WE HAVE officially passed 150 days of the Strait of Hormuz crisis. Surcharges have been climbing steadily, peak season surcharges, congestion surcharges, bunker adjustment factors, stacking on top of freight and D&D at a rate that's outpacing most forwarders' margins. That pressure shows up in how invoices actually get paid: rather than a clean binary of paid or unpaid, a lot of forwarders are part-paying. Freight gets settled in full because cargo release depends on it, a portion of D&D gets paid to keep the relationship civil, and the rest sits on the ledger indefinitely.
It feels, from the forwarder's side, like responsible triage under cash flow pressure. From the carrier's side, and from a liquidator's side later, it reads very differently, a running pattern of partial payment against a specific, named debt is arguably worse evidence than simple non-payment, because it shows the forwarder had funds, allocated them selectively, and chose not to clear the balance. That's the commercial environment the 150-day figure is emerging from, and it's worth sitting with before getting into why I think liens are the next step.
Most credit terms in this industry sit somewhere between 30 and 60 days. Even generous arrangements rarely stretch past 90. So, when a demurrage and detention ledger shows invoices sitting at 150 days unpaid, that's not "slow payment" anymore — it's roughly triple the outer edge of normal trading terms, and it changes the calculus for every carrier holding that exposure.
Here's why I think that shift in duration is about to translate into a shift in carrier behaviour, specifically toward exercising liens rather than continuing to chase payment through the ordinary credit cycle.
D&D is unsecured debt. A carrier sitting on unpaid invoices is, commercially speaking, no different to any other unsecured creditor. They’re competing for attention, competing for cash, and competing for priority if the debtor's position deteriorates further. At 30 or 60 days, that's a manageable commercial relationship problem, the kind that gets worked out with a phone call or a payment plan. At 150 days, it's a credit exposure that most finance teams would be actively flagging on a monthly aged debtor report, and legal departments would be actively de-risking rather than leaving to the account manager to chase.
Think about what 150 days actually represents operationally. The container has long since been returned, the cargo has long since been delivered, and the commercial leverage a carrier normally holds, usually withholding release, refusing the next booking, holding the bill of lading, that has already been spent. What's left is a naked debt claim, easier for a struggling forwarder to deprioritise than a supplier invoice, because there's no cargo sitting on the wharf reminding anyone it exists.
The lien is the obvious lever, because it converts an unsecured claim into something closer to a proprietary one. However, it only works while there's still cargo in the carrier's possession. That's why I think the real shift won't be carriers waiting longer on existing aged debt. It'll be carriers moving to lien the next shipment the moment a forwarder's account crosses this kind of threshold, rather than extending further unsecured credit while a live opportunity to take security still exists. Rather than standing in line with every other creditor hoping for a liquidation dividend, a carrier exercising a possessory lien gets to hold something of value until the debt is satisfied, rather than holding a claim.
There's also a preference-risk dimension I think is under-discussed. If a forwarder is genuinely under financial strain, any lump-sum catch-up payment a carrier eventually receives on that 150-day balance is exactly the kind of payment a liquidator will scrutinise under the unfair preference provisions in Part 5.7B of the Corporations Act. And the carrier is in a uniquely poor position to defend that scrutiny. The good-faith defence under s588FG requires showing no reasonable grounds existed to suspect insolvency at the time payment was received. But a carrier holding its own 150-day aged debtor ledger on that exact counterparty is, in effect, sitting on the evidence a liquidator needs to prove the opposite. It's not third-party gossip; it's the carrier's own record of a debtor failing to pay for five months.
That creates an awkward position: continuing to extend unsecured credit doesn't reduce the carrier's insolvency exposure, it actively builds the paper trail that would unwind any payment received later. A lien changes that risk profile entirely. Enforcing security over cargo the carrier already lawfully holds is a fundamentally different transaction to receiving a payment. The carrier isn't receiving funds from the company's assets in preference to other creditors, it's exercising a proprietary right that existed independently of the forwarder's solvency altogether, and that doesn't retrospectively become vulnerable simply because the forwarder later fails.
In other words: the longer the ledger ages, the worse a straight cash recovery looks from a preference standpoint, and the better a lien looks by comparison. That's not a subtle distinction for a carrier's legal and credit teams, it's the difference between a recovery strategy that survives a subsequent liquidation and one that doesn't.
None of this makes liens a costless tool for carriers. A lien clause has to actually be in the contract of carriage and has to be exercised properly (over the right cargo, for the right debt) or it exposes the carrier to its own claims in conversion or breach of contract. And liens only work while there's cargo to lien, which is exactly why I expect the shift in behaviour to show up on new bookings and forward relationships, rather than as some dramatic retrospective seizure of goods already released.
My prediction is that once D&D exposure crosses this kind of threshold, carriers move from "commercial chasing" to formal lien notices and do so faster than they have historically. I'd also expect the trigger point to keep dropping over time. As more carriers formalise credit control policies around aged D&D, and as the preference-defence problem becomes better understood within carrier legal and credit teams, 150 days is likely to become the outer edge of tolerance rather than the point at which action starts. It isn't a legal trigger in itself, but it's a practical one: the point at which extending informal credit stops being a relationship decision and starts being a balance sheet decision.
For freight forwarders, the operational message is straightforward. A lien doesn't require a court order and doesn't wait for a liquidator's timeline. Lines can bite immediately, on live cargo, typically at the worst possible commercial moment: mid-shipment, with a consignee waiting and a delivery deadline looming. If your D&D ledger with any single carrier is drifting toward this range, the conversation to have isn't about whether you can afford to pay it. It's about whether you can afford for that carrier to stop asking.
The practical steps worth taking well before that point are the obvious ones: reconcile disputed versus undisputed D&D separately, so a genuine dispute doesn't get lumped in with debt you've simply deprioritised; keep communication with the carrier's credit team open rather than going quiet, since silence is itself a badge both liquidators and credit teams watch for; and treat any account drifting past 90 days as a live commercial risk requiring a plan, not a line item to revisit next quarter.
This article is general commentary only and does not constitute legal advice.