a standard invoice format — with clearly defined line items: voyage hire, bunkers (with fuel consumption & price), port dues, agency fees, demurrage & detention (if any), ancillary services. Standardisation reduces confusion, audit queries, and speeds up approvals.

• Automate matching & reconciliation: Use software or simple spreadsheet-based automation to flag mismatches between expected and actual, e.g., bunker consumption vs. invoice, port charges vs. port call data, demurrage vs. free days, so queries are raised early and resolved before invoice submission.

• Set and track KPIs: As part of your operations/finance dashboard (especially relevant for a platform like yours), monitor metrics such as:

   

  • DSO (Days Sales Outstanding) per partner/shipper

  • Query rate (percentage of invoices needing rework)

  • Invoice-to-payment time per voyage/per carrier

    Regular tracking surfaces problem areas and helps enforce internal accountability.

   

• Formalise payment-terms agreements: At contract/freight-book stage, define explicit payment-term clauses, e.g. “invoice payable within 30 days of bunker invoice & discharge notice,” or “demurrage invoices payable within 45 days.” Clear contractual terms help limit ambush delays.

• Introduce partial milestone-based payments or early-payment incentives: Where possible, consider milestone payments, e.g. 50% upon cargo discharge & documentation, 50% after 30 days or early-payment discounts. This improves cash-flow predictability and reduces DSO.

Tools & Quick-Win Steps: A 90-Day Improvement Pilot Plan

Here’s a sample 3-month improvement plan that an operator / mid-size shipping firm can run:

At the end of 90 days, you should already observe whether DSO has improved, which line items cause delays, and where more structural work (automation, policy changes) is needed.

Why This Matters Especially in 2025

The timing for addressing payment delays could hardly be more urgent. The 2025 report from UNCTAD warns that global maritime trade is entering a period of fragile growth, rising costs, and mounting uncertainty shaped by geopolitics, route disruptions, and volatile freight rates. 

For mid-size operators often more vulnerable to liquidity squeezes than large shipping conglomerates a 42-day payment delay can severely constrain their ability to operate, plan voyages, bunker ships, service debt, or invest in sustainability (e.g., CII/EU-ETS compliance, fleet upgrades).

Implementing tighter billing discipline, automation, and basic finance-ops integration is no longer a “nice to have” it is fast becoming a competitive necessity.

Conclusion & Call to Action

In a volatile maritime environment, payment lag is no longer just an accounting headache  it is a strategic risk. A 42-day average payment delay can erode working capital, increase financing costs, strain supplier relationships, and hamper operational agility.

But the good news: many of the root causes lie within the operator’s control. By centralising documentation, standardising invoices, automating reconciliation, tracking KPIs, and renegotiating payment terms, even mid-size operators can dramatically compress the payment cycle.

Next steps for you (as an operations/chartering/finance leader):

• Run a 90-day pilot - map, standardize, track.

• Evaluate whether digital tools (or your own internal product like Marlo) can support invoice-hub, reconciliation and KPI tracking.

• Share the lessons internally (e.g. via a cross-department workshop)  because long DSO affects everyone: operations, chartering, finance.