Methodology

The indicators are calculated from ANTAQ’s Estatístico Aquaviário, the public database of berthings and cargo at Brazilian ports. No Vessel Planner user data goes into these figures.

Definition of each time

Waiting time to berth: from the ship’s arrival to berthing.

Time at berth: from berthing to unberthing.

Operation: from the start to the end of loading or discharging.

Port stay: from arrival to unberthing.

Average handling rate: total weight handled divided by total operation hours, only for berthings with recorded weight and operation.

Median and percentiles

The median (P50) is the time that half of the berthings do not exceed; P75 and P90 show the longer waits. Slices with fewer than 5 berthings show “insufficient data”. Negative times or times above 2,000 hours are treated as recording errors and discarded.

Median and percentiles only appear with at least 5 berthings in the slice; below that we show “insufficient data”. Dedicated port × cargo and terminal pages only exist with at least 30 berthings in the last 12 months, so the figure does not hinge on a handful of vessels. Every page shows how many berthings back the figure.

The national reference is the median of all berthings in Brazil in the same period and cargo, not the average of port medians. Differences up to 5% are treated as “in line”.

Slices

Each berthing counts in the month it berthed. The berthing’s cargo is the heaviest of its cargoes. The map’s waiting level uses the median: low below 24 h, moderate from 24 h to 72 h and high from 72 h.

The port follows ANTAQ’s name (public port or private-use terminal). The port complex groups neighbouring facilities, such as the private terminals in the Santos complex. The terminal is the berthing facility (quay, pier or grouped berth) reported by ANTAQ for each berthing; the terminal comparison uses the last 12 months.

Limitations

ANTAQ does not record the notice of readiness (NOR) or the cause of stoppages. These times are therefore not equivalent to contractual laytime and do not replace the port call’s Statement of Facts.

Updates

Data is loaded once a month, with a monthly series from January 2020 onwards, as soon as ANTAQ publishes the next month (usually one to two months behind). ANTAQ may revise previous months; each load recalculates the current and previous year.

License and source

Primary source: the Estatístico Aquaviário of Brazil’s National Waterway Transportation Agency (ANTAQ), federal government open data downloaded from the “Base de Dados” tab of the Aquarela dashboard. The indicators calculated by Vessel Planner are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC BY 4.0): you may copy, redistribute and adapt them, including commercially, as long as you cite the source.

Source: ANTAQ — Estatístico Aquaviário, data up to 02/2026