US port congestion, read plainly
The plain-English congestion board for importers.
The ship queue, the truck planning-time index and the monthly TEU volumes at the big US gateways, plus one rules-based import-friction read per complex, from the public record. Every dwell number is labeled with its exact clock. One brief a week. No forecasts, no routing calls.
Data through Jul 7, 2026 · updated Jul 10, 2026
Weekly brief
Get the weekly port brief
The import-friction read per complex, the ship queue, the truck index, and the monthly TEU volumes behind them. One email a week, built from public BTS data. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
Furthest above normal
The import-friction board →The data
Friction board
The hero: one plain read per port complex, flowing, some pressure, or congested, built by a fixed rule from where its ship queue, truck planning-time index and loaded-import TEU sit against their trailing-12-month normal.
1 pagePort complexes
The complex hub pages: the import-friction read at LA/Long Beach and NY/NJ and the live metrics behind each, the ship queue, the truck planning-time index, and loaded-import TEU, in one place.
2 pagesShip queue
Container ships awaiting berth, the count of ships waiting offshore for a berth to open, weekly from MARAD and the Marine Exchange. This is a queue, not a dwell time, and it is the most current congestion signal on the site.
3 pagesTruck index
The truck planning-time index around each complex, the FHWA measure of how much longer a drayage trip takes than free-flow. The truck-side congestion signal, monthly.
2 pagesContainer volume
Monthly container volume by port in TEU, split into loaded imports, loaded exports and empties, with the month-over-month, year-over-year and versus-2019 reads. Loaded imports are the import-demand signal.
9 pagesVessel dwell
The classic pandemic-era congestion number: the national average time a container ship sat at a US berth, AIS-derived, in hours. BTS reported it through mid-2023; this is a labeled historical page, never a current reading.
1 page