Data & Image Credit: Fuelsure

• Current post-fixture costs in Singapore range from $0.42/mt to $14.44/mt by supplier, against a market average of $3.72/mt
• Wide spread by port: New York costs on average $12.80/mt and Ulsan just $0.80/mt
• Singapore's average has nearly doubled in the latest six months while ARA and Fujairah improved

According to Fuelsure, recent post-fixture bunker costs in Singapore can equate to as little as $0.42/mt and as high as $14.44/mt, depending on which supplier you choose.

That is a $14/mt spread on the cost of doing business.

In other words, if three different suppliers in Singapore all fix with buyers for 1,300 mt of VLSFO at $900/mt, then once post-fixture costs are added one of those buyers could actually end up paying $900.42/mt, one $903.72/mt, and another $914.44/mt.

There is an obvious commercial advantage in picking the supplier with the lowest true price, but of course post-fixture cost is not something that is advertised, and in fact until recently it is not something that has been fully quantified at all.

Post-fixture costs also vary by port: over the past 12 months in Ulsan they average $0.80/mt, in New York $12.80/mt.

So how do you pick the right supplier in the right port, and are the savings enough to justify the effort of trying to get it right?

That is the question Fuelsure has been trying to quantify, and it has shared some recent aggregated data from 15 bunker hubs with Ship & Bunker so we can put it to the test.

What Are Post-Fixture Costs?

The cost of a stem comprises the price of the bunkers plus several factors that all come down to supplier performance.

They include:

• Delivered quantity: did the vessel get the volume on the BDN?
• Energy content: how much usable energy was in the fuel delivered?
• Delays: will the supplier be on time, and what kind of delays can be expected?
• Disputes: how likely and how costly are disputes with the supplier?

Fuelsure converts each of those into a dollar-per-tonne figure and adds them together to give what it calls the "execution premium" for a stem, which added to the bunker price gives the likely "True Cost" of bunkering at a particular port with a particular supplier.

It is the likely True Cost rather than a fixed one because it is built on historical performance: barges are late by differing amounts, quantity shortfalls vary from stem to stem, and disputes do not arise every time, so the figure is an expectation of what a supplier will cost after fixing, not a guarantee.

The different problems also carry very different financial weight, Fuelsure says.

Quantity issues, for example, account for roughly 64% of positive-value claims but only about 29% of claimed value.

Delay makes up only around 31% of claims but about 55% of claimed value.

Quality is much rarer, but the underlying claims data includes cases that escalated into major operational disruption and debunkering.

How It Varies Port to Port

The average post-fixture cost at each port is surprisingly varied.

Across the 15 hubs Ship & Bunker reviewed, the 12-month average ran from $0.80/mt at Ulsan to $12.80/mt in New York.

Those averages also move, and not all in the same direction.

Singapore's figure looks modest over 12 months, but it rose from $2.93/mt in the earlier six-month period to $5.42/mt in the latest, while ARA went the other way, from $10.13/mt to $7.90/mt, and Fujairah improved from $5.05/mt to $3.36/mt.

The Lower Mississippi and Houston both moved higher over the same period, and Gibraltar was broadly unchanged, so a port that performed well six months ago may not look the same today.

How often this data is commercially actionable is an interesting question, and will vary heavily between buyers.

First, there are likely only a handful of ports along the route that are practical places on the voyage to call for bunkers.

Of those, if one port is $50/mt cheaper than another on the quoted price, a post-fixture difference of $5 or $10/mt is not going to change where you bunker.

How It Varies Supplier to Supplier

This is where the numbers get commercially interesting, because the variation inside a port is bigger than the variation between ports.

Among suppliers with enough deliveries to qualify, the 12-month post-fixture cost in Singapore runs from $0.42/mt at the best to $14.44/mt at the worst, a spread of $14.02/mt.

ARA's suppliers range from $5.25/mt to $16.02/mt, a spread of $10.77/mt, and Fujairah's from $4.54/mt to $13.35/mt, a spread of $8.81/mt.

Gibraltar ($5.72/mt), the Panama Canal ($5.19/mt), Houston ($4.40/mt), and the Lower Mississippi ($4.00/mt) follow, with Balboa, Ulsan, and Yeosu all under $2.50/mt between their best and worst suppliers.

Put the two sets of numbers side by side and the point makes itself: the gap between the Singapore and ARA market averages is $5.50/mt, but the gap between the best and worst supplier within Singapore alone is more than twice that.

The worst-performing Singapore supplier in the data costs its buyers more after fixing than the New York market average, the most expensive hub on the list, while the best beats every port average in the set.

A buyer can therefore make the right call on where to bunker and still get very different economics depending on who supplies the stem, which is exactly the situation in the three-supplier example above.

The reverse is also true: if the spread between suppliers is low, a buyer knows there is little to be gained from choosing the "right" supplier, at least in terms of post-fixture cost savings.

Is It Worth the Effort?

On Fuelsure's Singapore spread, the difference between the best and worst supplier on a 1,300 mt VLSFO stem (1,300 mt being Singapore's average stem size) works out at about $18,200, by Ship & Bunker's arithmetic, and that is before any claim.

Claims are where the numbers stop being a few dollars a tonne, and the biggest ones are getting bigger.

Comparing January to August this year with the same period of 2025, the typical claim has risen only modestly, from about $4,800 to $6,700, but the largest claims have roughly doubled, with one claim in every hundred now costing more than $170,000, up from around $90,000 a year ago, according to Fuelsure.

Picking the right supplier is therefore worth a few dollars a tonne on every stem, but the same choice decides how exposed you are to the rare event that turns a normal delivery into an unwanted P&L event.

Experienced bunker buyers will recognise most of this from their own dealings. How much effort to put into guarding against it has always been a judgement call, made without a clear idea of how big the risk is.

Fuelsure's data now puts a value on it, and gives a warning when a port or a supplier that a buyer thought they knew starts to change.

The quoted price still matters most. Fuelsure's point is that it reflects only the price before delivery, and what happens after fixing can be worth thousands of dollars on a single stem.

Read Fuelsure's full analysis here: https://www.fuelsure.io/fuelsure-analysis-the-bunker-price-is-missing-a-number