The RightShip Safety Score is a rating from 0 to 5 that RightShip calculates for every vessel in its system from five years of safety performance data. Charterers, terminals and cargo owners read it before they fix. No operator sets it, no tool adjusts it, and it moves only when the record it measures moves.
What is the RightShip Safety Score?
The Safety Score is RightShip's benchmark of a vessel's historical operational performance, published on its platform to give vetting customers what RightShip calls "an initial perspective on the operational performance of a potential vessel". It sits at the centre of dry bulk vetting the way the SIRE report sits at the centre of tanker vetting, with one big difference: it is a single number, visible at a glance, and it follows the ship.
The score is not a vetting outcome. RightShip's own help centre is explicit that vetting "involves a range of inputs and assessments, in addition to the Safety Score", and a customer can layer its own criteria on top. But the score is the first thing a charterer's screen shows, and for many fixtures it decides whether anyone looks further.
It is also not an inspection. The physical inspection of the ship is a separate exercise carried out to the RISQ, covered in our chapter-by-chapter walkthrough of what RightShip inspectors check. The two connect, which is the subject of the last section.
How is the score calculated?
In two stages: rules first, model second. RightShip checks every vessel against a set of safety performance rules distilled from what its methodology page calls accepted "good industry practice". A triggered rule pins the score at N/A, 0, 1 or 2, and each rule carries a defined road to resolution. Only when no rule is triggered, or every triggered rule has been resolved, does the statistical model take over and assign a 3, 4 or 5.
The model, per RightShip's help centre, is built from six sub-scores and more than 20 safety considerations, all drawn from the vessel's five-year history:
| Sub-score | What RightShip counts | Weight in the model |
|---|---|---|
| Incidents | Reported incidents over the past five years, categorised A to C by seriousness | Highest |
| DOC holder performance | Detentions, PSC deficiencies and incidents across the manager's whole fleet | Highest |
| PSC deficiencies | The vessel's deficiencies over the past five years, adjusted for regional inspection practice and graded by severity | Medium |
| PSC detentions | Detentions over the past five years | Medium |
| Flag state | The flag's performance record | Lowest |
| Classification society | The class society's performance record | Lowest |
Two things in that table deserve a second look. Incidents outweigh everything else at vessel level, so a single Category A incident does more damage than a run of minor deficiencies. And the DOC holder sub-score means a vessel is scored partly on its manager's other ships: a sister vessel's detention reaches your score through the company column.
What is deliberately absent: size, type, builder and age. RightShip removed them after industry feedback, so an older ship is not marked down for being old. Age enters through a different door, the inspection requirement, which no model output can offset.
What do scores 1 to 5 mean in practice?
A 0 means the vessel is flagged as sanctioned, and RightShip states such vessels "cannot receive a positive vetting outcome". A 1 signals the most serious rule triggers: a Paris MoU, AMSA or USCG ban, three PSC detentions within 24 months, or an open Category A incident within 12 months. A 2 covers the broader rule set: two detentions within 24 months, an excessively high deficiency count (RightShip's threshold is 50 within 24 months), an unacceptable last RightShip inspection, class outside IACS, or an ageing vessel with no acceptable inspection.
Scores 3 to 5 are the model's territory. A 3 is roughly average performance for the fleet; a 5, in RightShip's words, reflects "best practice attention to safety over the last five years". The difference between a 3 and a 4 is not published as a formula, which is one reason operators watch the sub-score panels on the vessel page rather than chase a single number.
What score do charterers expect before fixing?
RightShip publishes no universal minimum, and its help centre says a vessel scoring anywhere from 1 to 5 can in principle receive an acceptable recommendation if it meets the minimum vetting standard and the customer's own criteria. That is the formal position. The practical one is harsher: a score of 1 or 2 routes the vessel into what RightShip calls additional checks, which can include a full score review, PSC deficiency reports, class survey status and, at the end of that road, a required inspection.
In the dry bulk market operators commonly work to a 3, treating anything lower as a commercial handicap rather than a formal bar. No charterer publishes a cut-off, and how each sets one is their business, not RightShip's; our guide to how charterer vetting works across regimes covers that layer. The honest summary: a 2 does not formally bar the ship, it just means every fixture becomes a negotiation about risk.
Which factors can an operator actually influence?
The controllable inputs are the performance ones. PSC deficiencies and detentions respond to preparation before each port call. The incident record responds to how the ship is actually run, and to closing out incidents with RightShip rather than leaving them open, since open records trigger harsher rules than closed ones. The DOC sub-score responds to doing all of this fleet-wide. Flag and class are choices too, though slow and expensive ones, and they carry the least weight in the model anyway.
Worth saying plainly: no tool, Fleetward included, changes the Safety Score. The score is RightShip's, calculated from RightShip's data. What preparation changes is what the next PSC boarding or RISQ inspection finds, and those findings are the raw material the score is made from. An operator who wants a different number in two years' time gets it by putting different inspection results into the record, one port call at a time.
How long do PSC deficiencies and incidents weigh on the score?
The model looks back five years, so everything fades eventually. The rules run on shorter, sharper clocks:
| Trigger | Rule | Score | Window |
|---|---|---|---|
| Three PSC detentions | SS1-8 | 1 | 24 months |
| Open Category A incident | SS1-9 | 1 | 12 months |
| Two PSC detentions | SS2-1 | 2 | 24 months |
| 50 PSC deficiencies | SS2-2 | 2 | 24 months |
| Closed Category A incident | SS2-4 | 2 | 12 months |
| Open Category A or B incident | SS2-8 | 2 | 24 months |
| Two or three incidents, any category | SS1-13, SS1-14 | 1 | 36 months |
Since 20 August 2025, every PSC deficiency entering the system is graded high, medium or low severity under RightShip's PSC severity framework: an AI-assisted analysis proposes the grade and a RightShip subject matter expert makes the final call. A dozen administrative findings no longer weigh like a dozen fire safety failures. If you believe a grade is wrong, there is a documented route to challenge it, described in our guide to the reassessment process and inspection validity.
How does the score relate to a RISQ inspection?
Through a rule. SS2-5 holds any in-scope vessel over 11 years old at score 2 until it completes an acceptable RightShip inspection, and the age threshold has been stepping down since 2025 under RightShip's inspection age trigger, reaching 10.5 years on 20 January 2027. For an ageing bulk carrier the inspection is now the gate the score cannot pass without.
The inspection's result then feeds back: an acceptable outcome resolves the rule and earns a validity of 3 to 12 months depending on findings and close-out quality, while an unacceptable one triggers rules of its own. Which is why the score and the inspection are best treated as one problem. The score tells the market what the record says; the inspection is where the record gets written.