Carriers file 1 September GRIs and Panama surcharges of up to $500/TEU on East Coast cargo

The Analysis

Twenty-sixth of August, ten twenty-three in the morning, and the number is out. Thirty-six transits a day becomes thirty-four on the third of September, and thirty-two on the fifteenth. That is the Panama Canal Authority speaking, in Advisory to Shipping No. A-29-2026, dated the twentieth of August. Eleven percent off the daily slot book, announced before any carrier had touched a published surcharge.

I have read the advisory twice and what stops me is not the slot number. It is the silence on the other side. CMA CGM, MSC, ONE and Hapag-Lloyd had all filed Panama-related surcharges before the twentieth of August, at various points between late July and mid-August. As of the twenty-fourth, four days after the advisory went out, none of the four had revised anything. In this market the money usually runs ahead of the operations. This time the operation is out in front and the invoice has not caught up.

Two clocks, then, and they are not set to the same time. One is the transpacific GRI taking effect on the first of September, roughly 1,800 to 2,250 dollars per 40ft high-cube on US West Coast FAK and spot, with the East Coast going up by more than that. The other is the canal surcharge stack, which carries four different effective dates and three different ways of counting a container. If your September plan treats those two as one number, the plan is already wrong, and it will be wrong in the direction of under-budgeting.

Let me put the four carrier filings in one place, because the shape of them is the story.

CMA CGM. Panama Canal Adjustment Factor, 500 dollars per TEU, which is 1,000 dollars on a 40ft box, effective 10 September 2026. On 25 July that same factor was 320 per TEU, 640 on a 40. That is a 56 percent step up in about six weeks.

MSC. Panama Canal Surcharge, 149 dollars on a 20ft, 297 on a 40ft, 376 on a 45ft, effective 12 September 2026 and keyed to the date the container is delivered to the port. The 20ft was 100. The 40ft was 200. On the 20ft that is a 49 percent move, on the 40ft a 48.5 percent move.

ONE. Panama Canal Transit Fee, 150 dollars per TEU, on EC1, EC2 and EC4 eastbound transpacific, effective 10 August 2026.

Hapag-Lloyd. 130 dollars per TEU, Far East to North America via the canal, effective 15 August 2026, and the reason given was draft restrictions reducing the cargo a vessel can lift.

Now put the 40ft figures side by side. CMA CGM 1,000. MSC 297. ONE 300. Hapag-Lloyd 260. Same water, same locks, same missing rain, and the spread between the top and the bottom of that list is 740 dollars on one box. This number has a problem with it, and the problem is not that somebody mispriced. The problem is that four carriers are charging for different things and filing it under one label. One is pricing a capacity loss. One is pricing a draft-driven payload loss. One is pricing a transit fee. If you average them, or if you take the biggest one and apply it across your book, you have produced a number that no carrier has actually published for your service.

The ACP side deserves the same literal reading. From 3 September the Neopanamax locks go from 10 transits a day to nine. The Panamax locks go from 26 to 25. From 15 September the Panamax number goes to 23. Add it up and you get 34 on the third and 32 on the fifteenth, against 36 today. Eleven percent off current capacity, and it is the first time in this drought that the authority has moved slots and draft together. Through July and August it moved draft only: 49.5 feet on 3 July, 49.0 on 24 July, 48.5 on 15 August. Two further draft steps were in the calendar and have now been pushed back, to 48.0 feet on 2 September and 47.5 feet on 1 October 2026. Two feet off the draft in roughly three months.

The reason is water. Rainfall across the canal watershed from May to August 2026 came in 34 percent below the historical average. Inflows into the watershed, which is what actually fills the locks, came in 44 percent below average. The authority has also flagged El Nino across 2026 and 2027 as a reason the rest of the wet season could run short, which puts pressure on the water it would need through the 2027 dry season. That is a forward-looking warning, not a commitment, but it is a warning from the body that controls the tap.

For scale, 32 is not the floor. In the 2023 and 2024 drought the authority went to 32 in August 2023, then 24 in November, then 22 in December 2023. What is on the table now is much less restrictive than that. I am not saying we go back there. I am saying that if your planning assumption is that thirty-two is where this stops, you have picked a number that recent history does not support, and you should say out loud that it is an assumption.

Two mechanical points decide how this lands on you, and both are about definitions rather than rates.

The slot cut does not replace the draft mechanism. The advisory is explicit that the two run in parallel. A vessel can be limited by how deep it may load and separately by whether it can get a slot at all, and those two constraints bite at different points in the same voyage planning cycle. A shipper who hears the word postponement and reads it as relief is reading the wrong line. The draft steps were postponed, which buys about a week on one of them and about four weeks on the other. The slot book was not postponed. It was cut.

The second point matters more to anyone with an open purchase order. The surcharges already on file were filed against cost and against draft. The slot reduction is a capacity measure announced later, on 20 August. If a carrier now files something new and cites the slot reduction, that is a separate round and it should not be folded into the Panama surcharge that was already there. The distinction sounds academic until you look at a quotation in October and cannot tell which advisory a line item answers. I would not accept a revised Panama line on a quotation without a written statement of which advisory it responds to.

Before anybody adds 1,000 dollars to a US East Coast box, check the routing. Not every Far East to US East Coast or Gulf service transits Panama. Some run via Suez, some on other routings, and the choice belongs to the carrier, not to you. A single surcharge applied across all East Coast cargo is wrong by construction. And West Coast cargo is out of this entirely: on the direct services currently operated, a box from Vietnam or elsewhere in the Far East to the US West Coast does not go through the canal, so none of these four surcharges apply to it. The West Coast is not exempt from September. It is exempt from this line item, and it still takes the 1 September GRI at roughly 1,800 to 2,250 per 40ft high-cube.

Let us do the arithmetic, and I will mark every assumption as an assumption.

Assume a shipper moves forty 40ft high-cube containers a month to the US East Coast, all on CMA CGM. From 10 September the canal factor is 1,000 dollars a box. Against a zero baseline that is 40,000 dollars a month. Against the 640 a box already in force from 25 July, the increment is 360 a box, or 14,400 dollars a month. Same event, two numbers, and which one belongs in your budget depends on whether your contract passed the old factor through. If it did, 14,400 is the September hit. If it did not, 40,000 is. Many people discover which one applies by reading an invoice, and by then the month is already gone.

Assume instead the same forty boxes move on Hapag-Lloyd at 130 per TEU, which is 260 on a 40. The canal line is 10,400 dollars a month. The difference against CMA CGM is 740 a box, or 29,600 dollars a month. That is a real number and it is worth chasing. It is not free to chase. Switching carrier moves your space allocation, your sailing day, your free time and your contract rate, and each of those carries a price that never appears on the surcharge line. I have watched a desk book a carrier on a 740-dollar gap and give most of it back on a missed cut-off and a week of detention.

Assume a 40ft high-cube carries 500,000 dollars of goods. My assumption, not anybody's filing. At CMA CGM's 1,000 the canal charge is 0.2 percent of cargo value. At Hapag-Lloyd's 260 it is 0.052 percent. The spread is 0.148 percentage points on the same box moving through the same canal. If you sell a low-margin commodity where the whole landed-cost conversation happens in basis points, that number is not small.

Assume now that your book is heavy in 45ft boxes. MSC's published 45ft number is 376. CMA CGM publishes per TEU and confirms only the 40ft equivalent at 1,000. If a 45ft box is counted as two TEU under a per-TEU basis, and I want to be clear that this is my assumption and not something the filing states, then a 45ft box on CMA CGM's basis is 1,000 dollars and on MSC's basis is 376. The difference is 624 a box. Across forty 45ft boxes a month that is 24,960 dollars. Same vessel, same canal, different tape measure. This is exactly why I refuse to collapse these four carriers into one per-container figure.

Now stack the GRI. Assume your East Coast GRI lands at 2,250 per 40ft high-cube, the upper end of the West Coast range, on the reasoning that the East Coast goes up by more. Add CMA CGM's 1,000 and you are at 3,250 a box before anything else. Forty boxes is 130,000 dollars in one month. That is the shape of September, and it is the number I would put in front of a finance director this week rather than in November.

Last piece of arithmetic, and it is the one people skip. Assume a sailing that used to wait a day for a slot now waits three, because the slot book is eleven percent thinner. My assumption. Two extra days on a roughly thirty-day East Coast transit is about 6.7 percent more transit time. Assume 500,000 dollars of cargo value and a 6 percent annual cost of capital: 500,000 times 0.06 divided by 365 is about 8.22 dollars a day per box, 16.44 dollars for two days, and 657 dollars a month across forty boxes.

So: 29,600 dollars a month hangs on which carrier's canal wording you are booked under, 24,960 a month hangs on the box-size basis, and 657 a month hangs on the waiting time. Two orders of magnitude between the first and the last. If you have one afternoon, spend it on the surcharge basis and not on the schedule.

Where does an eleven percent slot cut actually land, if not on the freight bill? It lands on waiting time first, then on schedule reliability, then on whether the service keeps its published rotation. The advisory gives lock-level totals and does not name the services that lose the slot, so nobody outside the carrier knows which rotation takes the cut this week. A shipper who asks which of their sailings is affected will not get a straight answer until the carrier re-publishes the rotation, and that is not evasion, it is where the information genuinely stops. What you can do is log proforma against actual from the first week of September and watch the variance accumulate. The variance is your early warning; the surcharge, when it comes, will be the confirmation.

A word on box mix, because the surcharge basis and the box mix interact in a way that surprises people. MSC publishes three numbers, 149, 297 and 376, and the ratio between the 20ft and the 40ft is not exactly two to one: 297 against 149 is 1.99. Under a per-TEU basis a 40ft box is exactly twice a 20ft. Assume a month of sixty boxes split evenly between 20ft and 40ft. On MSC's basis that is thirty times 149 plus thirty times 297, which is 4,470 plus 8,910, or 13,380 dollars. On a per-TEU basis at 150, the same mix is ninety TEU, or 13,500 dollars.

Assume instead that all sixty are 20ft: MSC is 8,940 dollars, the per-TEU basis is 9,000 dollars. The two bases track each other closely on ordinary mixes, and the gap opens on 45ft boxes and on the step from 130 per TEU to 500 per TEU. Which is a second way of arriving at the same conclusion: the carrier you book and the basis it counts in are worth far more than any arithmetic you do on your own box mix.

One more, on the contract calendar. Most annual contracts on the eastbound transpacific were signed well before 20 August, and a Panama surcharge filed in August or September sits outside the all-in rate you signed, because the surcharge mechanism is drafted to sit outside it. Go and check whether your contract allows pass-through at all, and on what notice. Assume it allows pass-through on seven days notice and the effective date is 10 September: the notice has to go out this week. Assume it requires thirty days: the charge may not be recoverable on the September sailings at all. That is a conversation to have with the carrier in August, not an argument to have in November when the invoices are already paid.

And the piece that usually gets missed, which is the inventory one. An eleven percent slot cut does not cancel your sailing. It widens the variance around it. Assume your East Coast transit has historically run thirty days with a spread of plus or minus three days. Assume the thinner slot book pushes that spread to plus or minus six. My assumption, not a published figure. If your safety stock is sized to a three-day spread, you are now short by up to three days of cover every time a sailing drifts. Assume daily consumption at landed value of 20,000 dollars: three days of cover is 60,000 dollars, and that is a one-time working capital addition rather than a monthly cost. Set 60,000 once against 29,600 a month of surcharge spread and the inventory answer starts to look like the cheap one.

What I would do with the week that is left runs as follows. Before 31 August, rebuild the September order book for the East Coast and the Gulf into four columns: carrier, service, container type, surcharge effective date. One hundred percent coverage, and any line missing a value stays out of the budget until someone fills it. In the week of 1 September, confirm the transit routing on each of those lines and strip out the boxes that do not use the canal. On 3 September and again on 15 September, snapshot the published tariff and file it with a timestamp, because those are the two days the slot book changes and the snapshot is how you later prove a new surcharge post-dates the advisory. On 10 September and 12 September, reconcile invoices against the new CMA CGM and MSC rates, remembering that MSC keys to the container delivery date to the port rather than to the sailing, so gate-in day decides the rate and not the departure date.

Then set one trigger in writing. Any surcharge filed after 20 August that cites the slot reduction gets its own line, separate from the Panama surcharge already in force. Zero tolerance for a merged figure. The close-of-month target is one hundred percent of canal charges itemised and zero lines where the new and the old are blended into one.

Where this goes wrong, in the order I would watch for it.

The counting basis is the first trap. CMA CGM and ONE charge per TEU. MSC charges by box length, at 149, 297 and 376. Collapse those into a single per-container number and the quotation is wrong before it leaves the building, and it will be wrong in whichever direction hurts you most that week.

The effective date is the second. Three of the four are keyed to a calendar date. MSC is keyed to when the container reaches the port. Same vessel, different gate-in day, different charge. If your bookkeeper reconciles by sailing week, MSC will not reconcile.

Free time is the third, and it is where a schedule slip actually gets paid for. Slot reductions surface in waiting time and schedule reliability before they surface in rates. Two days of drift on a container that has seven days of free time is survivable; two days on a container that has four is a detention invoice, and detention is not a surcharge anybody announces in advance.

The fourth is the uncomfortable one. Do not assume a carrier's transit-time commitment covers canal waiting. Read what the commitment is written against, and if it is written against a berth-to-berth figure, ask what happens in between.

The fifth is for anyone quoting onward to a customer. Put the carrier, the service, the container type and the effective date on the quotation. Do not convert the whole thing into one number per box. Somebody will hold you to that number in October, on the day a fifth line item arrives.

And the one I keep coming back to: the trade press has been saying for days that a surcharge arising from the slot reduction should be listed separately from the charges already in effect before 20 August, to avoid double-charging the customer. I agree, and I would extend it. I would also refuse to pay a revised Panama line that carries the same name as the old one and a different number, without a written note of which advisory it answers.

The canal is short about a third of a season's rain. Nobody in this market is short of a reason to file a surcharge.

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— By Vivian Zhao