Paris MoU detention rate reaches 4.18% — but the longer view complicates the story

The Paris MoU has published its 2025 annual report, “Port State Control; Progress and performance, highlights of the Paris MoU 2025”. The headline figure is a detention rate of 4.18%, up from 4.03% in 2024.

That reads as a clean upward trend, and much of the trade coverage has framed it that way. The report itself is more careful: it also records a detention rate of 4.25% for 2022. On that longer view, the last two years look less like a new peak and more like a return toward a level the region has seen before. The direction is real; the novelty is not.

The report also records 19 refusals-of-access — bans — in 2025, described as a rise following several years of relatively low figures. A ban sits at the far end of the port state control ladder and follows the ship and its operator well beyond the port where it was imposed.

On deficiencies, the distribution is unambiguous. According to the Paris MoU’s 2025 report, fire safety under SOLAS Chapter II-2 accounts for the largest share at 16.8% of recorded deficiencies, followed by structural and electrical elements under Chapter II-1 at 11.6%, and health protection, medical care and welfare under MLC Title IV at 10.0%. Fire doors alone account for 3.1%. ISM-related deficiencies stand at 4.5%, and seafarers’ employment agreements at 1.3%.

Classification societies have been revising their own fire safety guidance in the same period. ClassNK issued Edition 2.0 of its container ship firefighting guidelines in July 2026, updating equipment specifications and monitoring measures for container carriers — the segment where fire risk has drawn particular regulatory attention in recent years.

The fire safety figure is worth pausing on, because an independent analysis published by RightShip in July 2026 reports the same 16.8% share for the Paris MoU region. Two separately compiled datasets agreeing on the same number is unusual enough to be worth noting — and it removes the usual excuse that the pattern is an artefact of one regime’s recording habits.

RightShip’s own inspection regime adds a second, separate route to the same fleet-risk exposure this report describes. Independent of PSC history, a vessel that reaches RightShip’s inspection age trigger — stepping down from 14 years to 10 across four phases — without a valid RightShip inspection on file has its Safety Score downgraded. Owners tracking a vessel against that phased schedule can check the exact dates with our free RightShip inspection age trigger checker.

For owners and technical managers the practical content is in the second and third lines of that list rather than the first. Fire safety is a known and heavily inspected area. Structural and electrical condition at 11.6%, and crew health and welfare provisions at 10.0%, are the categories where a deficiency usually reflects something that drifted over months rather than something that failed on the day.

Further detail sits in the full report, published 1 July 2026 on the Paris MoU publications page.

Apeks view — A single-year detention rate is a weak instrument; the same report showing 4.25% in 2022 is the reminder. What holds steady across the years is the deficiency mix, and that is the part an operator can act on. Two of the three largest categories describe slow deterioration rather than sudden failure, which puts the burden on how consistently a vessel’s condition is recorded between inspections.