FCA (Free Carrier)

FCA fixes delivery at a handover to a party the buyer has chosen. Risk and cost pass at that handover. The seller has taken the goods through export clearance and to the agreed place; the buyer has contracted the carriage that collects them and bears what follows.

Cost

The seller bears costs up to and including delivery at the named place and export clearance; the buyer bears the main carriage and everything beyond.

Risk

Passes at the handover to the nominated carrier or party at the named place, not at arrival and not at loading onto a vessel.

Carriage

The buyer contracts the main carriage and nominates the carrier. The seller’s duty runs to delivering into that carrier’s hands.

Insurance

Neither party is obliged to procure insurance for the benefit of the other under this rule.

Export and import formalities

Export clearance is the seller’s; import clearance and any transit formalities beyond export are the buyer’s.

Much modern cargo is handed over well before it reaches the vehicle that will carry it internationally. A container of coffee is stuffed inland, delivered to a depot, and only later moves to a quay and onto a ship. An air consignment of cut flowers is handed to a forwarder hours before it reaches an aircraft. In both cases the commercially real handover — the moment the seller lets go and the buyer’s chain takes over — happens at a terminal or depot, not at a ship’s rail.

The any-mode family exists to describe exactly that geometry. FCA locates delivery at the handover point wherever it physically is, which is why it can serve road, rail, air, inland waterway, sea, and combinations of them without changing shape. The port-based family, by contrast, is built around a vessel and a port and takes its reference points from them.

FCA’s handover point tends to fall at a moment that matters physically for farm goods. For temperature-sensitive consignments, the risk boundary and the point at which the cold chain changes hands often coincide, which makes the condition and the recorded temperature at handover the evidence both parties later rely on. For containerised cargo, the handover typically follows stuffing, so the state of the packing at that point is what passes to the buyer.

• Handover commonly occurs at a depot, terminal, or forwarder’s facility rather than at a port or airport of departure
• Export clearance sits with the seller, the party actually established in the exporting jurisdiction
• For perishables, the physical condition at handover is the practical dividing line as well as the legal one
• Where a document showing goods on board is needed, the seller is not the party who contracted the carriage that would issue it

None of this makes the rule suitable or unsuitable for any given trade. It describes where the term places the boundary, and which operational facts consequently become important to record.