Why congestion is moving
Above normalWhy is US port congestion easing right now?
8 ships awaiting berth across US ports as of week of Aug 24, 2026. Broadly steady for 3 weeks.
Data through week of Aug 24, 2026 · source last checked Sep 1, 2026 · page revised Sep 1, 2026
Cite
- Ships awaiting berth
About this data
- Source
- MARAD and the Marine Exchange, via BTS Supply Chain and Freight Indicators
- Series
- Container ships awaiting berth, all US ports
- Basis
- Queue count, not a dwell time
- Geography
- All US container ports
- Unit
- vessels
- Calculation
- Weekly reading
- Last observation
- week of Aug 24, 2026
- Update frequency
- Weekly
The national ship queue has been broadly steady for 3 weeks, with no sustained move in either direction. The queue is 8 ships, near its trailing-12-month normal of 9 ships. The national at-anchor count rose by 2 to 8 ships over the same span (BTS). The LA/Long Beach truck planning-time index reads 2.19 for Jul 2026 (FHWA via BTS; 1.0 is free-flow, published about two months behind). The market is in peak shipping season, when holiday-inventory imports typically crest.
US port congestion has been broadly steady for 3 weeks: the national ship queue shows no sustained move in either direction. For the current picture, see the US ship queue and the import-friction board.
| Period | Current | Prior | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Week over week | 8 ships | 6 ships | +33.3% |
| Month over month | 8 ships | 6 ships | +33.3% |
| Year over year | 8 ships | 15 ships | -46.7% |
| vs 5-yr median | 8 ships | 16 ships | -50.0% |
What makes port congestion ease
Port congestion eases the way it builds, in reverse: when berths, cranes, trucks and rail clear boxes faster than ships deliver them, the offshore queue drains, and because a queue is a stock rather than a flow, sustained easing means throughput has genuinely outrun arrivals for weeks, not that one good day happened.
Cooling import demand is the most common cause. When importers finish stocking, tariffs pull demand forward and leave a hole behind, or consumer spending rotates away from goods, the monthly TEU volumes fall and the pressure comes off every link at once. The 2022-23 unwind, when the queue went from dozens of ships to a handful, was demand normalizing more than capacity growing.
Throughput recovering does the rest. Labor agreements settling, terminals returning to full gangs, equipment pools refilling: each raises the rate at which a berth turns ships, and a small edge of throughput over arrivals compounds week after week into a shrinking queue.
Landside decongestion shows up on the water. When boxes leave the yard promptly, because chassis are available, rail is fluid and warehouses have space, cranes work faster and vessel calls shorten. A falling truck planning-time index and younger import-box dwell buckets usually accompany a draining queue.
Smoother arrivals prevent re-bunching. Carriers re-timing sailings, queue-management systems that have ships slow-steam to an appointment instead of racing to anchor, and the end of a weather or canal disruption all spread arrivals out, so the same weekly volume lands without clustering. The coast-wide at-anchor counts falling alongside the berth queue is the sign the easing is real rather than ships merely holding further offshore.
The calendar helps twice a year. The post-peak winter lull and the Lunar New Year sailing gap both thin arrivals for weeks, giving terminals a scheduled chance to digest backlog; easing into those windows is partly the calendar doing what it always does.
The import-friction board gives the per-complex read, and the rising twin of this page covers the same system running the other way.