Transpacific Carriers File Nov 15 GRIs of $2,000-$3,000, the 22nd of 2026

The Analysis

Seven carriers filed a general rate increase for the eastbound trans-Pacific last week, effective the fifteenth of November, and the headline number is the range they filed: two thousand to three thousand dollars per forty-foot container. It is the twenty-second GRI on this lane since the first of January. I want to sit with that second figure before I sit with the first, because a lane that files twenty-two increases in eleven months is telling you something structural about itself, and very little of it survives inside any single filing.

Here is what the filing actually contains, laid out plainly. Evergreen, Hapag-Lloyd and HMM went in at three thousand. CMA CGM, COSCO, Yang Ming and ZIM went in at two thousand. That is not a price, it is a thousand-dollar spread on one lane, in one week, for one effective date, and both ends of it are being reported as though they were the same event. They are not. They are two different negotiating positions wearing one headline.

The third thing, the one every rate desk already trades on and the trade press keeps leaving out, is the market these increases are aimed at. Freightos put the West Coast spot rate in early November flat, near eight thousand three hundred and forty dollars per FEU. So a two-to-three-thousand-dollar increase is a move upward into a market that is not moving upward. What the carriers filed is a request. What they collect is a different number, and the distance between the two is the entire story.

Start with what a GRI legally is, because the word gets used as if it were a price. A general rate increase is a tariff filing. The carrier publishes a new rate level and an effective date, files it with the regulator, and notifies the market. On paper, from the effective date, the number is higher. On water, from the effective date, the number is whatever the two sides agree to when the booking is confirmed. Those two sentences describe the same filing and produce two different worlds, and the whole trade lives in the gap between them.

The twenty-two figure is the part nobody wants to do the division on. Twenty-two filings across roughly forty-six weeks is one GRI every two weeks, more or less, all year, into a market that Freightos currently marks flat near eight thousand three hundred and forty dollars per FEU on the West Coast. If every one of those twenty-two filings had landed at face value, the West Coast rate would not be near eight thousand dollars right now; it would be a number that does not exist in this business. So the honest reading is that most of them landed at something well under face, and some of them landed at zero. A filing that lands at zero is not a failure of the filing. It is a failure of the announcement to be mistaken for the price, and that mistake is exactly the one a shipper makes when they pre-book on the strength of a headline.

Now put the arithmetic on the table, with the assumptions written down where you can argue with them. Take the West Coast baseline Freightos gives, eight thousand three hundred and forty dollars per FEU in early November. Assume the low filer's two thousand lands in full. That is ten thousand three hundred and forty, an increase of about twenty-four per cent. Assume the high filer's three thousand lands in full. That is eleven thousand three hundred and forty, about thirty-six per cent. Those are the numbers a customer sees when they read the announcement as a fact. They are also the numbers nobody pays, because the market that sets the collected rate is not the filing, it is the booking, and the booking is set by supply and demand on the sailing the box actually moves on.

The supply side of that equation is where the twenty-second filing starts to explain itself. A carrier does not file twenty-two increases because it expects twenty-two to land. It files them because the filing is a cheap instrument. It costs almost nothing to announce an increase. It costs almost nothing to withdraw it quietly when the week goes badly. What it buys is a reference point, and reference points matter enormously in a market where contract renewals run on a calendar and the annual negotiation is the one moment the buyer and seller actually sit down. A wall of GRI filings through the year is a way of arriving at renewal season with the seller's number already in the air. That is the function. The rate is the side effect.

Look at the spread again, because the spread is the most useful single fact in the release and it is the one that gets averaged away. Three carriers filed at three thousand, four filed at two thousand. Same lane, same week, same effective date. If the underlying cost of moving a box were the same for all seven, the filings would cluster. They do not cluster. They split, cleanly, into a high group and a low group, and the split is a signal about how each carrier reads its own book.

The carriers filing the lower number are telling the market they would rather fill a ship at a lower rate than sail it light at the full increase. The carriers filing the higher number are telling the market they think their capacity on this lane is tight enough to hold. Both are honest. Both are informative. A buyer who reads only the range, two to three thousand, learns nothing from it. A buyer who reads which carriers sit in which group learns where to book.

That has a direct practical consequence that almost never makes it into the advice columns, which is sequencing. If four carriers are willing to sit at two thousand and three are holding out at three thousand, then the order in which a shipper places its November tonnage is not neutral. You quote the low group first, and you let the low group's willingness to trade set the reference for the high group. The shipper who calls the high filers first and then tries to walk them down has handed the anchor to the wrong side of the table. The shipper who opens with the low filers, and can name the low number credibly because it is a published filing, is using the carriers' own split against the average. The average is the enemy of the negotiator. The split is the friend.

Then there is the December filing, which is the detail that should change how you read the November one. Carriers have already scheduled another two-to-three-thousand round for the first of December, the twenty-third of the year. Two filings, two weeks apart, in the last six weeks of the calendar. That is not a demand story; peak season on the trans-Pacific traditionally peaks through September and October and softens from there. Two increases stacked into the softening end of the year reads as a capacity-management move, not a demand-driven move. The carriers are trying to put a floor under the fade. Whether the floor holds is a supply question, and the supply question is not answered by how loudly the increase is announced.

Here is the part I keep coming back to, and it is the piece the coverage skips every time. The timing of the filing is not neutral. November the fifteenth sits past the traditional peak, which means the boxes that move on that sailing are not the desperate peak-season boxes; they are the steady, planned, contract-adjacent boxes. Those are precisely the boxes where the buyer has leverage, because the buyer planned them, the buyer has alternatives, and the buyer is not under time pressure that would force a yes. A GRI filed into peak and a GRI filed into the tail of peak look identical on a press release. They behave nothing alike. The peak GRI extracts; the tail GRI tests. And a shipper who reads the fifteenth-of-November filing as if it carried peak-season urgency has misread which kind of filing they are looking at.

There is a second structural fact sitting under the spread, and it is the one that explains why the high filers are willing to be visible at three thousand. Almost none of the boxes moving on a trans-Pacific string in the second half of November move at the spot rate. The bulk of them move under annual or multi-quarter contracts that were struck months earlier, often with a base rate plus a bunker adjustment plus a peak-season surcharge layered on top. A GRI filed on the fifteenth does not touch most of that contract cargo at all, because the contract has its own mechanism for handling the market.

The GRI touches the uncommitted remainder, the spot book, and the spot book in the tail of peak is thin. So the high filers are not risking much by filing high; the tonnage that could punish them for being greedy is a small slice of what is on the ship. They are filing high against the margin, not against the core. The buyer who understands which of their own boxes sit in the contract slice and which sit in the spot slice knows immediately whether the filing can reach them.

That distinction changes the arithmetic I laid out earlier, so let me be precise about it. If you have forty FEU in November and thirty of them are under a contract with a fixed base and a capped surcharge, then the filing only has teeth on the other ten. Ten boxes times a thousand dollars of landed increase is ten thousand dollars, not forty thousand. The same headline, the same filing, and a quarter of the exposure, purely because of where the boxes sit in your own book. The shipper who computes exposure on total tonnage has overstated it by four times. The shipper who computes it on the spot slice has the real number, and the real number is usually small enough to absorb without a panic re-quote. Run the split before you run the total.

Then there is the question of what the spread does to your contract renewal, which is the place this filing will actually cost you money. Suppose you renew a West Coast contract in January. The carrier opens with the filed level: three thousand above the baseline, say. You counter. The number you settle on is a number between the filing and the market, and the filing has just moved the midpoint of that conversation up before you walked in the room. This is the slow, quiet cost of a loud GRI, and it does not show up on any booking confirmation.

It shows up next year, in the base rate, and it shows up because the reference point was set nine months early. The defence is to enter renewal with your own reference point already on the table: the collected spot history, the landing rates on the twenty-two prior filings, and the carrier-by-carrier split. If you bring the market's number, the filing is just noise. If you bring nothing, the filing is the number.

One more layer, and this is the piece I have never seen reported on any GRI story, ever. The lane the filing is named for is not the lane the boxes move on. A transpacific eastbound GRI is filed against the trade as a whole, but the rates it actually governs are port-pair specific. East Asia to the US West Coast and East Asia to the US East Coast are different markets with different capacity, different transit times and different demand shapes, and they are filed under the same GRI umbrella. So when a carrier files a two-to-three-thousand-dollar increase, it is filing a number that will be applied at a different value on every port pair, because the underlying base rate differs on every port pair.

The headline gives you one number for a lane that is actually a dozen lanes stitched together. The only way to know what lands on your specific port pair is to ask your specific carrier for your specific booking, and that is a question almost nobody asks because the headline already gave them a number to hold onto. The headline number is a label, not a rate. Treat it as a label.

The counterfactual is worth naming, because it is the thing that decides whether this article ages well. If the December first filing lands hard, it means the carriers were right about tight capacity and the November softness was the anomaly. If the December filing collapses the way most of the twenty-two before it collapsed, then the November fifteenth round is not the start of a new level, it is the twenty-second data point in a series whose whole message is that announced is not collected. The variable that flips the conclusion is not the size of the increase. It is where the spot index sits two weeks after the effective date. Watch the index, not the announcement.

Bring it down to a box on a lane. Assume you have forty FEU to move from East Asia to the US West Coast in the second half of November. Assume the low filers land at half of their two thousand, so a thousand dollars per box, and the high filers land at half of their three thousand, so fifteen hundred. At the low group, forty boxes times five hundred dollars of landed increase over a flat baseline is twenty thousand dollars of unplanned cost if you did not budget for any landing at all, and forty thousand if the full two thousand landed. The gap between the two scenarios is the size of the mistake you make by treating a filing as a fact. This is why I keep asking for the collected rate and not the announced one. The announced one is a press release. The collected one is your payable.

The last thing I would tell a rate desk this week is about the shape of the negotiation, not the level of it. In a market where the index is flat and the filings are loud, the loudest filing is usually the one furthest from the trade. The carriers that filed high need the high number to be visible, because the high number is what they take into renewal. The carriers that filed low need volume, because volume is what they take into the next quarter. If you are booking this month, you want to be talking to the ones who need volume. The ones who need the number have already decided what the number is for, and it is not for your sailing.

Worth adding one operational wrinkle, because it decides whether the filing reaches you at all on the sailings you care about. A GRI applies to cargo booked on or after the effective date under the spot tariff, but most carriers let a booking confirmed before the effective date ride at the pre-filing rate if the container is gated in within a stated window, often seven to fourteen days. That window is the whole game in the days around the fifteenth.

A box gated in on the thirteenth is a pre-filing box. The same box gated in on the twentieth is a post-filing box at the higher level, and nothing about the cargo changed except the date on a gate receipt. If you have forty boxes and thirty can be gated in before the fifteenth, you have just moved three quarters of your exposure out of the filing's reach. Confirm the gate-in window in writing with each carrier before you book, because the cut-off date is not the booking date and it is not the sailing date either; it is the gate date, and that is the one line on the confirmation that actually decides your rate. This is the cheapest lever in the entire transaction and it is almost always left on the table because everyone is arguing about the size of the increase instead of the date the box hits the terminal.

None of this is a prediction that the increase will fail. Some of it will land; some carriers on some sailings will collect most of what they filed, and that is the normal distribution of these things. What I am saying is narrower and more useful. The filing tells you the ask. The index tells you the market. The split tells you where to book. And the December filing tells you whether to pre-book now or wait. Four numbers, four questions, and not one of them is answered by the range in the headline. The range is the least information-bearing part of the whole release, and it is the only part that got reported.

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— By Vivian Zhao