Port of Los Angeles Container Imports Hit Second-Highest Level in History During May

The Analysis

Spread the map out on the table, the big one, and put your finger on the corner where the Pacific pushes itself into Southern California. That shallow crescent of water between the breakwater and the terminals is San Pedro Bay, and if you have been in this trade long enough, your finger already knows the spot without looking. Ten years ago I stood on a bluff above the Vincent Thomas Bridge during a summer peak and watched a line of boxships stretch past Angels Gate all the way to the horizon, and honestly, I thought I was looking at something that would be the high-water mark of an era.

That mooring field has filled again. The Port of Los Angeles just reported 840,165 TEUs moved across its terminals in May 2026, of which 449,370 TEUs were imports, up 26 percent year over year, the second-highest month in the port's history, and it happened for the plainest possible reason: retailers are running ahead of a bill that comes due on July 1, when vessel operators start recouping the higher fuel costs generated by the Iran war. Gene Seroka, the port's executive director, told anyone who would listen that June and July are shaping up even stronger. When the man who counts every box in the harbor says the pipeline behind this one is fuller, you take that as a fact about your own warehouse, not a statistic.

Zoom out one level and the picture is the same all around. Descartes put total U.S. container import volume in May at 11.5 percent above last year, so this is not one harbor hoarding the traffic, it is the whole coastline of North America loading up at once. Look closer at what came through and you find plastic goods, HS code 39, up 26 percent to 251,706 TEUs, with plastic office and school supplies alone up 87 percent and plastic tableware and kitchenware up 57 percent. Somebody is buying autumn and back-to-school assortments right now, in bulk, in a hurry, before a July 1 fuel-cost surcharge and two tariff clocks that both point at late July, one being the 10 percent global Section 122 tariff that may expire and the other a proposed tariff of up to 12.5 percent on sixty countries. That is not commerce, that is a convoy moving through a closing window, and everyone in the chain, importer, exporter, buyer, planner, is on the same convoy whether they chose a ticket or not.

I want to stay with the map a moment longer, because the harbor itself will mislead you if you read it shallowly. A port is a system of rates: how many boxes a berth can take per day, how many trucks the gates can cycle, how many trains the on-dock rail can load, and above all how fast the yard can forget a container, meaning how quickly it moves from ship to rail to truck to door and frees its slot for the next one. Every physical acre inside that breakwater was decided decades ago, the cranes were ordered years ago, the terminal operating systems were budgeted in calmer times, and none of it can stretch just because retailers collectively decided to pull a quarter forward.

Ten years ago the harbors of Southern California absorbed a genuinely historic surge and it took months for the congestion to drain; the lesson of that year, the one that got written into every carrier's network plan since, is that the queue does not stay politely inside the port. It backs up into the anchorages first, then into the inland empire warehouses, then into the appointment systems for truck turns, and by the time it shows up in your tracking portal as a five-day delay it has been building for two weeks somewhere you cannot see.

Now translate May's numbers into the only language that matters at your desk: days and dollars. The port handled 840,165 TEUs in total and 449,370 TEUs of imports, a 26 percent jump, which means roughly one extra import TEU arrived for every four that came in last May, all inside the same fence. Picture what that does to a terminal yard that was already running at a healthy clip. Container yards live on dwell time; when import volume rises 26 percent and the yard's discharge capacity stays flat, dwell stretches, and every day of stretch compounds, because a box that sits three days instead of two occupies its slot half again as long, and the trucker appointment system fills earlier in the day, and the drayman who used to do four turns now does three, which quietly removes capacity from the trucking market without anyone firing a driver.

Meanwhile 11.5 percent national growth means the same story is playing out in Savannah, New York, Houston and Oakland, so there is no neighboring port left with idle slack to absorb the overflow the way there was in quieter years. The network is full everywhere at once, and full networks transmit shocks instead of swallowing them.

Run the arithmetic on your own freight and be honest about the assumptions. Suppose you import 200 FEUs a year, which for a mid-size household goods or school supplies importer is nothing exotic, and suppose the July 1 fuel-cost recovery adds, purely as an illustrative figure, 200 dollars per FEU on the transpacific leg; nobody outside the carriers' pricing desks knows the real number yet, so hold it lightly, the point is the mechanics, not the digit. Two hundred FEUs at two hundred dollars is 40,000 dollars a year, and that is before the tariff layer.

If the proposed 12.5 percent tariff on your origin country lands and Section 122's 10 percent lapses in late July, the two changes do not politely average out; they stack according to whatever order the customs rules land in, and on a 40,000-dollar annual customs base the swing between planning for one outcome and the other is the difference between a lean month and a lost quarter. Add the dwell stretch from the yard congestion, call it three extra days landed-to-door on the busiest weeks, and if you are one of the importers whose goods sit in the 87-percent-growth school-supplies category, you are also competing for the same warehouse labor in August that every other rush shipper discovered at the same moment. None of these numbers is certain; every one of them is directionally ugly, and the ones you fail to write down today are the ones that surprise you on an invoice in September.

So what do you actually do, this week, with names and dates attached? Sit your finance and purchasing people down and build the tariff scenario grid before the end of this week: four boxes, Section 122's 10 percent expires or it does not, the 12.5 percent proposal lands or it does not, and in each box the landed-cost delta on your top ten SKUs by customs value, with the sourcing office in the origin country supplying the customs-value base by Friday. Book your July and August export and import allocations with your carriers in the same conversation, because Seroka's June-July warning is a volume forecast and volume forecasts become equipment shortages, and ask specifically what fuel-cost recovery applies from July 1 on each of your service strings and how it is billed.

Freeze the forecast into purchase orders: anything that must land before late July, meaning before the tariff clocks tick, should be on the water by the last week of June at the latest, and anything that can wait until the rules clarify should be deliberately, contractually, allowed to wait. Tell your freight forwarder today that July deliveries into Los Angeles need inland buffer days built into the promised dates, not the optimistic port-to-door math from a normal May, and get the promise in writing so the sales team stops quoting the old transit times to customers.

If you cannot beat the window, think honestly about stepping around it, and price the detour before you need it. For goods where the tariff question dominates, a different origin country, one not on the sixty-country proposal list, changes your exposure completely, but requalifying a supplier takes a quarter at the speed of a normal sample-approve-ship cycle, so if that option is real it had to start three months ago; if it did not, the honest version is a partial shift, moving the SKUs with the thinnest margins first while the fat-margin lines keep shipping from the usual source and absorb the duty.

For goods where the calendar dominates, weigh Gulf or East Coast routings against the extra ten to fourteen days of water, remembering that an East Coast routing that saves you a tariff cliff but arrives in the middle of the same national import surge has simply moved your queue. For the cargo already in motion, look hard at your free-time windows at destination, because demurrage clocks in a congested port are where surging networks collect their rent from the unprepared, and a one-day-per-container charge at typical terminal rates can erase the entire margin you saved by rushing.

And whatever you shift, shift it deliberately: the classic mistake of a surge year is not choosing the wrong option, it is choosing three of them at once, splitting containers across two gateways and two booking channels and losing visibility over all of them, then paying an expediter to find your own boxes.

Watch the network, not just your boxes. The single most useful indicator for the next six weeks is not a rate index, it is the weekly import velocity of the San Pedro Bay complex against the same weeks of a normal year; when you see the ports and the railroads publishing throughput numbers and the anchorages filling, your queue is forming whether your cargo is on the water yet or not. The second indicator is your own demurrage exposure and the third is your carrier's equipment availability in the origin market, because in a surge the empty container is the scarce asset, and the exporter trying to book out of the same factories is your direct competitor for every box.

Ten years ago the mooring field outside the breakwater taught this trade what a full network looks like, and the people who read that horizon early, who rebooked and re-priced and told their customers the truth in week one instead of week five, came out of that year with their margins intact and their customers closer than they found them. The water outside Los Angeles is filling up again. The window that everyone is rushing through is real, and it will close, and after it closes the trade will settle into whatever the July tariff decisions make of it. Spread the map out one more time before the rush: the companies that did well in every congested era are the ones who looked at the whole coast, wrote their numbers down, and moved while everyone else was still reading the news.

There is also a quieter layer to this surge that the headline numbers hide, and it is the layer where most mid-size traders actually get hurt. When 449,370 import TEUs land in one month, the terminals do not feel it evenly; the carriers with the biggest weekly strings get priority at the berths they share with fewer rivals, the big beneficial cargo owners with fixed long-term slots sail through on their contracts, and the squeeze lands on the spot shipper and the mid-size importer who suddenly finds that the space he booked three weeks ago is being re-timed by the carrier's operations desk. This is not malice, it is hydraulics: when demand spikes against fixed weekly capacity, the flexible space in the middle of the market is what absorbs the shock, and the shock is absorbed as rolled cargo, re-timed bookings and quietly shortened free-time windows.

The exporter feels the mirror image of the same hydraulic. The importer is pulling forward, which means the factories are shipping everything they can stuff, which means the empty containers that would normally cycle back to the export side are sitting full in a congested San Pedro yard instead. If you ship outbound from Asia or from the U.S. Gulf, your booking for next month is being priced by the fact that Los Angeles is full, even if your cargo never touches California.

The plastic numbers deserve their own paragraph, because they tell you what a rush looks like at the commodity level. HS code 39 landed 251,706 TEUs in May, up 26 percent, and inside it, plastic office and school supplies up 87 percent, plastic tableware and kitchenware up 57 percent. Those are not luxury goods and they are not urgent goods; they are dense, cheap, shelf-stable products that are perfectly storable, which is exactly why they front-run a deadline so violently. When a category that usually moves at the pace of the retail calendar jumps 87 percent, the interpretation is not that American children suddenly multiplied their stationery consumption, it is that importers judged the July combination of fuel-cost recovery and tariff risk to be more expensive than carrying the inventory for two or three extra months.

That judgment is a price signal aimed directly at the July 1 fuel recovery and the late-July tariff clocks, and every importer who did not make it is now on the wrong side of the same trade: they will buy the same goods later in the year, at freight and duty levels set after the window closed, or they will find the good stuff already sold. If your assortment lives anywhere near code 39, your competitor's 87 percent move is not a statistic, it is a notice.

Ten years from now, when someone asks what the mid-2020s did to this coastline, the answer will not be a single storm or a single rate spike; it will be the summer the map redrew itself in fast-forward. A war in the Gulf pushed fuel onto every carrier's cost line and a policy loop in Washington kept every tariff clock spinning at once, and both of those forces landed, in the same six weeks, on the same twenty-five miles of California waterfront.

That is the real story of 840,165 TEUs: not a boom, a compression. Decisions that used to spread across a year, when to buy, where to buy, how to route, how much to hold, were forced into one season, and a system built for the old rhythm had to take the whole wave at once. The traders who thrive in such seasons are rarely the ones with the boldest forecast; they are the ones who write the arithmetic down early, who know which of their SKUs can wait and which cannot, who hold a spare option in the plan the way a good harbor master holds a spare berth. The window is open. Write your numbers down this week, book what must move, release what can wait, and keep the map on the desk where you can see the whole coast, because the next squeeze will not announce itself any more politely than this one did.

One more practical note, the kind that does not make the trade press but decides who sleeps in July. When a port takes a surge, the pain arrives in the drayage market about ten days after it arrives at the berths, because the trucking capacity between the terminal and the warehouse is the thinnest pipe in the whole chain and it is the one nobody owns. Chassis become scarce, appointment slots at the big terminals get taken by algorithms at dawn, and the driver who used to give you two turns a day now gives you one and a half.

If your distribution center runs on fixed receiving appointments, a two-day berth delay plus a two-day drayage queue is not four days of slip, it is the loss of your appointment slot and a re-booking into the following week, which is how five days quietly becomes eleven. Talk to your warehouse this week about flexing receiving hours through the end of July, even by a shift or two, and talk to your drayage provider about pre-pulling boxes into off-peak windows where the free-time clock allows it.

The importers who kept their July deliveries roughly on schedule in past surges were almost never the ones with better vessels; they were the ones whose boxes got out of the yard in the first forty-eight hours, and that is a truck-and-yard game, won by arrangements made in advance, in writing, with the two local partners every other importer is also calling.

A word on how this reads from the other side of the water, because half the readers of a piece like this are selling, not buying. A 26 percent import jump into Los Angeles with June and July promised stronger is, for the exporter in Asia or the Gulf, a market that is emptying its warehouses on purpose and will need to refill them, but the same hydraulic that carries your boxes out also drains the empty-container pool your booking depends on. The practical version is unglamorous: confirm your July equipment two weeks earlier than your normal cycle, in writing, with the line's local agent rather than the overseas desk, because in surge months the local agent is the one holding the empties.

And when your buyer asks you to pull a shipment forward to beat a deadline that belongs to his tariff schedule, price the pull-forward honestly, the overtime at the factory, the trucking premium, the documentation rush, rather than absorbing it silently into a price you will regret for the rest of the contract year. The window benefits both ends of the trade only when both ends price it truthfully; the last surge I watched from inside taught me that the losses, when they came, rarely came from the sea, they came from favors extended in a hurry and never put on an invoice.

↑ Back to the key points

— By Tomás Ferreira