Definition
A charge imposed for the use of a wharf in connection with the loading or unloading of goods. More precisely, wharfage is the money due, or actually paid, for the privilege of landing goods upon a wharf or loading a vessel while moored from one. The fee compensates the wharf owner or operator for use of the structure and its facilities in the transfer of cargo between vessel and shore.
Wharfage should be distinguished from the wharf itself: the term names the monetary obligation, not the physical infrastructure.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A dock, quay, or pier; wharfs collectively; or a fee charged for using a wharf.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The fee or duty paid for the privilege of using a wharf for loading or unloading goods; pierage, collectively; quayage. Also, a wharf or wharfs, collectively; wharfing.
Common usage runs two meanings together — wharfage as the physical facility and wharfage as the fee for using it. In legal contexts, wharfage almost exclusively denotes the charge or monetary obligation, not the structure itself. A researcher encountering the term in a contract, admiralty pleading, or regulatory document should read it as a fee rather than a place.
Common Confusion
Wharfage is sometimes used loosely alongside related maritime charges — pierage, quayage, dockage, and demurrage — as if interchangeable. They are not. Pierage and quayage are analogous fees tied to piers and quays respectively. Dockage covers the charge for occupying a dock berth. Demurrage is a separate concept entirely, arising from the detention of a vessel beyond the agreed lay time. Wharfage is specific to the use of the wharf surface for landing or shipping goods. Confusing these terms in historical admiralty documents can produce errors in fee apportionment analysis and in reading rate schedules.
Why It Matters in Research
Wharfage appears across several distinct bodies of law — admiralty, property, municipal regulation, and commercial contract — and the legal issues surrounding it shift depending on context.
In admiralty and commercial sources, the central questions concern who owes wharfage, when it is earned, and how it is apportioned. Rapalje & Lawrence flags the apportionment issue among joint owners of a wharf as a distinct problem treated in reported cases. Researchers working with partnership or co-tenancy disputes over wharf income should be alert to this.
In the regulatory and constitutional dimension, Bouvier notes that rates of wharfage may be regulated by statute given the public interest in navigable waterways, and that riparian proprietors hold the right to build wharves subject to legislative regulation. Courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, addressed whether states could grant municipal corporations exclusive rights over wharves on navigable rivers — a question that intersects with the Commerce Clause, public trust doctrine, and riparian rights. Corpus researchers tracing the public-private boundary in waterfront regulation will find wharfage a useful entry point into those cases.
A practical trap in historical sources: the term covers both the obligation to pay and the rate schedule establishing the amount. Contract documents and port authority regulations may use "wharfage" to mean the rate schedule itself. Read the document type before inferring meaning.
London wharfingers appear in the historical cases as a distinct class of operators, and at least one important limitation — that London wharfingers could not claim wharfage for goods unloaded into lighters from barges merely fastened to their wharves — is specific to English practice and should not be imported uncritically into American sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are in close agreement on the core definition. Black's (both editions), Burrill, Rapalje & Lawrence, and Bouvier all describe wharfage as money paid for landing goods at a wharf or for shipping goods from one. The formulation traces back to Cowell, which Burrill and Black's both cite directly.
Black's adds the sharpest doctrinal precision: "strictly speaking," wharfage is money due or actually paid for the privilege of landing goods upon, or loading a vessel while moored from, a wharf — a formulation drawn from 1 Brown, Admiralty 37. This distinction between the loose and strict sense is worth preserving; it clarifies that the charge attaches to the use of the wharf surface in the loading or landing operation, not merely to the vessel's presence nearby.
Bouvier contributes the most on the public-regulatory dimension, noting both the statutory rate-regulation principle and the constitutional case law on riparian and municipal wharf rights. The other dictionaries treat wharfage as a purely private commercial obligation and largely omit the regulatory layer.
What the historical dictionaries collectively underplay is the admiralty lien dimension — whether wharfage gives rise to a maritime lien against the vessel or cargo. Researchers should not rely on dictionary coverage alone for that question.
Jurisdictional Note
Wharfage regulation in the United States has historically operated at both state and federal levels, with navigable waterways subject to federal commerce power oversight. State legislatures have regulated wharfage rates, and municipalities have been granted varying degrees of control over public wharves depending on state law. English authorities on wharfingers, while present in the early American cases, do not translate directly into U.S. practice.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Admiralty and Maritime Law; Riparian Rights; Public Trust Doctrine.