Los Angeles import-container dwell

This page tracks the Port of Los Angeles daily import-container dwell report: the count of loaded import boxes on the port's terminals, split into how long they have dwelt, 0-4 days, 5-8 days and 9 or more days, updated each business day from the Cargo Operations Dashboard. Read it as an inventory-age distribution: it tells you what share of the boxes on the terminal right now are aging, not how long the average box takes to leave (an average dwell time) and not how long a ship sits at the berth (vessel dwell). The 9+ day share is the congestion tell, because those are the boxes burning free time and heading toward demurrage. On-dock rail, where shown, is the count of import boxes staged on terminal awaiting a train. It is the Port of Los Angeles only; it is not blended with any other port or with the archived national vessel-dwell series.

The rail-bound slice has its own side-by-side page, port rail container dwell at Los Angeles and Long Beach, because Long Beach publishes its on-dock rail counts in the same shape. And where this page is the aggregate, one booking's own timestamps, from vessel discharge to available for pickup, the last free day and gate-out, are covered in container milestone tracking.

How to read the 0-4, 5-8 and 9+ day buckets

Each bucket counts the import boxes sitting on the terminals that day by how long they have been there. On the report of Oct 14, 2026, 36,597 of the 54,332 import boxes on the port's terminals (67.4%) were 0-4 days old, 8,832 (16.3%) were 5-8 days old and 8,903 (16.4%) had been there 9 days or more.

0-4 days is the working inventory: boxes that came off ships in the last few days and are clearing customs, waiting for a carrier release or a trucker's appointment, or lining up for a train. A big 0-4 count mostly says ships have been unloading. 5-8 days holds boxes that missed a quick pickup. Whether one of them is still inside its free time depends on its tariff; the last free day calculator counts that for a single box. 9+ days is the aging tell. Nine days is the line the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach picked in October 2021 for their proposed Container Excess Dwell Fee on truck-bound import boxes, a fee they approved but never collected (dwell fee vs demurrage has the history).

Read the share and the count together. The 9+ day share is the 9+ count divided by all import boxes on the terminals, both from the same report. Because it is a ratio, it can fall without a single aging box leaving, when a big discharge swells the 0-4 bucket, and it can rise when fewer new boxes arrive. Between Oct 7, 2026 and Oct 14, 2026, the 9+ count went from 9,251 to 8,903 boxes and all import boxes went from 53,532 to 54,332, so the share went from 17.3% to 16.4%.

Our daily series starts on Jul 20, 2026. Across the 53 reports collected since then, the 9+ day share has run from 9.0% (Jul 20, 2026) to 18.5% (Oct 9, 2026), with a median of 13.9%.

Where the boxes go once they leave the gate, and how Los Angeles import volume turns into demand for warehouse space around the port, is covered in warehousing at the Port of Los Angeles.

Port dwell, vessel dwell and rail dwell

Port dwell time, also called container or box dwell, is how long a container sits on the marine terminal between coming off the ship and leaving by truck or train. This page counts Los Angeles import boxes by that age. Three other numbers get called dwell, or get mistaken for it:

• Vessel dwell is how long a ship sits at the berth. BTS published a national average from 2019 until mid-2023 and has not updated it since, so the US vessel dwell page is a historical record.
• Rail dwell means two things. At the ports it is the count of import boxes waiting on the terminal for an on-dock train, which Los Angeles and Long Beach both publish daily (port rail container dwell). The on-dock rail row in the table above is the Los Angeles count of that kind. For the railroads it is terminal dwell, the average hours a railcar spends in a rail yard across BNSF's or Union Pacific's whole network, reported weekly to the Surface Transportation Board.
• Ships waiting for a berth is a count of vessels in the offshore queue, not a dwell time at all (LA/Long Beach ship queue).

The full comparison, and why mixing the clocks up leads to wrong reads, is in what is dwell time in shipping.

Methodology and source

The Port of Los Angeles posts an Import Containers by Dwell Time report, covering all of its terminals, on its Cargo Operations Dashboard each business day, with data from its Port Optimizer Control Tower. We read it every afternoon and keep a report only when its three buckets add up to its printed total, its printed shares add up to 100%, and its printed date is newer than the last report we kept. The shares on this page are computed from the counts and match the report's printed shares within rounding. The chart has one point for each report collected. The report does not say which event starts its count; terminal systems usually count from discharge, as what the import dwell date means explains.