NY/NJ port congestion

The Port of New York and New Jersey is the largest container gateway on the US East Coast, the primary entry point for the New York metro region and the wider Northeast. Unlike LA/Long Beach, which sits almost entirely on the transpacific trade, NY/NJ receives a genuinely mixed set of services: all-water Asia strings that run the full ocean route through the Panama Canal, and direct sailings from Europe, so its import mix is not tied to a single ocean's shipping cycle the way a single-lane gateway is.

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. NY/NJ reports two of the three components this site tracks, the truck planning-time index and loaded-import TEU. BTS does not publish a public ship-queue reading for NY/NJ the way it does for LA/Long Beach and Savannah, so the composite here is judged on those two alone. A component reading more than 15% above its trailing-12-month median counts as elevated. Zero elevated components reads Flowing, one reads Some pressure, two or more reads Congested. It describes the latest published numbers, never a forecast. Both of NY/NJ's components are monthly and are published about two months after the month they cover, so this read describes those months, not this week; the freshest weekly congestion signal on this site is the ship queue at LA/Long Beach and Savannah.

Truck planning-time index (Aug 2026) is 2.23, below its trailing-12-month normal of 3.82 (the past year has ranged 2.23–4.03). Loaded imports (Jul 2026) is 392,074 TEU, near its trailing-12-month normal of 382,286 TEU (the past year has ranged 300,819 TEU–425,453 TEU).

NY/NJ's import volume follows the same August-through-October peak-season build as the other gateways, driven by the same holiday restocking calendar. Because part of its cargo comes off transatlantic strings rather than the transpacific route, NY/NJ's peak is somewhat less tied to the Lunar New Year factory-shutdown effect that shapes the West Coast pattern; the complex's own seasonal wrinkle is winter Atlantic storm activity, which can slow vessel schedules into the harbor much the way hurricane season does at Savannah, later in the calendar.

See the truck planning-time index and New York/New Jersey TEU for the live numbers behind this read, and the methodology page for the exact rule.