Ocean Oct 10, 2026 · 8 min read

Port fees on Chinese ships are still due back on 9 November

US fees on Chinese ships restart in 30 days unless USTR files a notice. The US pause on port fees for Chinese-operated and Chinese-built ships ends at 11:59pm ET on 9 November. Washington says the wider US–China truce now runs to 10 January, but as of 10 October no extension notice from USTR, the US trade office, is in the Federal Register. Our view: an extension is likely, but until it is published, the restart date stands. The fees are $50 per net ton (a measure of cargo space) for Chinese operators, according to FreightWaves. Alphaliner put the top 10 carriers’ 2026 bill at $3.2 billion. Put surcharge clauses in Q4 quotes now. We expect a notice in early November.

USTR has 30 days to file the notice that keeps Chinese ship fees switched off
At 11:59pm Eastern time on Monday 9 November, the US pause on port fees for Chinese-operated and Chinese-built ships runs out. That is 30 days from today. The US says its wider trade truce with China now lasts until 10 January 2027. But the fees sit under their own legal order, and that order has not been changed. As of 10 October, USTR (the Office of the US Trade Representative) has published notices in the Federal Register, the US government’s daily legal journal, as recently as 8 October. None of them is about ships. The latest word on the fees is still the November 2025 suspension.
Our view is simple. The fees will very probably be paused again. Washington has said the truce runs to January, and nobody in the trade wants a lapse. But a TV interview is not a legal notice. Until USTR publishes one, carriers have to plan for fees from 10 November, and forwarders should quote as if the risk is real.

What the paperwork says

The fees come from a Section 301 action. Section 301 is the US trade law that lets USTR punish what it judges to be unfair foreign practices. In April 2025, acting on its investigation into China’s targeting of the maritime, logistics and shipbuilding sectors, USTR set fees on ships calling at US ports.
The pause was created by a USTR notice published on 13 November 2025. It says the actions “are suspended, as of 12:01 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on November 10, 2025, through 11:59 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on November 9, 2026.” It does not extend itself. It says only that USTR “will consider whether it is appropriate to continue the suspension period or whether further action is appropriate” before the deadline.
On 23 September, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News: “We have agreed today that we will extend what we call the Busan agreement”. He added that “that is going to be extended until Jan. 10 to give us more time to see what we can do on the economic front”. The Busan agreement is the one-year truce struck in late 2025. It included the suspension of Section 301 tariffs and fees, and will now run to 10 January instead of 10 November, according to Seatrade Maritime News.
The gap between those two things is the story. “The truce announcement did not automatically amend the Section 301 notice,” FreightWaves reported on 28 September. Tech Times, a day later, said only a new USTR Federal Register notice can extend the pause, and none had been published.

Why we think it gets extended, late

The pressure to extend is broad. On 23 September, more than 200 trade associations, from farm and retail groups to freight forwarders, customs brokers and port authorities, wrote to US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer. Their letter, hosted by the National Foreign Trade Council, asked for the suspension to be extended. “These costs compound quickly and are ultimately borne by U.S. businesses, workers, farmers, and consumers,” it said. It also argued that “vessel fees alone are not a strategy for rebuilding the U.S. shipbuilding industry”.
Lawyers read the short extension as a good sign. Matthew Thomas of law firm Blank Rome told Seatrade Maritime News: “this is a positive signal that a further longer term extension is at least possible”. He noted that a lot could change before January, including the US midterm elections and the holiday shipping peak.
The track record also points to a late notice rather than no notice. Last year, the request for comments on the pause was published on 10 November 2025, the day the pause began. The pause itself was published on 13 November 2025, three days after it took effect. USTR has shown it will move close to, or even past, the wire. That is our main reason for expecting paperwork in the final days rather than this month.

What the bill looks like

If the pause lapses, three sets of fees come back, according to the USTR notices and FreightWaves:

Ships operated or owned by Chinese companies: $50 per net ton. Net tonnage measures a ship’s usable cargo space, not its weight.

Chinese-built ships run by non-Chinese lines: the higher of $18 per net ton or $120 per container unloaded.

Foreign-built car carriers: $46 per net ton, under an October 2025 change.

Fees are charged on one call per vessel per rotation, up to five rotations a year, according to FreightWaves. Some ships are exempt from the Chinese-built fee. These include ships of 4,000 TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units) or less, ships arriving empty, and short-sea voyages under 2,000 nautical miles, according to the April 2025 notice.
There is one detail most coverage skips. The April 2025 schedule was built to escalate. It set the Chinese-operator fee at $80 per net ton from 17 April 2026, and the Chinese-built fee at $23 per net ton or $153 per container. The suspension notice does not say which step applies if the fees restart. Reports have used the original $50 and $18 figures. If a lapse happens, ask carriers which rate they are being billed.
The money is large. Alphaliner estimated the top 10 container lines would face $3.2 billion in fees in 2026, according to gCaptain. COSCO Group was the most exposed at $1.53 billion. Next came ZIM at $510 million, ONE at $363 million and CMA CGM at $335 million, mostly because they charter ships from Chinese owners. Hapag-Lloyd was at about $105 million and Maersk at $17.5 million. Evergreen and HMM faced nothing. Per box, Alphaliner put the cost at about $2,121 per TEU on COSCO’s US-bound fleet, down to about $26 per TEU for Maersk.
Separately, HSBC projected annual exposure of up to $1.5 billion for COSCO Shipping, according to Tech Times. gCaptain reported HSBC’s estimate that this would erode about 74% of the company’s projected 2026 operating profit. For OOCL’s parent OOIL, HSBC estimated $654 million, about 65% of projected operating profit.

What happened last time

The fees have been live once. They took effect on 14 October 2025. On 1 November 2025, the two countries struck the trade deal that led to the one-year pause from 10 November. So the fees ran for under four weeks.
In that window, carriers “passed them through as freight surcharges to importers and cargo owners almost immediately,” according to Tech Times. USTR also let operators defer payment of some fees from 14 October to 10 December 2025, according to its October 2025 notice. Carriers had spent the 180-day run-up reshuffling fleets. In one example reported by gCaptain, MSC pulled a ship owned by Shanghai-based BOCOM Leasing from its California Express service.
China has its own reciprocal “special port fees” on US-linked ships. They were paused on a similar timetable, and FreightWaves reported that they could return in parallel if the US fees are revived. Our expectation is that a US lapse would bring a Chinese response within days, hitting US-linked tonnage in Chinese ports.

What forwarders should do now

The fees land on carriers, but carriers do not keep costs. Spot rates are already firm. Freightos data put Asia–US West Coast rates above $8,100 per FEU (forty-foot equivalent unit), up 4% in a week, and Asia–US East Coast at about $9,600, according to FreightWaves on 24 September. A surcharge on top would arrive just as Q4 and early-2027 pricing is being agreed.
Practical steps for the next 30 days:

Ask your carriers in writing how they would bill fees for calls after 10 November, and at what rate.

Check the loops you use. Exposure sits on services using Chinese-built or Chinese-owned tonnage, not on every transpacific sailing.

Keep surcharge pass-through clauses in Q4 quotes and short-term contracts. Do not absorb an unknown fee in a fixed all-in rate.

Watch the Federal Register’s public inspection list, where documents appear a day or more before formal publication.

Shippers with flexible cargo have little reason to rush it. The likely outcome is no fee on 10 November. The risk is a short, messy gap, not a lasting new cost.

Our call

We expect USTR to publish an extension in the first week of November, running at least to 10 January 2027 to match the truce. We think the odds of carriers actually billing these fees for November calls are low. Probably one in five, and only if the notice slips past the deadline.
The harder date is 10 January. As Tech Times noted, it falls before Chinese New Year on 6 February 2027, a peak shipping period. Unless the truce is extended again by mid-December, expect carriers to start publishing contingency port-fee surcharges for January sailings before Christmas.

Sources