The reference desk for landside charges
Every day we read every published schedule that puts a charge on an ANZ import container: carrier detention tariffs, terminal access notices, empty-park fee pages. Then we turn them into one verified, current, citable reference. We don't move containers, sell freight, or take a cent from the companies whose charges we track. We just keep the numbers straight.
Three commitments, no exceptions
A reference is only worth what its discipline is worth. These are the three rules we don't bend, because the moment one of them slips, the data stops being usable in the one place it matters most: a dispute.
Independent, by design
No carrier, stevedore or park operator funds Wharfa. Our only customers are the people who pay these charges: importers, forwarders, transport operators and the software they run on. That's the whole point. A reference is only useful if nobody with a rate card owns it.
Verified, not scraped
Every value is read from the publisher's own document and stored against an immutable capture of the page, the date and the figure. Machine-read values are flagged until a human verifies them. If we can't cite it, we don't publish it.
Corrected in the open
When we get one wrong, and it happens, the correction is published, dated, and kept in the history alongside the original. The archive never quietly changes. That discipline is what makes the data usable in a dispute.
The industry has plenty of opinions about these charges. What it's been missing is an agreed set of facts.
The desk behind the numbers
A small team in Melbourne, reading every published schedule so your quotes never ride on a stale figure.
The story, briefly
How a scatter of PDFs became one of the fastest-moving costs in Australian trade, and why the fix is boring on purpose.
Landside charges have become one of the fastest-moving costs in Australian trade. Terminal access charges that barely existed a decade ago now run to hundreds of dollars a container and rise on their own schedule, while carrier free time keeps shrinking and the tiers behind it climb.
Park fees, notification fees and booking fees are each small, each moving, and each published somewhere different, in a different format, on a different day. The industry's answer has been thousands of private spreadsheets: every forwarder, importer and transport operator retyping the same twenty PDFs, each version current as of whenever someone last remembered. Quotes get built on stale numbers.
Disputes get lost for lack of a dated source. Rate-variation letters turn into arguments because nobody can point at the notice. Wharfa is the boring, necessary fix: one desk that reads every schedule every day, keeps the receipts, and tells you the moment something moves. Not advice, not advocacy, just a reference, because the industry has never been short of opinions about these charges, only an agreed set of facts.
The full landside charge stack
If it lands on an ANZ import container, we track it: not just the rates, but the rules that decide how they apply.
Detention & demurrage
Import detention tariffs for every major line calling ANZ, with full tier structures, container-size multipliers, and the free-time rules that govern when the meter starts: day basis, clock start, combined pools, holiday treatment.
Terminal & infrastructure
Terminal access and infrastructure charges at every stevedore (DP World, Patrick, VICT, Hutchison), with full change history back to 2019 and advance notices logged the day they're lodged.
Empty parks & VBS
Notification and handling fees at major empty container parks, plus vehicle booking system fees. These are the small per-box lines that quietly compound into real money at volume.
LIVE COVERAGE: MELBOURNE · SYDNEY · BRISBANE · FREMANTLE · AUCKLAND · TAURANGA · NAPIER · LYTTELTON (MORE BY DEMAND)
Six stages between a PDF and a number you can cite
One pipeline feeds the site, the alerts, the API and the Index from the same verified store. One truth, many doors.
Watch
Every source, whether a tariff page, a notice board or a fee schedule, is checked daily for anything new or altered, however quietly it was posted.
Capture
Changed documents are stored immutably, exactly as published, timestamped. This capture is the receipt everything else points back to.
Extract
Values and rules are read out of the document into structured form: tiers, dates, day bases and clock starts, not just the headline dollar figure.
Verify
Extracted values pass sanity checks, and a human reviews anything new, unusual or high-impact. Until then it's honestly labelled machine-read.
Diff
New values are compared against history to produce the change record: what moved, from what, to what, effective when, with how much lead time.
Publish
The site, the alerts, the API and the Index all update from the same verified store. One pipeline, one truth, many doors.
Corrections, coverage requests, or a schedule we've missed?
We read everything and reply in writing, where records live. Corrections, source suggestions, API access, media: one desk, one place.