When cargo is lost or damaged, the carrier does not owe its value. Every mode's convention caps liability at a formula amount — per kilogram, per package, or the higher of the two — and the cap was written for an era of cheaper goods. Hague-Visby ocean liability is 2 SDR per kilo or 666.67 SDR per package, whichever is higher; Montreal air is 22 SDR per kilo; US COGSA is five hundred US dollars per package and has not moved since 1936.
The unit is the SDR — the IMF's special drawing right, a currency basket that moves daily. That is why this tool asks for today's rate instead of caching one: a liability figure quoted off a stale SDR rate is wrong twice, once on the rate and once on the confidence with which it was said.
For a forwarder the useful output is the shortfall. A 900 kg pallet of electronics worth 180,000 recovers about 1,800 SDR under Hague-Visby — a covering fraction small enough to shock. Shown to the customer at quoting time, that number sells cargo insurance better than any brochure; discovered after a loss, it becomes your hardest phone call of the year. And your own liability as a contracting forwarder usually mirrors the same caps through your trading conditions — which is what standard trading conditions and freight liability insurance exist for.
The special drawing right is the IMF's reserve asset — a basket of the US dollar, euro, renminbi, yen and sterling, revalued every business day. Conventions write liability limits in SDR precisely so no single currency's inflation erodes them unevenly. The IMF publishes the daily rate; most currency sites carry it as XDR. Use the rate for the day you are quoting, and date it in what you send.
Because Hague-Visby awards the higher of per-kilo and per-package, and the package test multiplies by what the bill ENUMERATES. Courts in many jurisdictions have held that "1 container said to contain 940 cartons" counts as 940 packages, while "1 container of electronics" counts as one. The enumeration costs nothing at booking time and can multiply a recovery by orders of magnitude. It is the cheapest legal drafting a forwarder ever does.
Usually yes — ordinary negligence is exactly what the limits limit. Breaking the cap generally requires conduct at the level of intent or recklessness with knowledge that damage would probably result, which courts find rarely, or an unjustified deck stowage or fundamental deviation in some ocean regimes. Plan around the cap applying; treat breaking it as litigation upside, not as cover.
If you issued a house bill you are a contracting carrier, and by default you face the customer for cargo claims — which is why standard trading conditions matter: they typically mirror the convention limits and add their own per-kilo cap, so your exposure tracks what you can recover from the actual carrier. A forwarder working without incorporated trading conditions, or without freight liability insurance, is running the one risk in this trade that can exceed a year's profit in a single file.
Cargo-Stack reads the enquiry, prices it against your own rates, and drafts the quote — with this arithmetic underneath it. Same maths, no retyping.
Try it on a real enquiry