Notice of Readiness

What is a notice of readiness?

A notice of readiness (NOR) is the formal statement by which the master tells the charterer or their agent that the vessel has arrived and is ready in all respects to load or discharge. Tendering a valid NOR is the event that, after any agreed notice period, starts the laytime clock.

In a voyage charter the owner is paid for carrying a parcel and is allowed a finite number of days for cargo work at each port. That allowance is laytime, and it does not begin to count just because the vessel turns up. It begins when a valid NOR is tendered and the notice period has run. The NOR is therefore the trigger that converts the vessel’s physical arrival into a contractual event with money attached. If the NOR is defective, the clock may not start at all, and a demurrage claim that depended on it can collapse. The Laytime Definitions for Charter Parties 2013 (LDCP 2013), published jointly by BIMCO, the Baltic Exchange, the Comite Maritime International and FONASBA, give the agreed market meaning of the terms used around arrival and readiness, and most modern fixtures incorporate them by reference or by adopting their wording.

How to tender a valid notice of readiness

Tendering a valid NOR is a sequence, not a single act. The clause in the charter party sets the place the vessel must reach, the readiness conditions that must be true, the form the notice must take, and the hours during which it can be given. The timeline below (T1) walks the canonical sequence from arrival to laytime commencement, with a concrete example at each step. It is the operational checklist a master and owner work through before counting a single hour of laytime.

1. 01

   Arrival at the agreed place

   Step 1

   The vessel reaches the place the clause fixes as the point of arrival. A berth charter requires arrival at the berth itself; a port charter only requires arrival within the port limits, for example dropping anchor at the commercial anchorage when no berth is free.

2. 02

   Vessel physically and legally ready

   Step 2

   The vessel is ready in all respects: holds clean, passed and dry for the cargo, gear and gangway set, free pratique granted and customs cleared where required. Charter wording such as WIPON, WIBON, WCCON and WIFPON decides which of these conditions can be waived for the purpose of tendering NOR.

3. 03

   Tender of NOR

   Step 3

   The master tenders the notice in writing in the agreed form, for example by email and by hand to the agent and shippers or receivers, within the office hours the clause allows, such as 0800 to 1700 on working days.

4. 04

   Acceptance or deemed acceptance

   Step 4

   The receiving party accepts the NOR, or it is deemed accepted by operation of the clause, for example where the wording treats the notice as accepted if no rejection is given within a stated time. A clause may also provide that NOR is deemed tendered on a later working hour if given out of hours.

5. 05

   Turn time or notice time runs

   Step 5

   An agreed allowance, often expressed as a notice period such as twelve hours after acceptance, or as turn time, runs before counting begins. During this period the vessel waits but laytime is not yet ticking.

6. 06

   Laytime commences

   Step 6

   Once the notice period or turn time expires, laytime commences and the charterer's allowed days begin to count down. From here the statement of facts records every countable hour until cargo work completes.

The order matters because steps two and three cannot be skipped or reordered: a notice tendered before the vessel is actually ready is, on the orthodox view, a nullity that does not start time even after readiness is later achieved, unless the clause provides for a fresh or deemed tender.

How the notice of readiness connects to the laytime regime

The NOR is a hinge clause. It does little on its own but it gates almost every other time-and-money clause in the voyage charter. The dependency map below shows the adjacent terms and how each connects to the notice of readiness. A change to the NOR machinery moves the result on every one of them.

Related term	How it connects to the notice of readiness	Page
Laytime	A valid NOR, once the notice period expires, is what starts the laytime clock; without a valid tender the allowed days never begin to count.	Laytime
Demurrage	An invalid NOR can delay or void laytime commencement, which shifts or erases the point at which the vessel goes on demurrage and can defeat an owner's demurrage claim.	Demurrage
Dispatch	Because dispatch is earned on laytime saved, the moment the NOR starts the clock sets the baseline from which any time saved by the charterer is measured.	Dispatch
Loading and discharging rate	The agreed rate fixes the size of the allowance in days; the NOR fixes the moment that allowance starts to be consumed, so the two together define the whole laytime window.	Loading and discharging rate
Laycan	The NOR cannot validly be tendered before the laydays open; arrival and tender outside the laycan window can let the charterer cancel before any NOR question arises.	Laycan

Read together these clauses form the operational spine of the voyage charter: laycan sets the arrival window, the NOR opens the clock, the rate sizes the allowance, laytime counts it down, and demurrage or dispatch settles the difference. For the wider contractual frame in which these clauses sit, see the ship chartering hub.

How an NOR clause is worded

The hardest part of the NOR clause is the cluster of acronyms that decide when the vessel can tender even though it has not yet reached the berth or cleared formalities. The annotated wording below is representative GENCON-style drafting, not text copied from any confidential fixture.

The four “whether or not” formulas all do the same job: they move a specific arrival or readiness risk from the owner onto the charterer by allowing the notice to be tendered before that condition is met. Their presence or absence in the recap can be worth a full day or more of laytime when a Capesize or Panamax is waiting days for a berth at a congested terminal.

Worked example: tendering NOR at a congested discharge port

The following worked example (T2) shows how the NOR machinery plays out at a busy discharge port. The figures and circumstances are representative and anonymised, not a real fixture.

A Panamax fixes a 70,000 tonne parcel of coal on a port charter for discharge. The NOR clause reads WIPON WIBON WCCON WIFPON, with laytime to commence twelve hours after acceptance. On arrival the discharge port is congested and no berth is available.

Step 1, arrival: the vessel reaches the commercial anchorage inside the port limits at 0930 on a Tuesday and drops anchor to await a berth. Because the charter is a port charter with WIBON, arrival at the anchorage within port limits is sufficient; the vessel does not need to be at the berth.

Step 2, readiness: the holds were cleaned and passed at the previous port and remain ready for coal; free pratique is pending but WIFPON allows the tender, and customs clearance is pending but WCCON allows it. The vessel is therefore ready in all respects for the purpose of the clause.

Step 3, tender: the master tenders NOR in writing by email to the agent and receivers at 1000 on the Tuesday, within the office hours of 0800 to 1700 on a working day.

Step 4, acceptance: the receivers acknowledge and accept the NOR at 1100 the same day.

Step 5, notice period: the twelve-hour notice period runs from acceptance, expiring at 2300 on the Tuesday.

Step 6, commencement: laytime commences at 2300 on the Tuesday and counts down the allowed days, even though the vessel does not actually berth until the Friday. The waiting time at anchor from Tuesday night onward counts as laytime against the charterer, which is precisely the effect the WIBON wording was negotiated to achieve. If the allowed laytime, derived from the 70,000 tonnes and the agreed discharge rate, is exhausted before discharge completes, the vessel goes on demurrage from that point.

What goes wrong with notices of readiness

Most NOR disputes come down to a notice that was tendered too early, in the wrong place, in the wrong way, or at the wrong time. The recurring failure modes (T3) are these.

Premature NOR before the vessel is physically ready. Tendering while holds are still being cleaned, or before the cargo gear is set, risks the notice being treated as invalid. On the orthodox view an NOR tendered when the vessel is not in fact ready does not start time, and time does not begin merely because readiness is achieved later, unless the clause provides for a deemed or fresh tender. Owners often protect themselves by re-tendering once genuinely ready.

Holds not yet passed. Where the cargo requires a hold inspection, for example a clean and dry standard for grain or a particular finish for iron ore, tendering NOR before the holds have passed the surveyor can invalidate the notice. The vessel is not ready in all respects until the inspection it must pass has been passed.

Tender outside the agreed hours or form. A notice given outside the office hours the clause allows, or given orally when the clause requires writing, can be ineffective or only take effect at the next permitted time. The clause governs, and an out-of-hours tender often counts as given at the start of the next working period.

Berth versus port ambiguity. Confusing a berth charter with a port charter, or relying on WIBON wording that the recap does not actually contain, is a frequent and expensive error. Under a pure berth charter with no WIBON, an NOR tendered from the anchorage is premature and waiting time may fall on the owner rather than the charterer. P&I clubs such as Gard, the UK Club and the North of England club publish detailed claims guidance on exactly these NOR validity points, and owners’ claims handlers treat the wording of the arrival clause as the first thing to check on any demurrage file.

Scope and what this page does not cover

This page explains what a notice of readiness is, how a valid NOR is tendered from arrival through to laytime commencement, how the NOR connects to laytime, demurrage, dispatch, the loading and discharging rate and laycan, how the WIPON, WIBON, WCCON and WIFPON wording works, and the common ways an NOR fails. It does not give jurisdiction-specific case law or arbitral authority on NOR validity, which varies by governing law and forum. It is not clause-by-clause drafting advice, and it does not cover berth-charter and port-charter doctrine in the depth a disputed claim would require. For a binding position on a real fixture, work from the executed charter party and the master’s statement of facts, and take legal or P&I advice on any disputed NOR or demurrage claim.