Five published changes in the July round, and the story is not the terminal access charges. Two New Zealand ports repriced the vehicle booking fee by 65% and 46% — the largest moves on the register — while the Australian side rose a routine 5%.
The month in one line
The smallest line on the cartage invoice moved further than anything else, at both Tauranga and Lyttelton, within a week of each other. A fee small enough to ignore is a fee small enough to raise.
What changed
- Port of Tauranga VBS booking fee: $11.90 → $19.66 per booking (eff 1 Jul). +65.2%, the largest single move we have recorded.
- Lyttelton Port VBS booking fee: $65.00 → $95.00 per booking (eff 6 Jul). +46.2%.
- Australian Amalgamated Terminals, Brisbane (all eff 1 Jul), a flat 5.0%
across the sheet:
- Terminal access charge (import): $191.89 → $201.48 per container
- Terminal access charge (export): $136.55 → $143.38 per container
- VBS booking fee: $46.31 → $48.63 per booking
What it means for the desk
Two different pricing behaviours in one month. AAT applied a uniform 5% — the kind of rise you can budget for a year ahead. Tauranga and Lyttelton repriced the booking fee outright, which is a different decision: not indexation, a reset.
Tauranga at $19.66 remains the cheapest booking fee we track, so the 65% rise starts from a low base. Lyttelton at $95 is now the second highest in Australasia, behind Ports of Auckland at $115. If you move volume through both, the gap between NZ terminals on this line is now wider than the gap on terminal access.
Watching
The Landside Index stands at 106.2 for the September quarter, 6.2% above its base. That movement is entirely terminal-access driven: no carrier changed an import detention rate in the period, which is unusual and worth watching rather than assuming it holds.
Every figure here is read from the publisher's own schedule and carries the document it came from.