Off-hire is a charter party clause that suspends hire payments while a ship cannot perform the service the charterer is paying for. Typical triggers are a breakdown, a dry docking, crew shortages and, most painfully, a PSC detention. The clause is why a detention costs far more than the repair bill: for every day the ship sits, the owner earns nothing while the costs keep running.
How it shows up in practice
Picture a bulk carrier on time charter, detained after a PSC inspection finds detainable deficiencies. From the moment the ship cannot sail, the charterer stops the hire clock. The owner still pays the crew, the insurance, the port dues and the repair, and now adds the surveyor's re-attendance and any charges the authority levies, all with zero revenue against them. If the detention makes the ship miss its next commitment, the losses compound down the chain. The full cost anatomy of a detention, day rates included, is laid out in detention costs and consequences.
Off-hire is also where disputes live. Charter parties define the triggering events precisely, and the burden of proving a valid off-hire event and its duration falls on the party claiming it. When a detention is involved, the paper trail decides the argument: when the ship was detained, what was found, when each deficiency was rectified, when the authority released her. Owners with a documented timeline settle these questions quickly; owners reconstructing events from emails and memory pay for the gaps.
What it means for operators
Off-hire converts inspection failure into a direct revenue loss at the full daily rate of the ship, which makes it the sharpest financial argument for inspection readiness. Prevention is the only clean answer: a deficiency found by the crew a week before arrival costs a work order, while the same deficiency found by a PSC officer can cost days of hire. And because detentions also feed the vetting records charterers screen against, described in charterer vetting explained, the off-hire days are rarely the end of the bill. The ship that avoids the detention never has the argument.