Warehousing at the Port of Los Angeles: how imports drive warehouse demand

Every loaded import box that lands at the Port of Los Angeles has to be emptied somewhere, and that somewhere is a warehouse. The port's own warehouse role runs through a foreign-trade zone on and around port land. The big warehouse stock is private, in the industrial markets of Los Angeles and the Inland Empire, which CBRE measures at about 1.5 billion square feet between them. This guide reads both, with the numbers the port and the warehouse market publish.

Warehousing on port land: Foreign-Trade Zone 202

The port's own warehousing page is about its foreign-trade zone. The Port of Los Angeles manages Foreign-Trade Zone 202, established in 1994. It covers about 5,400 acres of port property, including warehousing set up for zone operations, plus more than 35 general-purpose sites across Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties and three subzones in Vernon, Carson and El Segundo. Inside a zone, US Customs and Border Protection does not require formal entry or duty on foreign goods unless and until they leave the zone for the US market, and the International Trade Administration notes that goods re-exported from a zone go duty-free. A zone is a customs status for storing and handling imports, not a separate warehouse market.

From the dock to the warehouse

Every loaded box leaves the terminal by truck or by train. The Port of Los Angeles says drayage trucks handle about three-quarters of all import and export containers moving through it, and that about 26% of all its cargo uses the on-dock rail network. A box on a train heads inland by rail, out of the local market. A box on a truck usually goes a short distance: to a warehouse or distribution center, to a transload building where the cargo is moved into a domestic trailer, or to an off-dock rail yard. The truck-bound boxes are the ones that fill local warehouse space, and the two largest warehouse markets near the docks are Los Angeles and the Inland Empire, the counties of Riverside and San Bernardino to the east.

What the port's numbers say

The demand side is loaded imports, the inbound boxes with cargo in them. The ranking below gets each port's monthly figures through BTS a few weeks after the month ends. The port's own release runs ahead of it: on October 9, 2026, the Port of Los Angeles reported 545,696 TEU of loaded imports for September, up 19% from September 2025, in the busiest month of its history at 1,042,652 TEU in all.

The ranking's latest Los Angeles reading is 499,552 TEU of loaded imports in July 2026, down 8.1% from a year earlier.

Monthly volume swings with the shipping calendar (peak season covers the late-summer surge), so read warehouse demand off several months of imports, not one.

What the warehouse numbers say

Jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts warehousing and storage workers every month by metro area. In the Inland Empire (the Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario area) there were 128,300 in August 2026, a preliminary figure, up from 122,800 in August 2025 and 80,500 in August 2019. The series peaked at 139,400 in February 2022. In the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Glendale division the count is far smaller and slipping: 19,700 in August 2026 against 20,400 a year earlier. Neither series is seasonally adjusted, so compare a month with the same month a year earlier.

Space. Commercial real-estate brokers publish quarterly vacancy rates, and they do not agree, because each draws its market and its building list differently. For the third quarter of 2026:

• Inland Empire: CBRE 7.2% across its 677.72 million square foot Inland Empire Core, 0.5 points above a year earlier; Kidder Mathews 7.1% direct vacancy (8.3% total), down from 7.4%; Savills 9.9% on a wider market that includes the High Desert, 0.9 points above a year earlier.
• Los Angeles: CBRE 5.0% across 871.17 million square feet, down 0.2 points on the year; Kidder Mathews 6.0% direct (6.7% total), up from 5.7%; Savills 6.7%.

Take the spread as the range, and compare any one broker only with its own earlier quarters.

A worked example: the third quarter of 2026

Set the numbers side by side. The port's September loaded imports were up 19% on the year. Inland Empire warehouse jobs were up as well: 128,300 in August against 122,800, a 4.5% gain. CBRE counted 1 million square feet of positive net absorption in the Inland Empire Core for the quarter, space that tenants filled on balance. But at CBRE's 7.2% vacancy on 677.72 million square feet, about 48.8 million square feet stood empty, so the quarter's net absorption took up about 2% of it. The region was taking in more cargo with tens of millions of square feet still vacant.

The 2021-2022 surge is the contrast. Inland Empire warehouse jobs climbed to their peak of 139,400 in February 2022, the month after the LA/Long Beach queue in this site's weekly count peaked at 106 ships, and the port had been warning since January 2021 that inbound containers were stacking up on its terminals.

When warehouse space runs short, boxes wait at the port

When importers cannot take boxes in, for lack of space, dock doors, labor or trucks, the boxes wait on the terminal. The Port of Los Angeles described that in January 2021, early in the surge: the import-heavy imbalance had "reduced the number of chassis in circulation, caused inbound containers to stack up on terminals, and slowed the movement of trucks in and out of terminals." The port reports every business day how many import boxes are on its terminals and for how long (Los Angeles import-container dwell).

On its report of Oct 22, 2026, 20.4% of those boxes had been there 9 days or more.

A rising 9+ day share while imports hold steady is the port-side sign that boxes are not being pulled, for whatever reason, warehouse space among them. This site does not track warehouse occupancy itself; the broker and BLS figures above are the warehouse side.

The Dwell reports port data and cites these warehouse figures as their sources publish them. It does not forecast warehouse demand, vacancy or rents, and it is not real-estate or routing advice. For the steps between the berth and the warehouse, see from ship to your warehouse; for what backs a port up, see what causes port congestion.