Sea Freight Cut-Off Times: SI, VGM, CY and Doc Cut-Off Explained

A sea freight booking is not really a booking of a ship. It is a set of deadlines attached to a sailing. Miss any one of them and your container does not travel, even if it is sitting inside the terminal gate. Bangladeshi importers who ship LCL feel this second-hand through the forwarder; importers who move FCL from China deal with it directly. This guide lays out each cut-off, the order they fall in, and what missing one actually does.

Why cut-offs exist

Before a vessel sails, the carrier has to build a stowage plan — where every box sits, by weight and by discharge port — and file a manifest with customs at origin and at every destination. It cannot do that if data is still arriving an hour before departure. So the carrier sets a series of earlier deadlines: one for your shipping instructions, one for the verified weight, one for the physical container to be inside the yard, and one for any document corrections. Each feeds a step the carrier must finish before the ship leaves.

The deadlines are published on the booking confirmation. Read that document the day you receive it, not the day before the ship sails.

SI cut-off (shipping instructions)

The SI is the instruction you or your forwarder send the carrier telling it exactly how to draw up the bill of lading: shipper, consignee, notify party, cargo description, marks, HS code, container and seal numbers, freight terms. The SI cut-off is the deadline to submit that. It typically falls one to three days before the vessel sails from the China load port, and it is often the earliest of the set.

Miss it and the carrier may still accept a late SI for a fee, but you lose the buffer to check the draft bill of lading before it is finalised. A wrong consignee name or a cargo description that does not match your invoice becomes a bill-of-lading amendment later, which costs money and can delay release at Chattogram. Our guide on bill of lading types explains why those fields matter.

VGM cut-off (verified gross mass)

Under the SOLAS rule, no packed container can be loaded onto a ship unless its verified gross mass has been submitted to the carrier and terminal in advance. The VGM is the weight of the cargo plus dunnage plus the tare of the container, established either by weighing the packed box or by weighing the cargo and adding the tare. The VGM cut-off is usually close to the CY cut-off, sometimes a few hours before it.

No VGM, no load — this one is not negotiable with a fee. The box is simply left on the ground. If the submitted VGM is wildly different from the terminal’s weighbridge reading, the terminal can reject it and demand a re-weigh, which eats your remaining time. We cover the mechanics in the VGM explainer.

CY cut-off (container yard / gate-in)

The CY cut-off, also called the port cut-off or gate-in deadline, is the time by which your packed, sealed container must have physically passed through the terminal gate and be inside the container yard. For an FCL shipment out of a China port this is the hard operational deadline — the trucker has to clear origin export customs and reach the gate before that clock stops.

Miss the CY cut-off and your container is “shut out.” It rolls to the next sailing, which from China to Chattogram can mean several extra days to a week or more depending on the service. You may also owe storage at the origin depot for the days the box waits. Traffic into major Chinese port areas, a customs inspection hold on your export declaration, or a documentation error can all burn the hours you thought you had.

Doc cut-off and the manifest

After the SI, the carrier produces a draft bill of lading. The doc cut-off is the last point at which you can send corrections before the carrier files its outward manifest with China customs and transmits the inbound manifest data toward Bangladesh. After the doc cut-off, changes become formal amendments, often chargeable, and some — like changing the destination port — may not be possible at all once the manifest is lodged.

This is why the SI buffer matters. If your SI went in on time, you have a day or two to catch a mistake on the draft. If it went in late, the doc cut-off may arrive before you have even seen the draft.

How the deadlines stack up

A rough sequence for a China departure, working backward from the sailing:

• SI cut-off — earliest, often 2–3 days before vessel departure
• Doc cut-off — shortly after the SI cut-off, once the draft B/L is issued
• VGM cut-off — close to the physical cut-off, sometimes a few hours ahead of it
• CY / gate-in cut-off — usually 1–2 days before departure, the hard operational stop

Exact timing varies by carrier, by service string, and by port, and it tightens before Chinese New Year and other peaks. Always work from the numbers on your own booking confirmation.

Practical habits that keep you on the right side of them

• Read the booking confirmation the day it arrives and put every cut-off in a shared calendar
• Prepare the SI content from the pro forma invoice early, so submission is a paste-and-check, not a scramble
• Weigh for VGM before the truck leaves the factory, not at the port
• Give the trucker a full working day of margin before CY cut-off for city traffic and export customs
• Confirm the draft bill of lading is checked and returned before the doc cut-off, not after

If cut-offs are being missed on your shipments, the root cause is usually documents prepared late rather than a slow truck. A forwarder that chases you for SI content a week ahead is doing its job.

The front end: empty pickup and earliest receiving date

Cut-offs are only half the window. Before you can gate a full container in, you have to collect an empty from the carrier’s nominated depot, and the terminal has an earliest receiving date — you cannot gate in before the yard opens for that vessel either. So the real working window is from the earliest receiving date to the CY cut-off, which is often just a few days.

Things that eat into it: a depot located far from the factory, a shortage of the exact container type you booked — a reefer, a high-cube, or a weight-tested box for heavy cargo — and a queue at the depot on the day. Book early, and have your forwarder confirm the empty is genuinely available on the day your loading plan needs it, not just “allocated”.

Transshipment and the Bangladesh side

China to Chattogram is rarely a direct sailing. Most cargo transships at Singapore, Port Klang or Colombo, and each connection has its own load cut-off at the hub. Your box can make the China sailing on time and still miss the connecting vessel, in which case it waits at the hub — a rollover you experience as a longer transit, as covered in our vessel rollover guide.

At the destination, the carrier files the import general manifest at Chattogram and your bill of entry attaches to it. Nothing you do at the China cut-offs speeds up the hub connection or the destination manifest — those are the carrier’s to manage. That is one more reason not to lose days at origin, which is the part of the chain you actually control.

Shipping FCL or LCL from China and tired of missing sailings? DE International books, documents and moves sea freight from China to Chattogram, and manages the cut-off calendar so your box is not the one left on the ground. Reach us on the contact page, see the services page or the shop. Related: vessel rollover, free time at Chattogram, and the sea freight documentation checklist.