What a voyage estimation tells you
A voyage estimation answers one question: does this cargo, on this ship, over this route, make money? It brings together the freight revenue and every voyage cost — bunker fuel, port disbursements, canal dues — across the days the voyage takes, and returns the voyage result, the daily TCE, and the breakeven freight rate. Chartering desks run dozens of these a day to rank competing cargoes before fixing.
How the estimate is built
- Sea days = distance ÷ (speed × 24). Port days = load + discharge.
- Bunker cost = fuel burn at the chosen speed (scaled by the cube law) × bunker price, plus port consumption.
- Voyage costs = bunkers + port disbursements + canal dues.
- Breakeven rate = voyage costs ÷ (cargo × (1 − commission)).
- Voyage result = net freight revenue − voyage costs; TCE = result ÷ voyage days.
Worked example
A Panamax lifts ~72,000 t of grain from the US Gulf to Qingdao (~11,400 nm). With bunkers at $600/t the voyage costs land around $0.73m over ~40 days, for a breakeven of roughly $10/t. Fix the cargo at $52/t and the voyage returns a strong positive result and a TCE near $75,000/day. Enter it above and vary the rate to find where the voyage turns red.
Keep it current
Bunker prices and freight rates move every day, so a voyage estimate is a snapshot. Pair it with the live Baltic Dry Index and sub-indices to judge whether the market is carrying rates up or down before you commit.
Call GET /v1/voyage for machine-readable P&L, TCE and breakeven, or see every endpoint on the API page.
Related tools
TCE calculator ($/day) · Freight cost estimator ($/t) · All shipping tools