How to Check a RightShip Rating and What the Score Actually Means

To check a RightShip rating you need access to the RightShip platform, where each vessel carries a Safety Score on a 0 to 5 scale together with the activity timeline that produced it. The score matters most to dry bulk charterers lifting iron ore and coal out of terminals in Australia and Canada, where the major miners and their vetting desks screen every nomination against it.

Ratings are not published openly, so owners, managers, charterers and terminals see them through a subscription or through the charterer who is vetting the ship. If you are being asked for your score, the fastest route is to request it from the manager who holds the fleet account.

The Safety Score replaced the older star rating and works differently. It blends statistical modelling of a vessel operational history with industry standard rules and expert review, and it updates as new events land against the ship rather than sitting still between annual reviews.

Where the number comes from

The score is assembled from several sub-scores plus rule-based overrides. The inputs that move it most are the ones that describe how the ship has actually performed:

• Port state control inspection results, including individual deficiencies and any detention, by regime.
• Incident and casualty history, including groundings, collisions, fires and pollution events.
• Vessel age, type and structural profile.
• Ownership, technical management and the performance of the wider managed fleet.
• Flag state and classification society performance, where membership of IACS, which covers ABS, DNV, Lloyd's Register and their peers, is the usual dividing line.
• Inspection results from RightShip own inspection regime for dry bulk tonnage.

Because manager and fleet performance feed in, a well-run ship can be dragged down by stablemates. That surprises owners who assume the score is purely vessel specific.

Reading the scale the way a charterer reads it

Vessels scoring between 3 and 5 are treated as working toward industry best practice in safe operations. A 3 is commonly the minimum a charterer wants to see before proceeding to a fuller vetting review, and many major charterers set their internal acceptance threshold at or above that point.

A score below 3 does not automatically mean rejection, but it moves the ship into a category where a charterer has to justify the fixture internally. In practice that means longer approval times, more questions, and lost business on tight schedules. Terminals in the dry bulk and gas trades apply similar screens before accepting a nomination.

Checking the detail behind the headline score

The score alone tells you very little. The value is in the activity timeline, which lists the events contributing to the rating: inspections, deficiencies, detentions and incidents, with dates. Work through it in this order.

• Open the vessel record and note the current score and the date it last changed.
• Read the timeline back at least five years. Look for clusters rather than single events, since repeated deficiencies in one area weigh differently from one bad inspection.
• Identify which entries are attributed to the current manager and which predate the takeover.
• Check whether any entry is factually wrong: a deficiency logged against the wrong IMO number, a detention later lifted on appeal, an incident recorded twice.
• Compare the ship against sisters and against the manager fleet average to see whether the issue is the vessel or the office.

What to do about a score you cannot live with

Owners have more room to move than they usually assume, but the work is slow and evidence-driven.

Start with data accuracy. If a port state control record is incorrect, the correction has to happen at the source, through the flag state and the secretariat that holds the inspection data. That is the Paris MoU for European inspections and the Tokyo MoU for the Asia Pacific region. Only after the source record changes does the correction flow through to the rating. Disputing the score without fixing the underlying record rarely succeeds.

Next, close deficiencies with documented root cause analysis rather than a one-line rectification note. A pattern of recurring findings in the same code area is what the model treats as systemic, so demonstrating that the cause was found and removed matters more than the speed of the close-out.

Then use the inspection route. A recent, clean inspection under the RightShip regime gives the model current evidence to weigh against older events. Booking one before a chartering campaign is a common tactic on ships coming out of a bad run.

How the rating interacts with other vetting systems

RightShip dominates dry bulk screening. In tankers the equivalent screen is the OCIMF SIRE inspection programme and the operator own vetting department, and a strong RightShip score does not substitute for a valid SIRE report. Gas carriers and some chemical trades sit across both.

Insurers and financiers also read flag and class performance directly, so a vessel carrying a weak score usually finds the effect showing up in more than one commercial conversation at once.

Practical points that catch operators out

• The score changes between the time a ship is offered and the time she is fixed. Check it again before the laycan, not only at the offer stage.
• A change of technical manager resets very little immediately. The new manager fleet performance starts feeding in, but the vessel own history stays.
• Crew certificate and drill records will not raise a score by themselves, though they are what an inspector will test first if you have booked an inspection to raise one.
• Sale and purchase teams should pull the score and timeline during inspection of a candidate ship, since a weak rating is a real commercial defect that survives the sale.

If you manage tonnage in the dry bulk trades, set a standing monthly check of every ship score and timeline rather than reacting when a charterer raises it. Our Shipboard Operations section covers building the deficiency close-out evidence that vetting systems actually credit.

Sources and further reading

• Safety Score - RightShip
• What is RightShip's Safety Score?
• Safety Score Methodology
• RightShip Safety Score: What you need to know - NorthStandard

What to read next

• Understanding Ship Rudders
• Understanding Ship Beam
• Understanding Ship Hulls