What NY / NJ drayage really costs.

A container move from a NY / NJ terminal has one number people shop — the base rate — and a tail of fees that decide whether the move was actually cheap. The tail isn't padding: most of it is real cost triggered by real events (a chassis day, a terminal wait, an expired free day). The difference between carriers is not whether those fees exist, but whether anyone is managing the events that trigger them.

Here is the whole invoice, top to bottom.

The point-to-point charge for the tractor, driver, and move itself — terminal to door, door to terminal, or terminal to terminal. It scales with distance, market lane balance, and how hard the destination is to serve. City work (bridge clearances, borough truck routes, tight receivers) prices differently than a dock in the Meadowlands, and it should.

A percentage of linehaul indexed to diesel — most carriers, us included, peg it to the published DOE weekly average. It floats week to week. Any quote that hides FSC inside a too-good base rate is a quote you'll re-learn at invoice time.

Ocean containers ride on chassis that, at NY / NJ, usually come from interchange pools billed per day. Expect a daily rate for the wheels under your box from outgate to ingate. Two extra chassis events matter: a split (the chassis must be picked up or returned somewhere other than the container's terminal — an extra leg, an extra fee) and a flip (lifting a box from one chassis to another). See our chassis guide for the full NY / NJ picture.

Congestion, waiting time, and dry runs are fees the terminal environment creates. Waiting time bills when a driver sits beyond a free window at the gate or the receiver's dock. A dry run bills when a truck arrives and the move can't happen — box not available, wrong paperwork, dead appointment. Almost every dry run is preventable by verifying availability, holds, and appointments before dispatch, which is precisely the job our operating record automates.

Demurrage is the terminal charging for a container that overstayed its free time on terminal ground. Per diem (detention) is the steamship line charging for its container out in the world past free days. Yard storage is what a carrier charges to hold a box at its own yard — the cheap escape valve from the first two. The full mechanics get their own guide; the money summary is simple: demurrage and per diem escalate and compound, yard storage doesn't. Illustratively, if tier-one demurrage is a few hundred dollars a day and a yard day is a fraction of that, one well-timed pre-pull pays for itself several times over on a single box.

Overweight moves need permitted tri-axle equipment and legal routing — an equipment-and-compliance adder. Reefer moves add genset power. Hazmat adds endorsement, placards, and paperwork discipline. These price the real cost of equipment and compliance; the alternative to paying them is running illegal, which prices worse.

You lower drayage spend by managing events, not by grinding base rates: verified availability before dispatch (kills dry runs), appointments the terminal honors (kills waiting time), empty returns matched to live acceptance (kills second trips), pre-pulls before the last free day (kills demurrage), and empties returned inside free days (kills per diem). Every one of those is a dispatch behavior. That's the actual product you're buying when you buy drayage.