Ship Risk Profile and New Inspection Regime (NIR)

Paris MoU, Annex 7 (and the equivalent Tokyo MOU regime): defines the criteria for calculating the Ship Risk Profile and the resulting inspection intervals — HRS: 5-6 months from the last inspection; SRS: 10-12 months; LRS: 24-36 months. The flag/RO performance lists feeding the calculation are updated annually by the Paris MoU Committee based on the rolling three-year period of inspections and detentions; the 2026 edition (2023-2025 data) is in use from 1 July 2026 to 6 July 2027.

For a ship calling at Union ports, however, the Memorandum is not the source: it is the instrument through which twenty-seven Member States implement a binding act. That act is Directive 2009/16/EC of 23 April 2009 on port State control (Recast). It matters directly because it is transposed into each Member State's national law: before an Italian, Spanish or Greek court you invoke the transposing provision of the Directive, not Annex 7 of the Paris MoU.

The Directive builds the risk profile in the same terms this page describes, but with the text that counts. Annex I treats as higher risk, by type, “Passenger ships, bulk carriers, oil tankers, gas carriers, NLS tankers or chemical tankers”; by age, “Ships of more than 12 years old”; and by history, “Ships which have been detained more than once”. The threshold is numerical: high risk ships are those “which meet criteria to a total value of 5 or more weighting points”, while low risk ships are those meeting all the low-risk criteria — an «and», not an «or».

The inspection obligation is the Directive's too, not the MoU's: Article 5(2) requires each Member State to inspect all Priority I ships calling at its ports, and to reach annually a share of the total inspections to be carried out “within the Community and the Paris MOU region”. That is where the inspection pressure a ship feels comes from, and the reason intervals run from the last inspection in any Union or Paris MoU port, not only in the port State concerned.

Watch an amendment already adopted but not yet operative. Directive (EU) 2024/3099 of 27 November 2024 amends 2009/16/EC and entered into force on 5 January 2025; the consolidated text on EUR-Lex already incorporates it. But its Article 2 sets transposition at 6 July 2027: until then the old regime binds. Among the changes, the environmental parameters of the risk profile will also invoke the Hong Kong Convention, and inspections exceeding a Member State's annual commitment by 20% or more will no longer count towards Paris MoU commitments. Anyone reading the consolidated text today without checking the transposition date believes a regime applicable that is not yet.