LA/Long Beach port congestion

LA/Long Beach is the country's dominant transpacific gateway. The adjoining ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach share San Pedro Bay and, together, handle more loaded import containers than any other US complex, most of it Asia-origin cargo moving the shortest sailing route across the Pacific. Because the two ports sit side by side and largely serve the same ocean carriers and inland rail networks, The Dwell treats them as one complex for the friction read, while still publishing each port's own container-volume numbers separately.

This hub page shows the import-friction read for the complex: a plain, rules-based label built from where its live metrics sit against their own trailing-12-month median. LA/Long Beach is the one complex on this site with all three components reporting: the ship queue, the truck planning-time index, and loaded-import TEU, summed across Los Angeles and Long Beach. A component reading more than 15% above its trailing-12-month median counts as elevated. The ship queue is a small count, so it also has to sit at least two ships above its median to count as elevated; a one-ship swing on a calm queue stays near normal. Zero elevated components reads Flowing, one reads Some pressure, two or more reads Congested. It describes the current numbers, never a forecast.

Ships awaiting berth (week of Nov 2, 2026) is 2 ships, near its trailing-12-month normal of 1 ship (the past year has ranged 0 ships–4 ships). Truck planning-time index (Sep 2026) is 2.34, below its trailing-12-month normal of 4.02 (the past year has ranged 2.20–4.13). Loaded imports (Sep 2026) is 1,055,086 TEU, above its trailing-12-month normal of 848,128 TEU (the past year has ranged 755,145 TEU–1,055,086 TEU).

Like the other complexes, LA/Long Beach volume typically climbs from summer into the August-through-October peak import season, then eases after Lunar New Year each winter, when factories across China largely shut down and outbound bookings thin out. Because it carries the largest share of Asia-origin cargo, LA/Long Beach is also the complex most exposed to Pacific-side disruption: a labor slowdown, a schedule change by a major transpacific carrier, or a wave of orders pulled forward ahead of a tariff deadline tends to show up here first and hardest, before it reaches the East Coast gateways.

See the ship queue, the truck planning-time index and Los Angeles TEU and Long Beach TEU for the live numbers behind this read, and the methodology page for the exact rule.