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Delivered at Frontier (DaF) was an Incoterm used primarily in land-based international trade to specify that the seller's delivery obligation and risk transfer point is the named border crossing point between two countries, before customs clearance. The seller arranges and pays for transport to that frontier location. The buyer takes responsibility for everything that follows: customs clearance in the importing country, onward transport, and any additional costs from the border point forward. DaF was removed from the Incoterms ruleset when the International Chamber of Commerce published the Incoterms 2010 revision, and it no longer appears in current editions.
Its closest modern equivalents are Delivered at Place (DAP) and Delivered at Place Unloaded (DPU) from Incoterms 2020, which apply to all transport modes and border crossing scenarios.
Under DaF, the seller bore full responsibility until the goods reached the named frontier point. That included export clearance, freight costs to the border, and insurance for that leg of the journey. At the named frontier, risk and cost passed to the buyer.
The precise location mattered enormously in a DaF contract. "Delivered at Frontier, Polish-German border" meant something very specific: risk transferred at that crossing, not anywhere along the route to it or beyond it. Contracts had to name the frontier point exactly to avoid disputes about where the handoff occurred.
DaF was most commonly used in cross-border land transport, particularly in Eastern European trade routes and commodity movements involving oil, gas, and raw materials transported by rail or truck across national frontiers. Energy companies buying pipeline gas or crude oil crossing from Russia or Central Asia into Europe regularly used DaF terms during the period when the Incoterm was active.
The International Chamber of Commerce streamlined the Incoterms 2010 rules from thirteen terms to eleven by eliminating DaF alongside three other land-specific or rarely used terms: DES (Delivered Ex Ship), DEQ (Delivered Ex Quay), and DAF's close sibling DDU (Delivered Duty Unpaid). The ICC determined that DAP and DPU, applied with a named delivery point at the border, covered the same scenarios more flexibly and without requiring mode-specific rules.
If your contract was written under Incoterms 2000 or earlier, DaF terms may still govern the rights and obligations of the parties. Incoterms do not automatically update when new editions are released. The edition incorporated by reference in the contract is the one that controls.
Delivered at Place (DAP) under Incoterms 2020 achieves everything DaF did. The seller delivers goods to a named place, which can be a named border crossing, ready for unloading but without completing import clearance. Risk transfers to the buyer at that named place. Cost for onward transport and import duties falls on the buyer from that point.
The key difference is flexibility. DAP applies to any mode of transport, including sea, air, rail, and road. DaF was written specifically for land transport to a frontier. For modern cross-border land freight contracts, DAP is the correct current term.
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