Worldscale

Worldscale is the tanker industry’s standard system for quoting voyage freight rates. The Worldscale Associations (in London and New York) publish an annual schedule of flat rates — a nominal US dollar per tonne rate for every conceivable tanker route, calculated for a standard hypothetical vessel with defined speed, consumption, and port costs.

Fixtures are then negotiated as a percentage of flat: WS100 means 100% of the published flat rate, WS50 half of it, WS200 double. The system’s genius is flexibility: a charterer can negotiate one Worldscale level while keeping options over multiple discharge ports, since the flat rates already reflect each route’s distance and costs.

Reading Worldscale requires care: because flat rates are recalculated each year (updating bunker prices and port costs), a WS level in one year is not comparable to the same level in another. Owners convert WS quotes into time-charter equivalent (TCE) earnings per day to compare business across routes — the figure that actually drives fixing decisions. Very large long-haul cargoes, and increasingly some modern trades, are fixed on lump-sum or dollars-per-tonne terms instead.